when: 2008-10-15 18:16 what: The One True Jamaican Invention. look: Public where: GDI how: 14,322 listen: The Shins: "Phantom Limb" tag: verse chorus verse repeat & fade

It almost makes Your Humble Narrator want to just assign the blanket label of "Jamaican" to the whole mess and be done with it.

Let me explain.

At this point in La Norme Concrète's growth, the issue of capacity is, for the moment, moot, thanks to the advent of Gaia. With the recent influx of ska*, rocksteady, dancehall, ragga, dub, and straight-up reggae, one might assume that pigeonholing would become a problem, especially when it comes to discerning one musical style from another. Believe it or leave it, this is not the case, at least partly. The only issue with fractal genre pigeonholing is the absolute organizational nightmare that results when such an organic system is foisted upon an established hierarchy, such as that of Proteus, who hosts La Norme Concrète in tandem with Gaia. That is to say, why label something as "Bollywood" when it can go under "Vocals?" Why tag something as "Punk" when it can go with the rest of the "Rock?" Why bother with meaningless permutations like "Darkstep," "Jump-Up," and "Neurofunk," when they're all slightly, barely perceptibly different styles of "Jungle?**"

The problem is twofold. Firstly is the issue of assigning a style to a single artist, a method that arguably makes database-aligned music collections such as La Norme Concrète easier to browse and organize, as long as the artists in question are reasonably consistent as they grow and progress and mature. Linkin Park is rock, Madonna is pop, Ludacris is hip-hop, etc.; easy-peasy. The trouble starts when artists start to edge towards the fringes of their home genres, (Ray Charles, Johnny Cash) cross already gray borders between subgenres, (Aphex Twin, Banco de Gaia) or completely disregard the pigeonholing structure altogether. (John Cage, Cecil Taylor) When it comes to Jamaican music, there are numerous artists who ride the mutating waves of change and manage to stay legit and produce music true to the style, which is the crux of the issue: splitting genre assignments between single artists. Does Gregory Isaacs' dub work go under "Dub" or with the rest of his catalog in "Reggae?" Should ska from Toots and the Maytals be separated from their rocksteady stuff? These may seem insignificant, nitpicky issues on the surface, but they belie the second part of the problem:

While Your Humble Narrator may put on the airs of a music maven, I am by no means versed in its more scholarly aspects; the closest I've gotten to reading music was faking my way thru trombone tootlings in high school band. (or maybe that was just a dream) This is important to mention because when it comes to the art (or drudgery) of pigeonholing, discerning one musical style from another often comes down to the smallest detectable changes in one song or another. Maybe my ears just aren't sophisticated enuf, but minutiae like time, whether a keyboard is an electric piano or a Hammond organ, or even which stroke is considered the downbeat, are generally lost on me. Fortunately, and perhaps in part to possessing a more visual mind, the partitioning of one Jamaican musical style from another is made somewhat less painful when you look at the overall evolution of styles as progressive, parallel to burgeoning technology, and equatable to "Western" styles of the same time periods:

Consider: ska is to skiffle, as rocksteady is to doo-wop, as reggae is to rock. That is, if it sounds like it was made with a bunch of amateur musicians playing homemade instruments, it's probably ska. If the songs are slower, revolve around love, (lost or otherwise) and are heavy on falsetto vocals, it's probably rocksteady. If the sound is more modern, the production values tighter, and the lyrics more introspective and "conscious," it's probably straight-ahead reggae. In addition, dancehall is to house, as ragga is to drum n' bass; dancehall relies more on electronics and vocals, while ragga is even faster in BPM and more staccato with the MC's delivery. The closest thing dub comes to is remixing in general, as you can issue a dub "version" for just as many styles as there are to record for.)

