Dub Music

PART 3

Jamaican roots of Hip-Hop

The basic process of creating a dub from a reggae instrumental is called "versioning". Which involves taking little snippets of the original track (sampling ), and changing it into something new. And clearly hip-hop culture is based, more than any other music, on sampling.
This idea came to the US with DJ Kool Herc, who is one of the very most important figures in hip-hop culture. He spent his youth in Jamaica and was under a huge influence of sound system culture.
He took that idea of the DJ not just being the disk-jockey as the person that plays the records, but the DJ as somebody who's going to be playing the records and then vocalizing on top of the music to get the people more excited.
Without Kool Herc hip-hop wouldn’t be as it is.

Jamaican roots of European music.

In the 60s many Jamaicans have emigrated to other countries, especially to the United Kingdom (when the country was still under British rule), the United States, and to Canada.
Jamaican music came to England along with the first wave of Jamaican immigrants. Many of them took a long 20-day journey on a small boat with all of their belongings: furniture, records, everything. If they’d stay in Jamaica, they would die of hunger.


Punk and Reggae.

The reason that rock and reggae blend together is their heaviness. If you listen to the rock guys, they pride themselves on being loud and heavy. Reggae and dub has the same boast.
Punks liked the anti-establishment vibe of the tunes. And the fact that the lyrics were about something, they dealt with things like: "how are we going to live?". And it was themes similar to this that inspired the punk-rock movement.
In fact, Lee "Scratch" Perry was working with The Clash,

Mikey Dread was working with The Clash...

Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer loved reggae very much.

Dub Scene in Present

Nowadays Jamaican communities exist in most large UK cities. Most great DUB producers like: AlphaΩ

or Vibronics

or Zion Train

live in UK. And it must be said, England is a gateway to the continent. If a tune is a hit there, it is a hit in continental Europe.




Drum’n’Bass.

On the labels of the records in the 70s there used to be written: "Drum 'n' bass - King Tubby's".
And drum 'n' bass itself is now a genre of music. Yet the first man to put his name to a drum 'n bass track was King Tubby. In the early 90s Jungle was born it was becoming more and more popular.
These tracks often combined ragga vocal tracks with broken beats and bass lines. By 1994 jungle began to gain mainstream popularity and fans of the music (known as junglists) became a recognizable part of British youth subculture. The sound took on a very urban, raggamuffin sound, incorporating dancehall ragga-style MC chants, dub basslines, but also increasingly complex, high tempo rapid fire breakbeat percussion.

At this time jungle began to be associated with criminals and criminal activity and perhaps as a reaction or perhaps independently of this, producers began to move away from the ragga style and create what they labeled drum and bass. There is no clear point at which jungle became drum and bass, though most jungle producers continue to produce what they call drum and bass.



Questions:
Do you like drum’n’bass scene in Poland?
Have you ever been on a DuB party?
Would you agree that dub is a foundation of whole modern music?