510- Wickedest Sound

SPEAKER_07: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters i x l dot com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When Herbie Miller was growing up in East Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s, he and his friends would put on their best outfits and head into the city. And blocks away, they could hear music pumping out through giant powerful speakers set up at dance halls, bars, and social clubs all over downtown. The sound was irresistible, and so Herbie and his crew would just follow their ears. Along the way, they'd run into other kids like them, everyone looking for the exact same thing, the perfect dance party. SPEAKER_03: Packs of boys or groups of boys walking from community to community, unable to go inside clubs and dance halls because it was perhaps two shillings and six pence. That was the entropy to a dance. SPEAKER_08: The guys would collect scrap metal and recycle empty bottles just to earn enough cash to pay the door. But sometimes they'd still come up short. That's 99 PI producer Christopher Johnson. These parties were the hottest dance scene on the island, with DJ spinning the latest tracks by artists like Alton Ellis, Don Drummond, and Roland Alfonso. That music made the party so live that things were even popping out on the street. SPEAKER_03: So that you dance outside and you listen to the tune outside. Then you have the orange man, the juice man. All of these were on the outside of the dance. So you buy a piece of cane and you go and eat in your cane or your juice or whatever your pocket can afford. So you know, it was a lot of fun. SPEAKER_08: And then if they got lucky, a sympathetic bouncer would eventually open the gate and wave Herbie and his buddies through. And oh my God, that's when Herbie really felt it. SPEAKER_03: Well, the first thing when you walk inside, the weight of the music hits you in your chest. The bass is like an earthquake. You feel that bass inside there. If you don't feel the bass, there is no bass. SPEAKER_07: Herbie loved that muscular sound system. His bones rattled and buzzed from those driving dance beats coming from the R&B, soul, jazz, and ska records that the DJs were spinning. He'd find a spot next to a refrigerator sized speaker box called a House of Joy and just take in the crowd. SPEAKER_03: You watch the nice girls come into the dances in their dance through the door and they watch the old bad man walk, old bad man talk, old bad man profile. You know the whole thing, man. SPEAKER_08: As the men and women walked into the dance, young Herbie took note of what everyone was wearing. These folks were sharp. SPEAKER_03: It was just a colorful scene to see the people decked out coming on and Terraline and Bull and Herringbone and Feldhacks and Thais and people were just at their best. But these were working people. Me and Y'all Stoleray, but that's what it was all done. SPEAKER_08: For Herbie, one of the best parts of the night was when the crowd would form a ring and the expert dancers would enter the circle. A man danced until the clothes tick on to him. SPEAKER_03: He has to abandon a nice continental jacket and dance down to him shirtless. The way perspiration is oozing out of his body. SPEAKER_08: They'd get so hot that onlookers would splash the dancers with cold beer until the floor was a slurry of sweat and red stripe. SPEAKER_03: Come on, man. It just was an amazing spectacle to behold. SPEAKER_08: When Herbie was growing up, these amazing parties, sometimes called lawn dances or blues dances, they were happening on the regular all over downtown Kingston. And one of the things that made these jams burn so damn hot was the technology that powered the party. SPEAKER_07: Jamaica is famous around the world for its music like ska, dub and reggae. It's tempting to think that those powerful amplifiers and giant speakers were designed to perfectly capture Jamaica's indigenous sounds. But it's actually the other way around. SPEAKER_08: Those speakers and amps came first and the electricians, mechanics and engineers who built and adapted that technology would then play a decisive role in the creation of Jamaica's modern music. They helped pioneer approaches to making and performing music that would spawn whole other scenes from the Bronx to the UK. SPEAKER_07: These dance parties first emerged in Jamaica in the decade following World War II. That's when the deeply underdeveloped British colony started to grow economically. One big boost came from U.S. tourism. SPEAKER_00: This then is Jamaica, an exotic blend of old world and new. SPEAKER_07: Americans came in droves to visit the resorts that were popping up all along the sublime North Coast. SPEAKER_00: You'd have to go a long way to find anything to compare. Planes from New York, 1600 miles away, land at Montego Bay Airport barely six hours later. SPEAKER_08: As U.S. visitors flocked to the island, hotels scrambled to meet their demands, which could sometimes be a little particular. Because I don't mean to be rude about Americans. SPEAKER_08: Lloyd Bradley is a music historian, a British music historian. Every American