Listening Index · Wesleyan University Press, 2007
DubSoundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae
Every record the book names. In the order it names them. Each one carries the sentence that puts it in the argument, set exactly as printed.
Songs come first, then albums. Anything that recurs across chapters is repeated, so every list stands alone.
Contents
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Introduction
16 songs · 3 albums
Introduction
Veal sets out the argument: dub as the sound of a society remixing itself, and the herb-scented, Rasta-inflected Kingston of the mid-seventies where that remixing was done.
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Chapter One
13 songs · 2 albums
Electronic Music in Jamaica
Dub in the Continuum of Jamaican Music — The long run-up — mento, ska, rock steady, the studios and the sound systems — placing dub inside a Jamaican musical continuum that reaches back centuries.
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Chapter Two
44 songs · 7 albums
“Every Spoil Is a Style”
The Evolution of Dub Music in the 1970s — How the version became a genre: the B-side instrumental, the riddim recut, the accidental drop-out, and the decade in which all of it hardened into dub.
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Chapter Three
14 songs · 16 albums
The “Backbone” of Studio One
Sylvan Morris at Coxsone Dodd’s Brentford Road studio — the engineer who built the sound everybody else went on to dismantle.
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Chapter Four
43 songs · 24 albums
“Jus’ Like a Volcano in Yuh Head!”
King Tubby, Philip Smart, Prince Jammy, Scientist — The Waterhouse lineage. King Tubby’s four-track room and the engineers who came up in it, from the first drop-out mixes to Scientist’s arcade-cover era.
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Chapter Five
73 songs · 16 albums
Tracking the “Living African Heartbeat”
Lee “Scratch” Perry — Perry from Studio One apprentice to the Black Ark: the Upsetters, the Wailers sessions, and a studio treated as an instrument until it burned.
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Chapter Six
18 songs · 8 albums
“Java” to “Africa”
Errol Thompson — Errol Thompson at Randy’s and then Joe Gibbs — the Mighty Two, the African Dub chapters, and the sound-effects mixes that made dub theatrical.
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Chapter Seven
8 songs · 4 albums
“City Too Hot”
The End of the Roots Era and the Significance of Dub to the Digital Era of Jamaican Music — Violence, emigration and the Sleng Teng riddim: how the roots era closed and what dub handed on to the dancehall.
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Chapter Eight
3 songs · 14 albums
Starship Africa
The Acoustics of Diaspora and of the Postcolony — The theory chapter. Dub’s shattered space read alongside Sun Ra, Miles, Parliament and Detroit techno as an acoustics of diaspora.
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Coda
24 songs · 47 albums
Electronica, Remix Culture & Jamaica
Jamaica as a Source of Transformative Strategies in Global Popular Music — The long tail — On-U Sound, Ariwa, Wackies, jungle, trip-hop, Basic Channel and the remix culture that took dub’s method worldwide.
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Appendix
0 songs · 115 albums
Recommended Listening
By engineer — Veal’s own listening list, grouped by the engineer who mixed it. Catalogue numbers omitted.