There was no reason whatsoever why modern reggae – bass-line or not – shouldn't have continued to do the job it had done since the Sir, the Duke and the Prince shook up Orange Street forty years earlier. After all, it had already survived stylistic and cultural twists and turns every bit as radical. But the route it took through most of the 1980s and the 1990s was never so much evolution as revolution. In the past, statues had been moved to one side and the new ones put up next to them; this time around those same statues were being determinedly kicked over. With big hobnailed boots.
It would be easy to say that the reuse of old rhythms kept the lines intact, but that's not really the point. What happened post-roots was that attitudes changed. The reasons for making reggae records were no longer what they had been, and so the spirit of one of the world's most powerful folk musics was diluted. This isn't just a matter of moral corruption in face of the guns and slackness that came in around the beginning of the eighties, either – much Caribbean folk music has a bawdy element; and the shootist pantomimes has been around for years. What made the big difference this time round was the globalization of popular music in general, which meant that the fixation with America as an integral part of the island's music business appeared to be vindicated. Which tended to detract from the effort that might have been put into finding an alternative to titles like “Gunderlero” and “Punaany”.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with wanting to sell records in the biggest single music-consuming market in the world, but what counts is on whose terms these sales are made. Kingston's producers had kept one eye on the USA since Seaga's World's Fair trip in 1964, yet, as we've discussed before, the idea had always been for them to crack it in their own way their reliance on their sound-system crowds was so crucial to the whole industry's configuration they couldn't afford to alienate them. It's significant that after Bob Marley made his compromises, he enjoyed huge sales everywhere except Jamaica. Once ‘Under Mi Sleng Teng’ had introduced a sound and a structure that wasn't traditionally Jamaican - that is, Jamaican as perceived by largely uncomprehending black Americans and computerization allowed usage of the same samples as hip-hop, US airwaves-friendly ‘reggae’ tunes stopped being a contradiction in terms. Curiously, at about that same time major US record labels started coming down to Jamaica looking to sign deejays for more money than was previously thought possible: the biggest deals meant Supercat went to CBS, Shabba signed with Epic and Buju Banton settled at Phonogram. It was spending power that unbalanced the fragile, unique ecosystem that was the indigenous record business to the degree that, a few years back, this joke was doing the rounds: it's not applause you hear at the end of Sunsplash performances, but the furious flapping of American record company chequebooks.
That none of the above-mentioned deejays fared much better than Yellowman – Shabba did best as he exchanged Grammies for sustained ghetto credibility… you do the maths – is neither here nor there; what mattered was that it was only a matter of time before the home audience started to get bypassed and tunes were being made with America in mind. But the standards involved could never be the same as they would be for making a tune whose primary function was to rock a Kingston lawn dance. It was on the recalibrating of these fundamental values that modern reggae deliberately detached itself from its own history, did its best to behave like every other pop music and subsequently lost a great deal of what had previously made it so fascinating.
Such sentiments may seem like innate prejudice against dancehall or modern reggae in general. You know, an ‘Everything was better in the old days’ vibe. Or that Dennis, Gussie Clarke and Sly – and myself for that matter – are somehow ‘too old’ to understand what's going on in the dancehalls today. Not a bit of it. Dennis, Gussie and Sly all work in the new idiom as a musical form, each with a staggering degree of success. What doesn't make sense to them – or me – is the new perspective on life in general that is held by a generation of the country's music business, and the widespread disregard for humanity (or human life for that matter).
Every time in the past that reggae stopped and took on a new direction, it did so with no little acknowledgement of its own history, musical and cultural, meaning that lines remained unbroken and values and standards didn't slip. But it's possible to talk about reggae's latter period in terms only of contrast, not of continuation. The comments made in this and the previous chapter merely show the width of the gap between then and now, and serve to emphasize the point that it's impossible to tell the two stories in the same volume from the same perspective. Reggae pre- and post-Bob's death are different tales and it would be confusing not to treat them as such.
