I am stuck in reggae's past, and here's why...

[leggo rocker]

Some of us here just can't get past the sleng teng ting. I manage to creep past the '85 marker with some help from Music Works' brilliant late 80s digital output. But I just can't get a lot of enthusiasm for much of reggae from '85 on.

Why is this?

Well, I read an interesting thing this morning (on a hi-fi review site) about our preference for how we like our sound delivered. We're talking about hi-fi here:

"the most important variable determining a person's taste in music playback is the accident of adolescent revelation: The sound that your music was dressed in the first time you fell for it is the sound you'll love forever."

I think this goes for the actual music too. Over the years I've strayed away from reggae and got into dance music, early house. I still like it but I rarely play it any more. Reggae has come back firmly to top my musical preference.

And not just reggae, but the stuff that I cut my reggae teeth too, pre 80s dub and vocal and early dancehall and dancehall induced dub. I also still love ska and rocksteady, again genres I was exposed to as a youth man.

This is my theory:

We like what we liked when we were turning from boys to men (or girls to women). And try as hard as we might, we can't stop coming back to it and feeling 'right' with it.

So all those of you calling us 'stuck in the past' or 'integritists' or whatever the word used was, this is why.
We are not 'Luddite' and we are not closing our ears to the present. We're just following our musical conditioning.

It strikes me also that those of us more into digital reggae are younger, generally, and therefore have grown through their teenage years with digital sound as the norm.

[Matthew]

We like what we liked when we were turning from boys to men (or girls to women). And try as hard as we might, we can't stop coming back to it and feeling 'right' with it.

I'd have to agree, some truth to this it would seem.

For the first 8-10 years of my life I grew up on my dad's Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Wes Montogomery and Ramsey Lewis records. Too young still to fully get the grasp, but I do believe those LP's set the groundwork (subliminal or not) for my later musical tastes.
Plenty of drums, organ and piano, some vibes for sure.

1984 hits and I get my own real pieces of music.
2 cassettes : Run DMC - Run DMC & The Fat Boys - Crushin'.
These definitely had an effect as I would continue to listen to rap for the next 20+ years with a brief reprieve when I was introduced to reggae in 1990.
Actually...I was introduced to reggae via Yellowman on Run DMC's sophomore release circa 1985.(Horrible reference, shoudldn't even count actually, but the voice/accent and stylee was unmistakable.)
This early introduction did mold my ears quite a bit as I still return to enjoy the occasional Rakim, CMW, or KMD track.

1990 rolls around and I stumble across a small reggae shop.
I bought some vinyl, some cassettes, basically started collecting I even went to a few reggae concerts.

I was hooked...the 'ITIS' as leggo refers to it.

Surprisingly enough I never liked the current sound at the time and was always searching for older style tunes and artists. Definitely pre 1985 let alone 1990.
The digi style never caught me or as it's been suggested 'trapped me in that era'.
Of course now as I get older and have more access to tunes I realize there's plenty crucial digi artists out there, not just Shabba and Ninja and the more mainstream artists available in the states at that time.


Not sure where I was going with all this but...
I do believe that in my lifetime and through the actual formative years (15-16) I grew the closest to reggae and the works of JAH and it's never left my heart since.
Through all the trials and tribulations, backsliding, the time away from music and collecting,
'ROOTS REGGAE' left a permanent impression and a place to return for my strength, guidance and to keep the vibes alive.

[Lion]

A True Leggo,

I still buy now a day music from Jamaica.
But in general old time music Reggae/Latin/African/Soul.


Lion

Play Mr. Music Play

[chromatic]

Hm, my own personal experience doesn't fit the theory... In my teens I was a big post-grunge and triphop listener (though there was a bit of jungle in there), lots of psychedelic trance, then spent years listening to darkwave, then postpunk and finally got into reggae as a postpunk influence (and also from starting to investigate 80s ska) - not to go on about myself at length, but just to say that my experience is that my taste hasn't been, so to speak, set like that... About the only common denominator is that all the music I've listened to since my late teens, is not contemporary.

What I would agree on is the digital thing - even though I've listened to a lot of electronic music generally, and I got the 'Dawning of Digital Reggae' double CD set to see what I'd make of it, nothing - but then I'm not a fan at all of deejay, rap/hiphop or dancehall either (which incidentally is a great thing about this forum - no automatic attitude of, if we're talking about/playing reggae we're talking about/playing modern dancehall - to me the difference in sound and in vibe is so vast, despite the national, cultural & historical connection) - apart from anything else, the misogyny and homophobia would be enough to turn me off in itself.

But enough about me

[Jonti]

I think you've opened up a massive subject here, Leggo!

I got to Jamaican music via randomly deciding to buy a Lee 'Scratch' Perry CD while shopping one day, after spending my youth exploring virtually every other type of music (barring hiphop, pop and metal). Soon I found that I kept going back to that CD when I wanted to feel good, even though I was still listening to everything from AFX to The Kinks. Eventually I found that Scratch and Sherwood were coming to my town (Osaka), and it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. Thereafter I started to explore Jamaican music and buy huge quantities of reggae/dub vinyl. Never felt better.