The idea isn't bulletproof, of course. There are songs with a definite ska rhythm but with mushy vocals, downbeat rocksteady instrumentals, and reggae records produced in 1960s Britain that sound like they came straight out of Detroit. Not to mention the relatively brief period of time that rocksteady itself inhabited, (two years at the most) so it's no surprise that one person's ska is another's rocksteady is another's reggae, especially when it comes to the "wave-riders" mentioned previously. This porousness of the rules that define one style from another is what makes pigeonholing Jamaican music so frustrating, and the temptation of lumping anything that even vaguely resembles the sound into a single bucket all the greater. And while listening to music critically is seldom painful, the idea of sifting thru single after single trying to pick up on tiny changes in tempo, the ratio of instrumentals to vocals, or whether the tune has a "chicka-chicka" refrain sounds like more than a little tiresome.

Also, the playlist for the "jazz is dead" mixtape "There Are No More Masters" was successfully recovered:

Side A:

• Critters Buggin: "Sheets."
  
• Squirrel Nut Zippers: "Lugubrious Whing Whang."
  
• Elvis Costello & Bill Frisell: "Weird Nightmare."
  
• Caspar Brotzmann Massaker: "The Tribe."
  
• Frank Zappa: "Duke of Orchestral Prunes."
  
• MC Solaar & Ron Carter: "Un Ange en Danger." (from the Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Blue project, ten thousand times better than Guru's comparatively crap Jazzmatazz series)
  
• Medeski Martin & Wood: "Nocturne." (Automator mix)
  
• Henry Threadgill: "Laughing Club."
  
• Don Byron: "Furman."
  
• David Tronzo & Reeves Gabrels: "A Night in Tunisia." (Gabrels is better-known as the maddeningly talented guitarist in David Bowie's Tin Machine side project)
  
• Mark Ribot: "Nature Abhors a Vacuum Cleaner."
  
• Jimi Tenor: "My Mind."

Side B:

• Steve Reich/Pat Metheny: "Electric Counterpoint." (movement #3, fast)
  
• Machine Gun: "Cybercat." (who?)
  
• Cassandra Wilson: "Time After Time." (as in the Cyndi Lauper song, and it's almost unrecognizable)
  
• Squarepusher: "Our Underwater Torch."
  
• Ben Neill: "After The Gold Rush." (Neill's "mutantrumpet" invention is parts of three trumpets welded together with synthesizer parts)
  
• Tom Waits: "The Piano Has Been Drinking. (Not Me)"
  
• Morphine: "Let's Take a Trip Together."
  
• Neuwirth: "Famoudou's Bone." (who?!?)
  
• T.J. Kirk: "Damn Right I'm Somebody." (a brief side project of Charlie Hunter, they used to play, exclusively, the music of Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Rahsaan Roland Kirk)
  
• Steve Tibbetts: "Hellbound Train."

Recreating this and "The One True American Invention" will require some nips and tucks, as a number of the representative singles have had their parent records pawned during previous "decimations." Just like music itself, The Concrete Standard changes and evolves and is never static, for worse or for better.

EDIT: The majority of the recent Jamaican glut comes from the reasonably-priced Trojan box sets, which raises a slightly thorny concern, one that is just as easily dispersed. While anal-retentive purists and moldy old-schoolers might bemoan the privilege of acquiring such a large chunk of the genre's rich history in so few swoops, the ease in acquiring these remarkable sides hardly invalidates the value of the music itself. As if spending weeks scouring used record shops and filthying ones fingertips browsing thru endless melanges of cracked wax would make a record by The Uniques or a single by Sir Lord COmic sound any different or better.

Besides, I don't have a turntable anymore. Progress: it's a bitch.

*"Ska" in this sense refers to late-50's "first-wave" ska; not 2 Tone ska, ska revival, or "third-wave" ska punk.

**In the sphere of La Norme Concrète, drum n' bass, jungle, and its myriad iterations are categorized under "Breakbeat," which is both right and wrong in its usage. Breakbeat is derived from a 'break," which in hip-hop turntablism, is sampling the point in a piece of music where the front end of the band steps back to let the rhythm section jam for a bit, usually defined by a sharp hit of percussion or brass. Break loops are the cornerstone of modern hip-hop instrumentation, and since drum n' bass is, at its very core, little more than sped-up hip-hop, the pigeonhole term "breakbeat" is not entirely inappropriate, if a little inaccurate.

⎋

drop a frog | memory | share | permalink