That said, it's important to acknowledge the contrast. The fact remains that reggae in the 1990s may have shifted more units than its 1970s counterpart, but how many genuine superstars has it produced? How many acts today even have any shelf life beyond their initial impact? And it seems highly unlikely that, in twenty years' time, we'll be looking forward to reissued ragga albums. The roll call of deejays dead by gunshot became intolerable, as did the ritual violence that became associated with the dancehall – it wasn't during the roots or the rocksteady eras that the Kingston police had to ban gun records because life was too closely imitating art. And watching women take pride in behaving as coarsely as a minority of men is no fun at all.
There is, of course, the argument that this is ‘reality’, that these songs are only reflecting the way things are in the ghetto and are therefore a valid expression – they even became known in some circles as ‘reality records’. This holds about as much water as a fishing net. There has been a tendency for detached observers to romanticize America's gangsta rap records as being the fractured cries of a suffering people, and Jamaica's gun and punaany records are frequently subject to the same patronizing analysis. But you'll find the vast majority of Jamaicans – i.e., those with no vested interest in this music – are well aware that being poor and living in the shadow of violence doesn't mean you have to degrade yourself, and being black doesn't turn it into something cultural. Indeed, most people take such a strong stance that they believe that if you're not obviously part of the solution then you must be part of the problem, and that anybody who writes lyrics about sex and violence without heartily condemning them is somehow glamorizing them. And history shows how the music business doesn't have to succumb to such allure: witness Bob Marley, who survived a shooting, or the hundreds of other artists who lived in Kingston through the 1980 election campaign and still managed to find upful subject matter. During the rude-boy wars twenty years earlier, the vast majority of Kingstonians heartily disapproved of the violence, but that sort of attitude had simply gone out of fashion among the young, vociferous dancehall crowds.
It can't be denied that such behaviour is having an effect on how things are on the island generally, where there has been an escalating spiral of declining respect for fellow sufferahs. Today's ghettos are literally twitchy with fear, intimidation and paranoia – each visit over the six years of writing this book has been increasingly less relaxed. The traffic lights on the long stretch of Spanish Town Road dividing Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens have long since been switched off because nobody would stop at them. In 1997, a spectacularly tooled-up Tivoli Gardens posse took on the Jamaican militia in a firefight that lasted for hours and resulted in an army retreat from the gang's stronghold – only for the army to return later and, apparently, open fire from a helicopter, injuring innocent bystanders. The time before last when I was leaving Jamaica, as I waited at Norman Manley Airport, news reports of a Denham Town gun battle the previous night came over the radio, with the announcer mentioning that nobody knew how many were dead because the authorities were unable to go in safely and bring out the bodies.
Obviously, you can't blame the music for all of this, but it doesn't come off completely blameless. Or at least one of the creators of that epoch-making record ‘Under Mi Sleng Teng’ doesn't seem to think so.
Subject matter wasn't ‘Sleng Teng’'s only traditional aspect. The tune came together at Jammy's studio in a way that would have done Sir Coxsone or Prince Buster proud. Bobby ‘Digital’ Dixon was the engineer for that recording, and the way he describes it tells a story that is a virtual clone of those very first ska sessions twenty-five years previously.
‘It was Noel Davey, a singer and musician, he was the one who had the computer box and he and Wayne Smith was friends. It was the Casio Rhythm Box, and most of them come with built-in drum beats, but they are not reggae beats, they are like rock beats… hard rock beats. But because the sounds sound interesting, what was really done was we took down the speeds of what they had in the machines originally to what was closest to a reggae tempo, then we could start constructing something from it. We were just playing about with it, looking for something that could be done; I wouldn't say we really knew where we were going with it. But that sorta thing was usual, because Jammy's a man who was always looking to move forward with what he was doing, and he encourage us to try things. Like if we don't have anything to do, then to experiment.
‘Wayne Smith heard the beat that we were playing around with and he start to come up with that lyrical idea – Under mi sleng teng / mi under mi sleng teng / mi under mi… It was something he'd been thinking about for a while for a song, but didn't have the right riddim for it. Then, because he already had it so far figured out, he come up with the keyboard riff and it starting to sound like a song. From that point we knew we was going to do something different.
‘Wayne Smith and Noel and Jammy's start talking about how they would like to do a song that was nothing like anything else, but would still get played at the dance. We all knew that reggae was already for a shift as not much had changed for a few years – studios was going digital but there wasn't nothing radically new. After they talked, Jammy's say “Come tomorrow” – I think it was a Sunday – “An’ we'll see if we can do something.”
