Bradley has been a music journalist for 20 years. In this
comprehensive social history of reggae, he uses his deep love and
knowledge of the music to argue that reggae was the cultural
protest movement of a black underclass, whose roots were in Africa,
slavery and colonialism but who were disillusioned by the results
of Jamaican independence. This may be news to people who think
reggae begins and ends with Bob Marley. In fact, Bradley argues
that Marley's best-known music was more influential outside
Jamaica. Bradley traces reggae from its 1950s roots in sound
systems. He discusses R&B, ska, rocksteady and the influence of
Rasta, then shows reggae's full flowering in the 1970s and its
massive influence on British pop music. He has interviewed the most
influential singers, players and producers in Jamaica and the UK
and quotes from them extensivley as a form of oral history.
Throughout, he locates reggae in its cultural, social, political
and economic contexts, always returning to the experience of the
Jamaican dispossessed, the 'sufferahs'. Why 'bass culture'? Not
just because of Linton Kwesi Johnson's poem of the same name or
because reggae is a bass-led music, but also because, in sound
systems, the reggae bass is so prominent you feel it physically
vibrate through you, making the music part of a total cultural
experience. Bradley shows how, despite its misadventures in the
world of global pop music, reggae always returns for refreshment to
its spiritual and cultural roots. This is no lightweight pop music
book, but a serious work of cultural reclamation, reminiscent at
times of E P Thomson, which shows how, in reggae, black Jamaicans
created their own cultural form. Although it has no discography, my
advice would be: if you have the slightest interest in reggae, read
this book! (Kirkus UK)
Bass Culture is a complete history of reggae, from its origins in the Jamaican sound-systems dances of the 1950s, through its enormous international triumphs of the 70s, to the current generation of new roots artists who are searching out a way forward for the sound. The story is remarkable: how a downtown music developed out of decades of cultural oppression to become a truly indigenous art form that went on to conquer the world.
In an account that ranges from Kingston's ghetto areas and the cool hills of Jamaica's interior to the clubs and record shops of London and Birmingham, Lloyd Bradley tells the full story: the politics and the culture, the producers and the players, the heroes and the villains - but most of all, the music.
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