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Bass Culture - When Reggae Was King (Paperback, New Ed) Loot Price: R426
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Bass Culture - When Reggae Was King (Paperback, New Ed): Lloyd Bradley

Bass Culture - When Reggae Was King (Paperback, New Ed)

Lloyd Bradley

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List price R522 Loot Price R426 Discovery Miles 4 260 You Save R96 (18%)

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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.

General

Imprint: Penguin Books
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release date: August 2001
Authors: Lloyd Bradley
Dimensions: 197 x 128 x 38mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 572
Edition: New Ed
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-023763-4
Categories: Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > Black studies
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Reggae
Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Reggae
LSN: 0-14-023763-1
Barcode: 9780140237634

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