‘Wayne and Noel come back the next day, and he have the lyrics all worked out, but it had been an effort for us because it was so different from all the other things at the time. It have no conventional bass-line. “Sleng Teng”, I would say, was the first big song not have one. And the beat was a manufactured beat – it was already in the system – and we had to take that beat and add the chords to it to make it what it was. To make sure it would still work in the dance, but was different enough to get noticed. It was like, Mek we try and do a little thing with that, then we hear the sound on playback and it was, Now mek we do a little thing with this, and so on. That was how it was done.
‘Jammy's took it to play on his sound system either that night or in the next day or so, and it mash the place up. Once we put it out, all you can hear is “Sleng Teng”, or next versions of it done on the same slowed-down Casio Music Box rhythm. And it did surprise us the way it took off.
‘When you do something – anything – you must have confidence and hope that it will turn out to the best, that way anything you do you're gonna do it with a clear conscience and know that you are truly going to try and create something. Then all you can do is give it that chance to go out there and prove itself. True, Jammy's was always looking to push forward, but you never know where it's going to go when you try something so new.
‘Like me, Jammy's sticks to what he believes in and he wouldn't put out something if he ain't going to put him heart and soul into it. I feel that's why “Sleng Teng” took off like that, because although it was all digital, we put heart and soul into it to try to make it work on a genuine level, because then even if it don't work we can feel good about it. If you ain't going to do that then don't bother. It will just be a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of effort – what effort you did put into it, that is. It don't make sense.’
Bobby is ‘at home’, in his state-of-the-art Digital B studios in the almost suburban area of Hughenden. It was from here, post-‘Sleng Teng’ and once he'd left Jammy's, that he spear-headed reggae's digital revolution by recording backing tracks by Steely & Clevie and voicing the likes of Shabba Ranks, Johnny Osbourne, Garnett Silk, Cocoa Tea, Tony Rebel, Beenie Man, Frankie Paul, Ninjaman and Red Dragon. This morning, though, there's not a lot of commercial activity at Digital B, other than one of his deejays putting down a special for the Heatwave sound system, the set Bobby has owned since the late 1980s and operated for longer than that. The vocal is a freestyle semi-sung/semi-toasted wordplay on the idea that the Heatwave set and Kingston town are both ‘Hot!’ and Bobby is working the thirty-two-track desk surrounded by all manner of outboard equipment. As he deftly but gently teases a springy, instantly uplifting tune out of what started off as an essentially flat riddim track, the playback sounds as exciting as practically any hit single.
While this is going on, the producer himself is relaxed enough to play a game that might or might not have been a test. Each of the three or four guys at work in the studio, including the dread voicing the jingle, very straightfacedly introduce themselves to me as Bobby Dixon and convulse with laughter as I look understandably confused. Eventually the real Bobby emerges from a side room laughing just as hard, and I'm not sure which one of us is more relieved that I know who he is.
Bobby ‘Digital’ Dixon is good humoured, hospitable, informative and very very funny. And why shouldn't he be? Thanks to his involvement in ‘Sleng Teng’ and his subsequent years of success advancing the digital style, he enjoys a thoroughly deserved place in Jamaica's music hierarchy. But then as the continuation of the line that will see King Tubby's legacy into the new century Jammy's apprenticed under Tubby; Bobby learned his trade from Jammy's – he was always assured as much. He is one of the most relaxed and comfortably seated men in Jamaican music. Except when you get him talking about what that same Jamaican music has become in the years since ‘Sleng Teng’. Ask Bobby Digital about this period, the one he and Jammy's more or less fired the starting gun for, and his sunny demeanour clouds. He's no less eloquent and his remarks are no less carefully considered, he's just not as happy about things.
Perhaps the notion of no bass-line turned out to be far more ominous than it appeared at the time, as during the decade or so since ‘Sleng Teng’ dancehall reggae – or digitial, or ragga, or roughneck, or whatever you want to call it – lived up to Gussie Clarke's worst fears. That's when it became that culture of extremes, pushing itself into new areas of musical bleakness and lyrical unpleasantness. The slackness of Yellowman and General Echo seemed gentle compared with the humiliating ‘punaany’ lyrics that were to come; that all-important MTV-friendly video became an exercise in lewdness; deejay clashes became literal rather than musical situations; and artists boasted about their propensities for violence to such a degree that ‘gun records’ became an accepted sub-section of the music. Yes, there were some alternatives, much of it from the Digital B studios, but the new style achieved by far the highest profile and became reggae music's most obvious growth area. It got to a point at which the police banned gun records in response to the appalling rise in violence at sound systems.
