Straight outta Epsom

Hope this hasn't been posted before but I thought it was quite relevant to Nabeel's excellent lecture on digital music the other week. Firstly, it is a great example of new technologies as the video (taken from a BBC comedy show) is hosted on You Tube, the Dad is using an i pod and it could be seen as an example of a remix or mash up (although possibly not in the strictest sense).
Secondly, it is also an example of black music in the digital age and features the Amen break Nabeel mentioned.

For my blog posts I'm going to try to stick to the theme of old vs new technologies. In particular I want to show how most new technologies are simply more efficient and accessible extensions of old school ones. This post will briefly mention the remix/mash up and mix tapes vs downloads.

The remix has been around far longer than prosumer PC tools such as Reason, Fruity loops or Pro Tools and has in fact been a major part of the Jamaican music scene since the late 1960's. You could safely say that the remix was pioneered by Osborne Ruddock aka King Tubby back in 1967. Tubby would take a rock steady track, record a vocal track (or six) and then go about re-ordering the piece by taking instruments and vocals in and out of the mix and adding effects such as echo. These would be released on dub plates and played by sound system 'selectors'. Today the Jamaican record industry works in much the same way. Artists such as Sly and Robbie will record a 'riddim' and then every dancehall artist on the island will lay down their own vocal track. A good modern example of this is the Jamrock riddim made famous by Damien Marley. I have at least 10 differenf versions of this riddim on my i tunes. This made it very easy for the mash up to be invented. New York hip hop producers would take these riddims and remix them, perhaps adding a hip hop rather than reggae drum beat and release them on white label vinyl. Another modern example is the MIA/Diplo release entitled 'Piracy funds terrorism', a play on the UK campaign trying to link musc pirates to terrorists.

Similarly, the global sharing of music has been around far longer than Soulseek or the internet. In the 80's there was a healthy international scene of mix tape trading taking place within the DIY punk/hardcore scene. Punks would make connections through zines such as MaximumRocknRoll and develop pen pal type friends with whom they would trade mix tapes on which they copied their favourite hard-to-find or local punk from 7 inch records. This was in effect an archaic form of file sharing, the difference that the internet has made is that it is now far quicker and you have instant access to millions of peoples collections.

Next post I'm going to continue by talking about how personal blogs are a modern version of the DIY zine.

Here's an example of real Dub and pictures of the legend. Also, check out my radio show 'the Poisoning' FleetFM 88.3 or fleetfm.co.nz online. Tonight 6-7 punk to reggae.