We are talking about Jamaica’s remix culture in Musical Borrowing class and how it challenges Western concepts of authorship and ownership. The class is reading the opening chapters of Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power by Larisa Kingston Mann, which connects Jamaica’s ethos of communal musical creativity to its postcolonial history. We spent today listening to this delightfully titled dub classic by Scientist to warm up for the discussion.
The album consists of remixed (versioned) reggae songs released in 1981. Many of these songs are sung over remixed (versions) of instrumentals from yet other reggae songs. Scientist created his versions by playing the multitrack tape of each song through a studio mixing desk and re-recording (dubbing) them down to two-track. During recording, he performed various manipulations on the mixing desk: changing the levels of the tracks, muting and unmuting them, and applying audio effects, most notably Roland Space Echo. He carried out these manipulations in real time, with an improvisational approach, giving his versions an unpredictable structure.
Thanks to the internet, it’s easy to compare Scientist’s source material to his versions. Here’s “Love In Mi Heart” by Wayne Jarrett.
Scientist versioned this to make “Blood On His Lips”.
The Orb sampled the word “I” in “I WANT BLOOOOOD” in “U.F.Orb” (1992); listen at 2:59, and from 5:39 through to the end.
Next, listen to “He Can Surely Turn The Tide” by Johnny Osbourne.
Scientist turned this into “Plague of the Zombies”.
The opening vocal from this track gets sampled a lot, for example by Kerri Chandler in “Ladbroke Grove” (1997).
You can also hear it in “Tempest Dub” (2006) by Spectrasoul.
Here’s “You Are No Good” by Michael Prophet.
Scientist turned it into “Dance of the Vampires”.
At the very beginning of the track, there’s a beep from the tape leader. Scientist not only keeps this in, but he runs it through space echo so it becomes part of the texture of the track.
Scientist’s other albums have evocative titles too, like Scientist Meets The Space Invaders.
Also, here’s Scientist Encounters Pac-Man. Looking at the album cover, “encounters” is the understatement of the century.
You can get a good sense of Scientist’s process from this video of him doing a live mix of “Heavyweight Dub” by Ted Sirota.
So, here are my questions for class. Should Scientist really be considered the author of his tracks? Isn’t he just making remixes of existing songs? Is muting and unmuting tracks and applying Space Echo really enough to change a song into a different song with a different title? For comparison, we listened to “Bam Bam” by Sister Nancy. The backing track is versioned from “Stalag 17” by Ansel Collins. The authorship here seems more straightforward, because Sister Nancy wrote and sang original lyrics, even if her backing track is reworked from an existing song. However, her lyrics are not totally original either; her main hook interpolates “Bam Bam” by the Maytals. Maybe trying to attribute sole ownership is the wrong approach to any of this music.
Larisa Mann explains that Jamaicans have very different norms around musical ownership and intellectual property rules than Americans do, and for good reason:
It is not surprising that people descended from an enslaved population might not find an easy relationship to property law, since until recently property law only included them in the system of property rights on the worst terms possible (p. 11).
Jamaica effectively had no musical copyright laws at all until 1996, and the laws that have been instituted since then have had little impact on the practices of reggae and dancehall producers.
The law concerns itself with the behaviors of individuals with little sense of shared culture or community. Yet a tremendous amount of musical creativity derives from shared cultural practices and the collective interests of communities… The law also presumes that there is a final product of creativity, known as a work, whose value can be understood separately from other works. But in practice, many forms of creative expression involve using shared cultural objects, phrases, or vocabulary that cannot be so easily separated. This is true in Jamaica and elsewhere, and more often true for communities on the wrong side of colonial power (p. 14).
Studios commonly recorded multiple vocals over one riddim [instrumental] and distributed records with the full song on one side and the riddim on the other, both to the public and to sound systems. In this way phonographic orality became embedded in records’ material production, because anyone who had a record could sing over the instrumental (p. 54).
Black American musical culture has some shared history with Jamaican culture, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there are aesthetic similarities too.
Reusing familiar sounds or collections of sounds facilitates an interactive and social musical experience, drawing together musical practitioners— instrumentalists, voices, and dancing feet—into a coordinated but flexible moment of interaction. This reuse also contributed to a common culture of shared knowledge and experience, similar to how the musicologist Ingrid Monson describes this working in jazz: “condensing social and cultural relationships both in time and over time through invention and musical allusion.” In Jamaican music, these practices made use of verbal quotations, musical quotations, and prerecorded selections (later called “samples”) from existing songs, commercials, radio, TV, and film (p. 59).
The authorship and ownership questions are interesting, but if you are not in my class, you may be more interested in the aesthetic aspects of dub. How did such weird and experimental music have such a colossal international impact? Brian Eno was heavily influenced by dub, and he articulates what he finds exciting about it in his lecture-turned-essay, The Studio as Compositional Tool.
So when you buy a reggae record, there’s a 90 percent chance the drummer is Sly Dunbar. You get the impression that Sly Dunbar is chained to a studio seat somewhere in Jamaica, but in fact what happens is that his drum tracks are so interesting, they get used again and again.
This takes us to reggae, which is a very interesting music in that it’s the first that didn’t base itself around the standard approach of making work by addition. Earlier I said the contemporary studio composer is like a painter who puts things on, puts things together, tries things out, and erases them. The condition of the reggae composer is like that of the sculptor, I think. Five or six musicians play; they’re well isolated from one another. Then the thing they played, which you can regard as a kind of cube of music, is hacked away at — things are taken out, for long periods.
A guitar will appear for two strums, then never appear again; the bass will suddenly drop out, and an interesting space is created. Reggae composers have created a sense of dimension in the music, by very clever, unconventional use of echo, by leaving out instruments, and by the very open rhythmic structure of the music. Then, too, someone like Lee Perry, a producer who’s always been very intelligent as far as using the constraints of the situation goes, might find there’s hiss building up on tracks he’s used over and over. A Western engineer might get frightened by this, and use all sorts of noise reduction and filtration. Perry says, “Okay, that’s part of the sound, so we’ll just add something else to it and use it’ ” This adds an ambiance of weirdness behind what was straightforward reggae.
I question Eno’s use of the word “composer” to describe Lee Perry or Scientist. They are creative artists, but it’s a different kind of creativity from the Western European concept of the lone genius conjuring new ideas from nothing. Eno is making a well-intentioned effort to get his audience to respect dub producers as much as they respect canonical composers, but I think it would be more respectful to describe dub producers as what they are, interpreters and reshapers of existing ideas. I would like us to live in a world where such reshaping is valued as highly as creating “new” ideas from scratch.
When I first listened to Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, I had no context for it. I didn’t know how or why this music was made. I liked it, but the process behind it was totally opaque. Why did the vocals and instruments enter and exit when they did? Why did the vocals consist entirely of mysterious fragments? Why those vast echoing stretches of emptiness in between the cheerful grooves? Now that I know that the music is the result of improvisational subtractive editing of pre-existing reggae songs, it’s less opaque, but it still sounds futuristic and wild. It makes me want to go back into my collection of multitracks with a more imaginative attitude.