I've ever met, except for two or three actually, who have been abroad are SPEAKER_10: essentially looking for America with a more agreeable climate. SPEAKER_07: U.S. vacationers wanted something familiar, especially when it came to entertainment. SPEAKER_10: And so as the North Coast hotel business started booming, so there was a demand for dance bands, big band, jazz, swing, essentially American music played by Jamaican musicians in the hotels, you know, because the idea of recreating something as American as possible in these hotels would make it very easy for tourists to sort of slip into it. SPEAKER_08: Other tourists came to Jamaica wanting to hear music from Jamaica. So lots of hotels also hired bands that specialized in the island's folk music. SPEAKER_07: The demand for artists in the resort towns was so high, it sparked an exodus of musicians out of the capital city of Kingston. Many of them packed up their saxophones and guitars and struck out for tourist hotspots in search of higher paying gigs. SPEAKER_09: Places like Port Antonio, Montego Bay was a big draw for trained musicians. And it was also at this time that many of the trained musicians left Jamaica. SPEAKER_08: Music historian Norman Stolzoff says that lots of Jamaican artists also joined a mass migration of West Indians who headed to the UK, the U.S. and Canada. Trained musicians were leaving the capital city, and that left the average Kingstonian in the late 1940s with few options for live music. SPEAKER_09: There was kind of a dearth of entertainment, musical entertainment. Really a shortage of band music available to the masses of Jamaicans. SPEAKER_08: But look, those folks still wanted to dance and party. SPEAKER_07: So a handful of small businessmen, inventors and audio engineers across central and west Kingston began to improvise a way to give the people the dance parties that they craved without any live musicians. SPEAKER_08: It all started with shop owners who were connecting record players to very basic PA systems. They placed the speakers outside their stores and play recorded music to try and attract customers. SPEAKER_07: And it worked, sort of, because instead of going inside the store, some folks would just gather on the street and dance. A few other entrepreneurs saw real potential in this. So they put together their own PA turntable units and they took those setups around Kingston hosting little dances in open air lots or maybe in the yard behind a bar, wherever there was space. SPEAKER_09: They started playing house parties, small gatherings with their record players and small speakers. And they became quite popular filling in that role that bands would have played in an earlier time. And musicians weren't available, so the sound system then kind of stepped in. As small as they were, these parties would soon inspire some big advances in technology. SPEAKER_08: And that tech was going to help West Kingston's nascent dance scene explode. SPEAKER_07: Right around 1950, a Jamaican inventor named Headley Jones used his knowledge as a former radar engineer for the British Royal Air Force to build a new kind of powerful dynamic amplifier. It was designed specifically for DJs. The amp had what's called a three band equalizer, which could separate out and then emphasize high, mid and low frequencies. SPEAKER_08: So practically speaking, when you wanted a DJ to pump that bass, he could now pump that bass. A hardware store owner whose DJ name was Tom the Great Sebastian was one of the first to wire Headley Jones's new amp to his turntable and speakers. And he gave that powerful rig a new name, the sound system. SPEAKER_07: West Kingston's dance scene expanded from cozy house parties to larger affairs in social clubs, empty buildings and large open lawns to keep all those people dancing and now took a robust operation. And everything in the sound system just got bigger and bigger. The amps, the speakers and the speaker cabinets. SPEAKER_01: Yes. Because you know what, those days after that era, I'd gone with one speaker box. People started to make two speakers in a box now, make the box bigger to make it more powerful. SPEAKER_08: This is King Jammy, a legendary sound system operator and music producer. He was still a kid when these first sound systems were raining. SPEAKER_01: So you had most of the big sounds in those days going with double speakers and they start to build bigger amplifiers to drive the speakers more so they get more power. SPEAKER_08: By this point, the meaning of the phrase sound system had also expanded. It wasn't just the equipment. A sound system was also all the people it took to operate it. The owners, the DJs and the engineers. By the early 50s, there were close to a dozen professional top ranking sound system crews in and around Kingston. And these crews, sometimes just called sounds, were locked in a full on technological arms race to see who could build the biggest rig. SPEAKER_07: If you've seen pictures of sound system rigs, you know, the towering walls of speakers, this is where it begins. SPEAKER_08: Guys who were trained in electrical engineering and cabinetry, mixed and