Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae

By Michael Veal
Wesleyan University Press

Reading Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, one understands just how vast Veal’s knowledge of Jamaican music is. Unfortunately, the author could not translate his enthusiasm for the subject into a compelling read. Instead of being vibrant and humorous, the text is often academic and dry, stripping away the passion that would usually be associated with the subject matter. Ideally the book would have come with a companion CD, but Veal explained that the licensing would be too expensive, so readers are left having to follow the clinical text to get a sense of the music described.

Dub music is reggae music that has been reinterpreted through the use of sound effects, echo and reverb – the title refers to dismantling of prerecorded music. The music is often seen as a precursor to popular dance music. Dub has also leaked its way into mainstream pop music, as evident in “dub mixes” of top 40 hits by artists such as Madonna or Janet Jackson. The original dub music is a spin-off of reggae, though, as with any form of music, it has been diluted for mainstream popular consumption, as well. Pioneer engineers like Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Errol Thompson all revolutionized dub music, and get deserved mentions in the book along such luminaries as Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Sylvan Morris, and institutions like Studio One and the Black Ark – studios where some of the earliest works of dub music were created.

The book has some interesting points; the section on the influence of marijuana on dub music is particularly fascinating, as was his discussion of how producers would abuse their equipment to obtain a certain effect, but Veal often buries them with an avalanche of facts, figures and names (he has an unfortunate tendency to name drop), that will leave the reader overwhelmed. He has the germ of a great idea – he cites specific songs and discusses them in length, going over the details of the sounds of the songs and describing notable instrumental sequences and effects, though he gets mired in technical jargon (sometimes even including musical notes), that the reader may often find him or herself skimming through the passages.

To Veal’s credit, he does put dub music into a political and historical context, which gives importance to his subject, and the background information on the cultural influences that shaped dub music is very interesting; his passages about dub music and marijuana is illuminating, as the author attempts to debunk the myth that Jamaican music is “pot music.” He also does the reader a service by including a detailed discography of the artists cited in the book.

If Veal had trimmed down his writing a bit, and not overstuffed the tome with so much dry information then the book would’ve been a fascinating read. The text would have flowed better if the author had not tried to present the subject in such a textbook manner; the impulse is understandable, as Veal was obviously trying to make a claim for dub music an important academic or scholastic subject, but given the cultural impact of dub music, such a labored attempt in not needed. As such, one comes away from the book feeling as if there was an interesting book in there somewhere, done away by the author’s zeal for overwhelming his audience with facts.

Review by Peter Piatkowski

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Dub