A Brief History Of Dub

Anymore people call all kinds of crazy music "dub." But as a style of music, it originated with the practice of Jamaican record producers who put out a song on one side of a single and put out the instrumental from that song on the other side. DJs loved the "dub" side because they could chatter and chant and yell and sing and whoop over the track (cf: U-Roy, Big Youth, I-Roy, Tapper Zukie, Prince Jazzbo, and dozens of other rap ancestors).

Meanwhile producers began to play with dramatically remixing the instrumental sides, dropping instruments in and out of the mix, pushing signals through big walls of reverb and canyons of echo. In the hands of King Tubby and his disciples (Scientist, Prince Jammy), the mixes became more and more expertly remixed into a whole new type of music: music with huge rhythm tracks in which the development wasn't so much in the variety of melodies (pretty limited, though amazingly fecund, in reggae) as changes in the instrumental textures over time.

One influence on the sound was the fact that Jamaican studios were pretty primitive. Tubby's records sounded amazing because he was an audio engineer. Lee Perry's, on the other hand, sounded like heat waves rising off bubbling pavement on a Kingston street because he bounced the maximum number of tracks a 4-track board could bounce after running them through a phaser and an echo unit. Signal degradation was a key part of the sound. (For that matter, signal degradation and its interesting effects make a neat metaphor for Lee Perry's very colorful career.)

Another influence, one common to a lot of musicians, was drugs. In much the same way that gobbling acid (or trying to recreate the audio feeling of doing it) fueled bands from the Beatles on down to try out a lot of new sound colors, the copious amounts of top-quality weed that Jamaican musicians smoke have a lot to do with the disorienting, grooving effect of dub--as Bob Christgau said, getting baked improved the sound of Burning Spear because it's likely Spear himself enjoyed a chalice or two while recording the album.

So dub has gone through a trillion filtrations and permutations. It's a whole way of doing music that caught on really, really big in the late Eighties and early Nineties when hip-hop mixers based big portions of sets around breakbeats and mixed different records on top. Dub went digital with the rest of the Jamaican market around then. Meanwhile, roots crews sprung up all over--Brooklyn, England, Europe. Digital recording was easy and (compared to outfitting an analog studio) cheap. Anyone could sample, and with samples you could do what the DJs did without messing around with turntables and crossfaders.

Meanwhile, roots dub kept developing in Brooklyn, mixing with hip hop, recombining. Dancehall grooves were a lot faster, more synthesized, more fragmented, more jerky (more "new wave"), but at the same time you heard toasting (DJ rapping) over American drum loops (on the American side, by people like KRS-ONE). Swingin'! Conversely, someone like Bill Laswell, though using very modern technology, sticks pretty close to straight-up rootsy dub music.

And of course the methodology of dropping crazy snippets of theme songs, movie dialogue, song lyrics, and soul music breakbeats into and out of looped rhythm grooves because the way most electronica producers in any style (house, jungle, trance, techno, downtempo) worked as a matter of course. It's also provided context for what Miles Davis' bands from 1972-75 were working on: long grooves, shifting textures conducted by the guy doing the mixing (aka Miles), solos rising out of the bed of rhythm instruments and falling back.

So in a certain sense, "dub" describes a set of musical procedures in somewhat the same way "punk rock" does. About half the music I do qualifies. The point is to keep textures changing over the beat. The digital tools I use, SoundForge and Acid (now from Sony Media Software), make it easy to pluck out little bits of music and use them out of order, recontextualized, in the same way editing a film creates effects from the contexts and juxtapositions of shots. But it also provides a sense of structure and order, which helps balance all the craziness.