Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018

This article explores the emergence of sound system culture in Britain, from post-war Caribbean migration to the early 1980s, in terms of House and Blues parties, clubs and dancehalls, bass culture, dance-floor corporeality, and raver’s sartorial aesthetics and interventions, with reference to oral history interviews with sound system pioneers, practitioners and ravers from my installation-based exhibition, Rockers, Soulheads & Lovers: Sound Systems Back in Da Day (New Art Exchange, Nottingham and 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, London 2015–16).

This article provides an analysis of two black British feature films – Horace Ové’s 1975 film, Pressure and Franco Rosso’s 1980 film, Babylon – and integrates the films into a wider discussion of life in Britain during the 1970s–80s. Drawing on the musical and cultural theories of Paul Gilroy and on the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s concept of ‘bass culture’, the author argues that reggae creates what Clare Corbould calls an ‘aural community’ that is simultaneously local and transnational. The reggae soundtracks layer Britain’s black history into the built space of London, insisting that the films’ audiences hear the ongoing reverberations of the British histories of slavery and colonialism.

The Jamaican sound system is an assemblage of practices and ideas that make things visible, audible and tactile, which would otherwise remain obscured, a machine for waging epistemological warfare and mobilizing creative capacities otherwise excluded. This article explores such practices in the work of Nadine Robinson and Tom Sachs, two artists who deploy sound system methods and materials in their work. In studying sound systems’ iterations in the world of contemporary art, this article proposes that Jamaican sonic practice is generative of distinctive aesthetic and critical strategies.

In the late 1980s, a revival movement dedicated to 1960s Jamaican popular music began taking shape in Los Angeles, CA. Hepcat and Jump With Joey were two bands at the forefront of this movement, playing their own interpretations of Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae, interlaced with genealogically related influences. Using oral history interviews I conducted with band members, I analyse the role of recorded media in shaping Angeleno adaptations of 1960s Jamaican popular music. In doing so, I highlight how audio recordings help stimulate cross-cultural and inter-generational communication and explore the complexities of music revival subcultures and generic classifications.

This article discusses various issues surrounding the presence of Jamaican popular music in Mexico and focuses on issues of great importance as the arrival, development, adoption and adaptation of these musical practices that arise in specific times or time periods; in different levels of locality that are related to each other, at the same time related to the global; and that they express themselves by reinterpreting these genres in their own ways. Each period has characteristics that distinguish it and at the same time coexist today in a same musical scene that involves several smaller scenes, as much regional as stylistic, in which continue to arise new expressions of reggae in Mexico.

Not unlike the Caribbean, where the syncopated rhythms provided the soundtrack to the lives of the disenfranchised, ‘in communist Poland and Czechoslovakia [...] reggae’s celebration of the dispossessed struck a chord that led to the formation of dozens of local groups playing Jamaican-structured music’ (Salewicz 2000). Similarly, though not propelled by the anti-authoritarian aesthetics of the revolutionary 1970s, but informed by the then novelty factor, ska found its way into the repertoire of Alibabki, an all-female vocal group that ruled the Polish charts in the 1960s. Focusing on contextualized, diachronic milestones, the article analyses selected manifestations of reggae music in Poland, including instances of its cross-pollination, commodification and normative co-option by global market forces. Defined by its genre-specific qualities and at the same time genre-defying, reggae has not only yielded a vibrant summer festival scene in Poland, but also given rise to a year-round sound system culture, signature radio shows and local dancehall queens, all of which will be duly discussed as well.

Seggae is a music genre that developed on mainland Mauritius. It stems from Mauritian sega, which is a polymorphous practice of dance, music, rhythms, story-telling, and song in the Creole language, developed by enslaved Africans under French colonialism. In the 1980s, various sega artists (and Kaya especially, who was hailed as the father of seggae), developed a commitment to the new music genre from the influence of Jamaican Bob Marley’s roots reggae and the Rastafari philosophy. The sonic landscape and politics of seggae will be discussed through the framework of indigenization and epistemologies of resistance against the residual coloniality of power in Mauritius.