In this provocative study of dancehall culture, Cooper offers a sympathetic account of the philosophy of a wide range of dancehall DJs: Shabba Ranks, Lady Saw, Ninjaman, Capleton, among others. Cooper also demonstrates the ways in which the language of dancehall culture, often devalued as mere ‘noise,’ articulates a complex understanding of the border clashes […]
Music journalist Lloyd Bradley describes reggae’s origins and development in Jamaica, from ska to rock-steady to dub and then to reggae itself, a local music which conquered the world. There are many extraordinary stories about characters like Prince Buster, King Tubby and Bob Marley. But this is more than a book of music history: it […]
Cut’n’Mix tells the story of how sound and sense have been spliced together in music which began in the West Indies but ends up addressing a community stretching across the planet. Dick Hebdige is one of the founding figures of cultural studies and author of the groundbreaking Subculture: The Meaning of Style. In this seminal […]
In this seminal piece, Julian Henriques discusses the relationship between different sensorial regimes through the lens of a dancehall session in Jamaica. He describes sonic dominance as the preponderance of the sonic over the visual medium that can be experienced in a Stone Love sound system session. By considering both the ethereal and the material […]
This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene […]
In this innovative book Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall “vibes” are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates – at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text […]
This work provides an accessible account of a poorly understood aspect of Jamaican popular culture. It explores the socio-political meanings of Jamaicas dancehall culture. In particular, the book gives an account of the power relations within the dancehall and between the dancehall and the wider Jamaican society. Hope gives the reader an unmatched insiders view […]
For Solid Foundation David Katz has interviewed over 100 reggae artists, from Jamaica, the UK and the US, going back to the earliest pioneers of reggae in the mid-1950s. He has taken over ten years to collect the interviews and it is an extraordinary feat. This is an exhaustive history charting the progression and development […]
Vibe Merchants offers an insider’s perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that […]
DanceHall combines cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies to examine performance culture across the Black Atlantic. Taking Jamaican dancehall music as its prime example, DanceHall reveals a complex web of cultural practices, politics, rituals, philosophies, and survival strategies that link Caribbean, African and African diasporic performance. Sonjah Stanley Niaah relates how dancehall emerged from […]
Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of Jamaican dancehall as a musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways […]
While tracing the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music, anthropologist Marvin D. Sterlin illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the […]
Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s Jamaican dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering a thorough analysis of the music itself, Michael Veal examines […]