Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora by Paul Sullivan (review)

Paul Sullivan's Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora provides a thoroughly researched and concise introduction to dub as both genre and process. From the outset, Remixology charts dub's journey through the Jamaican diaspora and elucidates the expansive scope of dub and its influence on other music genres. Sullivan's most central premise is that dub, though often thought to have reached its peak as a subgenre of reggae in the mid-1970s and to have wound down starting in the 1980s, not only continued to reverberate and inform music through the twenty-first century but also has been critical to some central practices cutting across all genres, such as the sound system, the DJ, and the remix. While the travels and influence of dub have been addressed in several other texts about the genre, Sullivan's account emphasizes the relationship between space and sound. In his detailing of dub's travels along with the Jamaican diaspora, for example, Sullivan consistently makes note of the ways the conditions surrounding the emergence of dub in 1970s Kingston inevitably differed in new places and changed dub's sound.

The text opens with the history of the birth of sound system and dance-hall culture in 1950s Kingston and their social, cultural, and political valences. Perhaps most important was the economic context of the time, when sound systems largely relied on available, often imported recorded music rather than live performances, which were popular among the Jamaican upper classes. As the United States moved more toward rock and roll, and specialist dealers sold R&B records at exorbitant prices, there was a turn from outside exporting to local recording. It was in this context that the cost-effective dubplate came into wide use, allowing for new recordings to be previewed in dance halls before being cut on more expensive vinyl. Dubplate culture, as Sullivan explains, led to proto-dub experimentals and the relatively well-known story of the beginnings of dub in 1967, when the engineer Byron Smith accidentally left out the vocal track on a dub-plate of the Paragons' "On the Beach." Sound-system operators began playing these instrumentals at dance halls and soon began reworking them to include melody lines, replaced instruments, and sound effects. In the second chapter, Sullivan sets the early dub scene in Jamaica as he outlines early dub recordings and pioneers like Osborne "King Tubby" Ruddock and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Along with his discussion of producers, Sullivan notes some transitions in the genre, such as the application of its techniques to dancehall and its transition into the digital era in the mid-1980s.

It is in the rest of the text that Sullivan turns his focus to the Jamaican diaspora of the Northern Hemisphere in New York City, Bristol, Berlin, and Canada, as well as to how sound-system culture and dub were remade in each place. With its influence on a number of place-based genres—such as digidub, postpunk, grime, jungle, drum and bass, and dubstep in the UK cities of London and Bristol; rap and disco in New York City; glitch and techno in Berlin; and dub poetry and dancehall in Canada—Sullivan aptly captures the impact dub has had on a global scale since its inception up to the present day. This thorough tracing of dub's influence is enlivened and made possible by several interviews with some of the very producers and engineers Sullivan writes about.

Although Sullivan does work with a broad geographical scope, his analysis of dub's influence could have benefited from a deeper consideration of the politics of and relationship between sound and place in each of the contexts he studies. Sullivan does include brief historical accounts of the sociopolitical context of migration and the difficulties of the diasporic experience, yet the book lacks a more nuanced analysis of the ways racialized, classed, and gendered experiences were integral to the ways both dub and the social movements surrounding dub would develop abroad. Although Sullivan...