matched imported equipment with miscellaneous spare parts, tinkering, soldering, hammering, wiring and rewiring, all in the quest to build amp and speaker units that pumped out sounds so clear and so powerful they crush every other DJ crew in town. In his book on the history of reggae music called Bass Culture, Lloyd Bradley relates a story that he was told about one DJ who was out to pulverize the competition. Yeah, there was some guy, I mean, again, this might be a problem, but it's something that, SPEAKER_10: you know, it's just too entertaining to ignore. SPEAKER_08: As the story goes, a sound technician flew from Jamaica to Miami, and he stopped at a marine equipment dealership, the sort of place that supplies boats with all the things they need for seafaring. After browsing for a bit, he told his eager salesman what was on his shopping list, nautical grade loudspeakers. And he bought a couple of speakers that were used to warn ships in thought, you know, and SPEAKER_10: all he was concerned about was would it take 5,000 watts, which is what he was going to put through it. It was a real big deal, you know. SPEAKER_07: These guys would do anything, go anywhere to get their hands on the biggest and most powerful sound systems. SPEAKER_08: As vital and impressive as the tech was, there was, of course, no sound system without the actual music. Records were the lifeblood of the sound. But while the early sound system operators had reconstructed their equipment to make it their own, virtually none of the actual music was Jamaican. SPEAKER_10: The first sound system dances were R&B, were imported American records because there weren't any records being made in Jamaica. You know, it was easier to have a relative send boxes of records from New York or something. Well, we used to import records. SPEAKER_02: When I say we, I mean the sound system people, you know. SPEAKER_07: Monty Blake is sound system royalty. His dad started Maritone Sound in 1950. Today, Monty operates Maritone, the oldest active sound system in Jamaica. SPEAKER_08: When Monty was a kid, he and his brothers would climb up on their roof with a receiver and an antenna that was big enough to pick up R&B, jazz and blues radio shows in the US. They were listening for songs that they could order by mail, just to feed the family's sound system. SPEAKER_02: We used to tune in at nights, like 12 o'clock at nights when it's clear. And we would pick up, you know, the stations in Nashville. Then we would listen and import the records. So we used to get records from Ernie's and Randy's in Nashville. No, this was before vinyl. Now they were shellac records, 78 RPM, breakable stuff. SPEAKER_08: Jamaicans love this stuff. The music was heavy on bass and drums, and it sounded really good on the sound systems that were growing more and more powerful every day. SPEAKER_04: We used to import a lot of music out of New Orleans, the Louis Jordans, the Roscoe Gardens. SPEAKER_02: Anything by Dave Bartolomew, Smiley Lewis. SPEAKER_04: Oh, Red, what you gonna do? SPEAKER_08: Oh, Red, I'm sick and tired of you. Sound system crews also found other ways to get their hands on the records they needed. Many of them relied on men like Clement Seymour Dodd. As a kid, he'd earned the nickname Coxon after a well-known British cricket player. SPEAKER_07: In the early 1950s, Dodd did some brief stretches as a migrant farm worker in the American South. Those gigs gave him lots of exposure to black dance music and to black dance parties. He saw how lucrative an outdoor jam could be. Dodd would return to Jamaica with boxes of records for sale. He became a lifeline for Kingston soundmen who relied on him for a supply of fresh music. SPEAKER_08: Dodd wasn't the only migrant farm worker doing this, but his involvement in the scene went way beyond just transporting records. He would soon play a decisive role in the shaping of modern Jamaican music. SPEAKER_07: In the 2002 documentary, The Studio One Story by Soul Jazz Records, Dodd describes how in the early 50s he started doing DJ guest spots with one of the biggest sound system operators at the time, a guy named Duke Reed. SPEAKER_11: Duke Reed was a friend of the family. So I had the records, so I used to go around, play them on his sound system so as to see how the dance fan would accept it. On his sound system? SPEAKER_07: On his sound system. SPEAKER_11: What, did he let you try it out or? SPEAKER_11: This was doing a lot for him because I was playing record that he didn't even know. SPEAKER_08: Dodd was a huge music fan. He was very familiar with these records and he knew how to get more from the US. But he didn't really play any instruments himself. He was a trained auto mechanic and carpenter, a left-brain technician with experience building speaker cabinets for other sound system crews. And he realized he had all the skills he needed to start his own sound system. SPEAKER_07: Which he did. He called it Sir Coxon's Downbeat. And Sir Coxon quickly became one of the premier sound men of his era. Known for dropping bebop and blues cuts alongside the more predictable R&B dance tunes. SPEAKER_08: By the mid 