Now I'm just starting to explore early digital/dancehall and the good vibes are still here. Vinyl all the way, because I soon found that there was a massive gap between the CD sound and the wax sound.

[stepping razor]

I like both.Both for different reasons.
You just cant beat the old stuff, with real instruments being played by musicians and how it was recorded like a live sessions with not many takes, which gives the feel and great vibes,like how the jazz Blue Note label did their session recordings, where you would get different musicans playing in a set and what were the best combination for the best sessions.
The reggae in the 70`s was not easy to hear,on legal radio it was more watered down roots, so you would have to check out the pirate stations to get any proper roots. You would have to be about a city to hear them, and with sound systems setting up in parks and street corners and you could hear the music that way.
The reggae they played on the pirate radio DBC, Traffic Jam, Joey J on Kiss FM,also some great hip hop pirate stations and was the main way of hearing the stuff coming out.In the 80`s there could be 20 reggae pirate stations and 30 hip hop stations all running at once.

They say that theres more choice nowadays, but its more choice of throw away music thats not going to stand the test of time.Its always been that 5% of reggae is any good and 1% of hip hop is any good, and that has stayed the same for decades.
I liked the hip hop late 70`s and 80`s from when the beat box got invented and on the market place in 83.And its how it was used in reggae and hip hop from 84-88 that had great music in both hip hop and reggae.
Once the computers came into it in the 90`s you could see how music was changing, with Qbase programs and the like and had become sequenced in 2 or 4 bars repeated, which the beat box didnt do and you could get a 24 bar phase and then combine it with another 24 bar pattern.so it had feel and a live sound of life to it.
But in the end its how you use what you have.
I find with a lot of reggae that they sound like the beat is half done or half finished and stick any old vocal on it.
People have forgotten how to make proper beats.
TLA Rock-Its Yours on the Roland TR-808 beat box.
My best time for so called digital roots was 86-89 when some great tunes came out with the beat boxes and not computer programs.

Peace

[Jesco77]

Thanks to Leggo for kicking off another very informative RA thread! I don't think anyone need feel too apologetic about loving reggae's past as there is no other music which so consistently and proudly recycles its past (I would say that sample based music like hip hop and early house generally recycle other genres). Even in recent years the "newer" rhythms like Night Nurse and Baltimore have been revisited and I don't see anything wrong with that, it just shows what an amazingly adaptible music reggae is. Having said that I did like Sleng Teng, just think that the computerised sound became a bit watered down and tinny sounding (on a home syatem) after that, and compared with the great days of the early 80s with sounds like "Love Me With Feeling", "Spiritual Healing", "Electric Boogie", "Rub-a-Dub Soldier" and tracks like that which weren't "computerised" but were played on synthesisers and drum machines and still sounded great. IMO of course!

[Marky Dread]

nice one leggo and all!
i'm a musical romantic for sure - i've always gravitated towards "found sounds", basement recordings, field recordings - that sort of music generated and distributed by the underdog... the thought of someone banging out music for sheer love of music - even if they must create it on a boombox or crudest of 4 track... i acknowledge the skill it takes to create digital music, but somewhere there will ALWAYS be someone dicovering or creating some scratchy disk created in the back room of a record store or basement - and i will be there to champion that!
thanks again all!

[leggo rocker]

I didn't want this thread to degenerate into a digital verus analogue thread. So I am happy to see that, so far, it hasn't.

Like Matthew my youth was filled with great music, especially because my parents always favoured Hi-Fi over TV. Father would listen to jazz, blues and some pop of the time (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). Mother liked the pop too, but she also loved Frankie Lane and Johnny Cash. So no surprise to me then that now I find myself liking some country music (although not much)

I also have several of those old Blues and Jazz LPs, like Jimmy Smith, but sadly none of the originals, my elder brother beat me to my father's vintage vinyl and cats have all but destroyed my mothers collection (aaaaaaaaargh!).

So I really believe that music entering your ears when you are young *can* effect the music you like when you are older. And not only the music, but the equipment you hear it on. I can't really get on with MP3, CD etc. Vinyl it was when I was young and vinyl it is now I am old! And even the hi-fi, I prefer the 'old' sound to the new stuff.

[leggo rocker]

@ Oras. You might be surprised at how easy it actually was to get music, even in the 60s. Reel to reel tape was cheap and my parents were all 'file sharing' music long before the dawn of the MP3. LPs and singles were cheap, and people had less other financial distractions (no phones at home, let alone in our pockets!) so more money seemed to be available even in a poor working class family like mine to buy music.

Second hand records were even cheaper, there was no eBay to drive up prices.

As for choice, or too much of it, even for seasoned reggae fans the vast amount of it out there can be totally bewildering sometimes! So to venture outside of it onl;y confounds the issue. But at least nowadays people can sample music at home and not have to venture to those scary record stores!