Bobby takes no blame at all for what happened in the wake of ‘Sleng Teng’. In fact, he remains quite horrified at how it affected not just the recording industry but the dancehalls themselves and Jamaican life in general. Tellingly, his summation of this ‘new-generation’ producer bears out a great deal of what Gussie Clarke had to say:
‘It wasn't going digital make it go that way, just a lack of creativity. Like ‘Sleng Teng’ or ‘Boops’, people tend to use one riddim too often now when in the earlier days you only find like one song on a riddim or perhaps two or three. That was the problem right there, too much songs have been putting on one riddim, it sorta make people less creative and the audience less imaginative. In this age and time people are jus' dancehall fans, they're not music fans. They are just buying riddims, not the vocals or the personalities or anything… just pure riddim.
‘That's why I don't try to use a riddim that is just one straight beat, you have to have riddim with melodies so people can recognize that. Otherwise all riddims are sounding alike. You have to establish certain things with each artist and make the artist have their own sound, then people are looking forward to hearing this person sounding that way. It gives you certain standards that you try not to go below, or you try to always improve. But when you're just dealing with a riddim that everybody else is using you have your standard there and there's no need to improve.
‘But where it goes most wrong is it's not making reggae music for the people, just for the sound systems. It's a sound-system thing, with deejays in competition, which was going on fine until it deteriorated down the line from the real parties and the real dance, and end up as the swearing and the disrespect and the arguments and whatsoever. The tunes they started making were really pure sound-system tunes – specials – but when it get popular response in the dance, that is what they going to put on the record and say that it will sell. Because if it going on so well in the dance then it must sell – with the vulgarities and swearing and everything. And it get the things outta line.
‘The violence escalated. Sure, parts of Jamaica are violent places, but it was above what it was supposed to be. I don't know if it is something in the atmosphere make people just get violent, or if it's the system or how people are living or what that they get so, but the whole thing just get outta hand and the music don't help matters at all. With those records it's seen that the dance is the centre of those things and people start get scared to go to the dances. Which don't do the whole industry any good. Then the police start to come to the sets and clamp down on any sort of music – any way they hear a little music they go to turn it down. From when the music turned down, it like the people dem are “Bwoy, mi can't tek them low music,” and them gone. We lose even more people.
‘I don't even attend a dance any more – if I want to go to a dance I have my studio, so I play what I want to play in there. Or to go to a dance where you can really enjoy yourself, the best thing you can do is drive out to the country and stop by one of those neighbourhoods where you hear a little music playing and find the little sound systems like in a village or something. It's there that the vibe will be nice, you can sit down and drink two beer and t'ing and hear some sweet reggae music. That's where you can enjoy yourself.
‘The radio don't help it, either. True, Irie FM [Jamaica's first all-reggae radio station, on air from 1990] give a lot of youth the privilege to be heard, because when there was just one radio station they dictated, so if there was one little act out there that needed that thing from the public and it couldn't get play then it wouldn't get heard. Same way as you wouldn't have heard of Garnett Silk and such and such and such artists. But now there is so much radio they start to behave like sound systems – as soon as one station hear a Power FM playing it, or Class FM, or an Irie FM playing it the next one is going to play it – or maybe a next version – because it a popular song now, and they start with that same competitiveness. All radio stations did play their part in boosting the music and giving certain youth an opportunity to be heard, but they let things get out of control.
‘The competitiveness situation lead to so many records being made that there wasn't the same vibe of a few big tunes like there was a few years ago, so everything suffer. It spread too thin. And with this number of records is producers who don't know what they are doing. It's like you find musicians who used to play live can't get no work, can't get nowhere to play so they start to produce… any little act they can find to really keep bread going on their tables. So this musician tries to produce, but his real thing is not producing, his thing is really creating music, but that don't stop him. Like you find a carpenter come in and say 'im is a producer now, or a plumber gwan come in and seh, “Bwoy, dis ya what mi gon’ do now.” You must find it deteriorate, because he don't know the writing or how to start or how to go about it. So ‘im just seh, “So?” and jump right into it. It must mislead you and mislead the people dem. Most of these producers right now, they cannot produce a vocal song, they only can produce a deejay song.
