Dub in Hip Hop, Down Tempo and Drum ?n? Bass Dub, as Jamaican music, is perhaps best known for its link to hip hop in the seventies and eighties in the Bronx, NY. Kool Herc is now officially known as ?the father of hip hop.?18 He brought the culture of toasting (talking over the mike to make toasts while also animating the audience) to the Bronx. With his mobile sound system, and the concept of the breaks?he made the most of that instrumental section, where the drummer could find expression just for a few bars before the lyrics came back. This was the basis for turntablism. DJ?s became obsessed with finding breaks they could remix on the spot for dancers and especially B-Boys. The selector in Jamaica is equivalent to the DJ in New York, and the MC (Master of Ceremonies) is equivalent to the rapper. While the selector spins the records the MC animates people to get busy on the dance floor; this was called toasting, or talk-over. This activity of mixing and remixing live for the audience, while the MC talked over the records, which was further explored during the early days of hip hop in the Bronx, made it to the music studio, becoming the foundation for hip hop music, aligning itself with Disco, another studio based music genre. Soon after WWII, people from Jamaica migrated to England to fill up jobs that English people did not want to perform, and the music of Jamaica started to ambivalently become part of English culture, as the immigrants from the West Indies were not always well received by the English.19 West Indians children born in England developed new musical forms of their own, and in the nineties dub and reggae along with hip hop influenced the development of Drum ?n? Bass, as well as trip-hop and down tempo,20 music genres with multi-ethnic contributors, particularly in Bristol, England. Artists like Goldie attest that Drum ?n? Bass was the first form of music that England could call its own because it had not been imported.21 Nevertheless, Drum ?n? Bass is informed by the tradition of breaks (evolving into breakbeats) that started in the U.S. with turntablism. In England breaks were sped up. In this sense the turntable as an instrument played a vital role. A breakbeat record played at 33 RPM could be replayed at 45 RPM, and it would sound strikingly like the early jungle sounds. Also, by doubling up the beat in this way, jungle (early Drum ?n? Bass) became fully mixable with down-tempo, or trip hop compositions, often played at 60 or 80 BPMs. This allowed producers in Bristol to push for the beat in abstract form and explore rhythm in similar fashion to the early dub days in Kingston. This fetishization of the rhythm came to be called Rhythm Science. Drum ?n? Bass producers in particular also strategically inserted lyrics to create a sense of abstraction with hints to open ended narratives. The influence of dub is strongly sensed in early jungle.
Down tempo was influenced by hip hop compositions also often favoring or over-emphasizing the expressive power of the instruments, not the voice, although the lyrics were important, and complete songs did develop. As it is historically acceptable, one of the first trip-hop bands was Massive Attack. With their album Blue Lines (1991), they came to explore the possibilities of rap in UK culture. Their compositions were also clearly influenced by the Kingston sound, particularly the aesthetic of dub. This would become even more obvious in their second album, Protection (1994) which was published simultaneously with its doppelganger No Protection mixed and produced by Mad Professor. No Protection was clearly informed (if not fully formed) by imported dub culture. Other Bristol groups followed, like Portishead, and their internationally successful album Dummy (1994), as well as Tricky, and his album Maxinquaye (1995). Tricky initially collaborated with Massive Attack, but by the late nineties had moved on to work on his own projects. The label Ninja Tune was founded in 1991 by Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut.22 In Ninja Tune we find today a mix of all the genres mentioned so far, Drum ?n? Bass riffs seamlessly combined with breakbeats and down-tempo tunes, and other styles in-between that would defy an easy label. It is worth noting that artists like Massive Attack and Portishead are not so concerned with labels for their music as well. Other contributions during the nineties came from the label Mo-Wax which produced albums like DJ Shadow?s Endtroducing. Shadow, originally from Davis, California today is perhaps best known for his seminal composition ?Midnight in a Perfect World.?23 It is important to note how class is at play at this point in music influenced by dub, since Shadow while thriving on the periphery of music culture is college educated, something that many in the first generation of hip hop were not able to attain. While acts like Portishead and Massive Attack have found some acceptance in pop culture, Drum ?n? Bass artists have not been able to become as popular, although Drum ?n? Bass itself as a musical form is actually incorporated into bling bling type hip hop as well as car commercials. Goldie may be one of the few Drum ?n? Bass artists who actually became somewhat well-known in the mainstream. He even dabbled with acting.24 But other artists like Photek and LTJ Bukem remain well known mainly within the more immersive circles of electronic music. Their compositions are unlikely to be played in major radio stations, at least in the United States. To this day, dub has informed the more popular genre of ?electronic music?, but even this format is not fully part of the mainstream; instead, it thrives as a semi-sub-culture that at times attains momentary attention in mainstream media. Electronica, itself, thrives on the periphery of a stable market, which is possible due to the economical stability offered by global sales in large part on the Internet. Now that an outline of dub?s evolution is in place, its relationship to the periphery can be entertained with the theories of Bhabha and Hardt & Negri. Dub ?n? Theory We need to revisit the critical positions of Homi Bhabha as well as Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri in more detail. As previously explained Bhabha focuses on how identity is defined in the liminal space between cultural fields. He is interested in developing a theory of the Other that does not ultimately support colonial ideology. He writes: I want to take a stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement ? that confounds any profound or ?authentic? sense of a national culture or an ?organic? intellectual ? and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure.25 Bhabha with hybridity proposes to consider activities by groups like the ones responsible for the evolution of dub in terms of difference not diversity. The reason being that the notion of diversity, he argues, is epistemological, an object of empirical knowledge, something that demands a stable identity, while difference is always in the process of enunciation. It is always becoming, and changing.26 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use Bhabha as the generalized example to show the limited view of not only postcolonial theory, but also poststructural and postmodern theories. The main reason, they argue, is that these theoretical disciplines keep looking at Western thought as a hegemonic model from the past. Hardt and Negri argue that theories conversant with postcolonialism react against the foundation of Enlightenment thinking: We argued earlier that modernity should be understood not as uniform and homogeneous, but rather as constituted by at least two distinct and conflicting traditions. The first tradition is that initiated by the revolution of the Reinaissance humanism, from Duns Scotus to Spinoza, with the discovery of the place of immanence and the celebration of singularity and difference. The second tradition, the Thermidor of the Renaissance revolution, seeks to control the utopian forces of the first through the construction and mediation of dualism, and arrives finally at the concept of modern sovereignty as a provisional solution. When postmodernists propose their opposition to a modernity and an Enlightenment that exalt the universality of reason only to sustain white male European supremacy, it should be clear that they are really attacking the second tradition of our schema (and unfortunately ignoring or eclipsing the first).27 Soon after they explain that the critical position of the postmodernists and postcolonialists is limited because it only focuses on how power is sustained for white males and do not deal with the foundation of that power, they explain that the very concepts of difference due to this oversight have been co-opted, and comfortably assimilated by the very forces postcolonials aim to resist. Hardt & Negri?s argument of pushing against an ?open door? is based on how the concept of difference has been adopted and promoted by Capital (or Empire). To support their view they argue that corporations see difference, as often presented by postmodernism and postcolonialism as a way to new markets, and that even corporations promote ?diversity management? as a way to keep their employees as productive as possible.28 There are two elements at play in the criticism of Hardt & Negri. One is that Bhabha and those who share his methodologies do not support a dialectical development of culture, which is what Hardt & Negri are truly interested in. They argue that one must be aware of the ongoing development of what they call Empire, a concept that enables them to view the state of global development in line with the theories of late capitalism as defined by Ernest Mandel and further supported by cultural critics such as Fredric Jameson: ?We certainly agree with those contemporary theorists, such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson who see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market.?29 Hardt and Negri ultimately view postcolonial and postmodern theories as symptoms and signals marking a stage of capital that must be assessed critically to move successfully to the next dialectical moment. The second element of criticism is that postcolonialists (or in Hardt & Negri?s case, Bhabha) place an emphasis on the complexity of identity defined not only by class but also other cultural elements such as gender and ethnicity. Bhabha reflects on the struggle of classes in England with the miner?s strike of 1984-85. He explains that when this moment was later remembered it belonged securely to the ?working-class male? safely historicized as another class struggle, but to complicate this matter, the activist Beatriz Campbell interviewed for the Guardian women who also participated in the strike. The interview, argues Bhabha, demonstrated that women?s experience of the struggle was different from that of men?s, and that the conflicts were not only about class struggle, but identity and gender struggle as well. He elaborates: It would be simplistic to suggest either that this considerable social change was a spin-off from the class struggle or that it was a repudiation of the politics of class from a socialist-feminist perspective. There is no simple political truth to be learned, for there is no unitary representation of a political agency, no fixed hierarchy of political values and effects.30 This position on ?no fixed hierarchy? is what Hardt & Negri attribute to the indecidability in Bhabha; that is Bhabha?s unwillingness to claim a side and a clear position in terms of resistance as a struggle that is socially shared, as well as his apparent dismissal of a dialectical postcolonial theory. They accuse Bhabha of vacillating unable to come to terms with a larger view of cultural struggles. They further argue that the celebration by postcolonials of constant movement is something that people who actually struggle with class difference are unable to relate to: Just a cursory glance around the world, from Central America to Central Africa and from the Balkans to Southeast Asia, will reveal the desperate plight of those on whom such mobility has been imposed. For them, mobility across boundaries often amounts to forced migration in poverty and is hardly liberatory. In fact, a stable and defined place in which to live, a certain immobility, can on the contrary appear as the most urgent need.31 There are other postcolonialists who do share a materialist foundation in some degrees with Hardt and Negri, such as Gayatri Spivak in particular, but they do not mention her at all in their critical dismissal of postcolonial theory. I have focused on Bhabha?s and Hardt & Negri?s two critical positions because they are in many ways what contemporary critical theory has inherited from the nineties. As I will argue in what follows, the evolution and influence of dub since its conception in the West Indies can now be assessed with these two particular philosophical points of view in mind. Dub could be seen as a discourse that thrives on the threshold as defined by Bhabha, as well as a discourse that points to what is to come, in the next dialectical stage, as promoted by Hardt & Negri. |
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