Dubbing The Nation

It often seems to the outsider that there is an organic connection between the kind of beat, the kind of movement which is made to it, and the silent inner rebellion and frenzy which possess anyone strong enough to look at the society face to face.

—Gordon Rohler, My Strangled City and Other Essays

Dub means raw riddim. Dub jus' mean raw music, nuttin' water-down. Version is like your creativeness off the riddim, without voice.

—Prince Jammy (Lloyd James), in Rough Guide to Reggae

Dub submerges the reggae rhythm and lyric into abstraction, creating a nonverbal site for the learning and consolidation of "dread" awareness. The "dub organizer" constructs aesthetic space through a process of removal, alteration, and layering, where he and his dancing faithful, having reconceived time and space, return to imaginary African roots and ascend through and beyond the competitive pressures of Kingston's ghetto life. The use of drum and bass in dub implicates the musically ritualized history of African origins, exile, enslavement, and spiritual survival, and collapses this legacy alongside its present manifestations within its sound. In the words of Dennis Alcapone, dub is "a underworld tune," ¹ subterranean in its sound (thumping bass lines, cavernous echoes), in the places where it is played and danced to, and in its present invulnerability to conservative political appropriation. Dub is rebel music, and its aggressive horns, eerie flute and melodica, echoed chants, and blaring sound invite a confrontation with the forces of Babylon. The sound of dub evinces the pain felt by the "sufferah," invigorating the listener and inspiring physical movements and postures that exude a knowledge of self, a self guided by a "spiritual" force that "oversees" the dominant symbolic order, a physicality resonant with the music's threatening presence and internal dynamics.

This paper focuses on three dub artists: Lee Perry, King Tubby and Scientist, in order to illustrate the way dub music deeply reflects Jamaican subaltern experience and cultural identity. I plan to examine the dance as the key site where an ethic is physically and mentally juggled between the musicians' sound system and the dancers' physical movements.

The Roots of Dub

From the days of slavery onward, the Jamaican Afro-Creole community has survived the trauma of displacement, countered its portrayal as "negative other," and sought self-realization through development of its musical culture. The elements of dub—the interfusing of musical instruments, human sounds, and African and European rhythms and melodies crossing immeasurable depths—were sounded on the slave ship. Garth White describes the tragedy of enslavement suffused within a "dense musical climate": "Grunts of pain, lamenting wails, the notes of a thumb piano or stick or drum, scores of feet stomping, repeated song choruses, rhythmic clapping, sailors ditties, hymns and marches blowing in the winds of the Atlantic." ² White's narration points to the primacy of sound in managing grief and fury in ways that words never capture. ³ As creative expression, music subverts the limits that are imposed on the Afro-Creole subject when reduced to "symbolic Negro" within a code of objectification, from "the totality of his possibilities" to a unit of labor within the capitalist paradigm of production. ⁴ Horace Campbell states the added significance of music centered around drumming as a mutually intelligible language within the African diaspora: "Robbed of their language and forcibly tied to instruments of capital, African peoples developed musical forms which were means of both communication and inspiration." ⁵ Thus music becomes a language that manages to retain, consolidate, and communicate cultural memory in an environment determined to silence all traces of Africa. Jamaican music is the voice of a subordinated history. Dub excavates these coatings of ritual significance and these links to a history of rebellion that accrue with the sustentation of Jamaica's musical folk traditions. When planters banned the nocturnal drumming performed in slave villages and Maroon communities, it took root as an underground act of communication and insubordination. The sound of the drum echoing through dark...