‘Then there is the producers who choose to produce certain songs. It's like they stop look ‘pon it as a message and to educate the people, and start look on it as a ‘ustling – how much they can make off this, or if they do that how much they can make. And they are not looking at the damage they are creating along the way. Is like “All right, make a piece of money offa this one now,” but don't look at the long term. Like they are just thinking of today and not tomorrow. And they must remember that they have children coming up also. They cannot fill up the place with certain things and have kids coming up and hearing that and believing that's what they got to do when they grow. These producers just trying to reap what they can reap, but we don't want that. We want to try and curb that right now, because with so many 'ustling songs, songs of the moment, you hear about the other songs because they don't fit and they don't get played. It like they weren't done good enough for the public, but really is they get lost in the rush.
‘So it's not just the quality of the songs either, the whole music business… the whole record industry deteriorate. The dancehall thing was pushin’, pushin’ at young people and creating a very small scene that wasn't universal like you used to have with old-time tunes or the Studio One sounds.
‘Look, a big person not even looking to go and buy a dancehall song or wanting to hear them in the dance. They're looking to hear a nice singing song, a nice vocal song, that they can take home and put on their turntable or in their CD and listen to. A person of forty years old going into a shop to buy a deejay song? To do what? Go and play that in their house and feed their kids on? That is totally impossible.
‘It's created a wider gulf between the young people and the old people, at a time when the young people need guidance.’
Gussie Clarke is no less damning, further castigating recent developments from a strictly business angle. He believes that corporate American involvement in reggae, for so long the industry's Holy Grail, was as damaging as any creative influence, with the big deals with the American companies in the early 1990s curtailing too many Jamaican careers.
‘Shabba made a lot of waves, at a time when everybody still sitting down looking for another Bob Marley. Major companies abroad looked at dancehall and saw this as a new music that was happening – after all, it somewhat felt international, now it related to other forms, you know pop and non-traditional. It look like it woulda happened and a lot of record companies came in, signed a lot of artist left, right and centre and are now dropping them left, right and centre. ‘Cause when you add the numbers up it just can't happen.
‘Most of the reason is because they took the artist out of their environment, and in this country, in my opinion, an artist alone don't make things happen. It's a package, and success depends on a lot of elements going on around the artist – to make it make sense you have to carry them the way they are or leave them alone. And by the time they've taken an artist back up to New York, or wherever, for a year to do an album, by the time they come back to Jamaica they've lost their market here.
‘Then many people believe the deal is to get a record deal alone. That's not the deal – the deal is to keep the deal. But because of the way so much of the business works here so many get it wrong. Hypothetically, if a man got ten dollars to make a record he probably try to make a five-dollar record and have five dollar left for himself. In reality, too many artists and producers took the advances, spent off the money and delivered a substandard record; when that get rejected there's no money to do no proper work on it to put it right. So when the record don't work the company don't want the next. Me personally, I woulda made a fifteen-dollar record, then I might have five more albums to do. I'm not interested in the immediate though, I'm interested in long term, but that wasn't the way many Jamaican artists saw foreign deals. But then a lot of them inexperienced and got into music too easily.
‘Now, if you look at many artists, the companies are dropping them. Managers are trying to shift them round, trying to get a next deal, and three-quarters of them will be dropped within the next two years. Those who isn't dropped by now.’
While it might seem remarkable for two guys who have always had a strong international aspect to their businesses to be as uncomplimentary about the first Jamaican music to have genuine overseas opportunities, the point they're both making is a vivid description of what went wrong. The music's branches strayed too far from the roots and so began to wither. Maybe it was losing the bass-line, but as dancehall has progressed through its various manifestations it hasn't done the music as a whole a great deal of good. Reggae's total volume of sales is apparently up in recent years, but its profile hasn't been this low for a long time.
Thankfully, though, things appear to be turning round. Or at least they are in the music world.