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Electric LadyLand... question

L

lowendVibration

Sep 15, 2008
3
0
#1
I finally sat down and spent some quality time with this record. Its never quite been clear to me where Reggae's influence came from after the R&B craze in America faded.

It's funny to me that just a week ago i became somewhat obsessed by King Tubby, and for some reason tonight i listened to Electric Ladyland. From what i've gathered Reggae and Dub music as we know it started taking shape around 1968.

I have heard Jimi Hendrix play with all the same effects king tubby played with, and some of the basslines could easy be laid in Dubb form.

So if Ska=R&B then is Reggae Dub the red headed step child of Hendrix?
 
#4
Wrong. While there are some similarities in the production of Electric Ladyland this is not the source of Reggae and Dub. Reggae originated in the late fifties as an a Jamaican interpretation of the old R&B Doo Wop music that was popular in the states at that time. DooWop has a similar skank upstroke signature guitar sound that is played on the one with a reverb. Go ahead and listen to it. You'll hear it. If you take that skanky upstroke and play it on the "and" of a typical 4/4 beat you get ska. Reggae obviously evolved from ska. First mention of reggae came from Toots, as in Toots and the Maytals fame who had a song called "Do The Reggae." By stretching out the placement into a more sparse pattern reggae evolved as a separate but related genre of music.

Dub reggae evolved because in Jamaica there wasn't an abundance of groups. There were really less than a dozen solid working rhythm sections. So when a group got together they would record instrumentals for different vocalists to perform over. Some of these dub tracks made it into Jamaican dancehalls, and DJ's discovered that they could match beats from song to song and thus creating really long dance tracks. Some of these DJ's like Prince Far I, and U-Roy would actually talk over them, and that style kind of gave birth to what is now the really fast staccato style of toasting called Dancehall. In the studio people like King Tubby, and Lee Scratch Perry started tweaking these dub tracks with echo and reverb and turned it into a whole genre that we now know as Dub Reggae.

Don't get me wrong, I love Electric Ladyland. I love the spacey kind of ethereal production of it. I wouldn't be surprised if they looked toward dub reggae for ideas when it came down to making this record. I also wouldn't be surprised if dub reggae artists looked at this album for inspiration either. Still, I felt I had to kind of straighten you up on how it all came about. :)
 
#5
i get all that about Reggae... I've been somewhat obssessed with reggae since i was very little...(It's Hendrix i know nothing about) at the end of the day for me as a bass player it's all just blues lines so it is fascinating to me that someone who is considered to be one the greatest was doing almost exactly to blues what Tubby was doing to reggae... I never took all that much time to appreciate Hendrix, but i think i might be blazing a new trail for myself here...
 

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