50s, Kingston's sound system dance scene was getting very crowded. The guys who ran them came from all different walks of life. Dodd had been a migrant farmer and an auto mechanic. Duke Reed was a former cop known for openly carrying loaded guns at his dance parties. SPEAKER_07: Duke Reed, Coxon, Dodd and other sound men often found themselves spinning right down the block from one another vying for the attention of partygoers looking for the best place to dance. SPEAKER_09: So initially it would be two or more dance hall performances competing in the same neighborhood. And it was who could draw a bigger crowd. And the expression is that all the crowd went to your dance rather than to another. You flopped the dance of the other sound man. SPEAKER_08: It wasn't long before some promoters decided to make things a little more interesting by having sound systems go head to head. Kind of like a battle of the bands. And these became what are now called sound system clashes. SPEAKER_09: Where two sound systems or more would play against each other in a competitive musical battle. SPEAKER_07: At a clash, each sound system would typically get a set amount of time to spend. They'd go back and forth trying to win the crowd's unequivocal love. Early in his career, Coxon, Dodd won clashes against veteran sound men like Duke Reed. These victories were crucial because they helped establish Coxon as one of the best sound system operators in the game. SPEAKER_08: Winning sound clashes and throwing unforgettable dances was bigger than just bragging rights. In just a few short years, the sound system scene had become incredibly lucrative, supporting not just sound crews, but security details, drivers, venue owners, and more. SPEAKER_09: It was bragging rights for the sound system and their supporters, but also economic survival was wrapped up in who was going to eventually win a clash. SPEAKER_07: Fruit and fish hawkers, jerk chicken vendors, all sorts of people who were dependent on this homegrown scene would flock to the gates of the dance. SPEAKER_01: The sound system plays a very important part in a lot of industry. This is King Jammie again. It plays a vital part in people selling things at the dance. It played an important part for the weed man selling weed and a lot of things, you know. SPEAKER_09: So it became a kind of informal economy for people who were chronically underemployed and looking for ways to earn extra money. SPEAKER_07: When it came to staying ahead of the competition, sound system crews could be relentless. At a clash, one crew might even stoop to sabotage, cutting speaker wires or starting fights, just to derail the competition. SPEAKER_08: And there were other ways that DJ crews fought to stay on top. See, lots of Kingstonians relied on sound system parties to hear new music. Most people didn't have record players and Jamaican radio wasn't playing the edgier party tracks they wanted to hear. So if that's the kind of stuff you liked, you had to go to the dance. SPEAKER_07: And that's exactly what Kingstonians did. They headed to sound system parties and looked to the DJs to spin the freshest cuts. SPEAKER_08: And this is why the most precious thing that a sound man could have was a song that was new and that nobody else had. They were known as exclusives. A lot of that music was imported or brought to Jamaica by people like Cox and Dodd. And for most DJs, those records were priceless. The musical side was really about having exclusives. SPEAKER_08: Frank Broughton is the co-author of the book, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, a history of DJing. SPEAKER_12: The sound system guys would go to America to get rhythm and blues records. And it would be all about which exclusive tracks you could get that would really make the crowd go crazy that your opposition didn't have. And they had signature tunes that might be something that might be the only copy on the island. SPEAKER_09: The competition became relentless between the sound systems. They were sending people up to the United States to go on scouting expeditions to find records. And then there was also a lot of detective work to try to sleuth out what your competitors' records were that they were keeping secret. SPEAKER_02: To be exclusive, you used to scratch off the label. SPEAKER_07: Monty Blake, whose father started the Maritone sound system, remembers the extreme measures sound men took just to keep the records super secret. SPEAKER_02: Because those days you had spies. They knew the color. Once they see a yellow and black, they know it's speciality. And they see a red and black, they know it's Atlantic. SPEAKER_08: King Jammie says this practice was pretty common for guys who ran sound systems. They scratch out the name. SPEAKER_01: Nobody really knows who's singing or what's the name of the song. So they play it as an exclusive song. And they'll play it for months, you know, until the other guy finds out who is the singer or what's the name of the song. SPEAKER_07: And after erasing the name of the artist and their record label, sound men would sometimes even rename the now anonymous tune. Then they'd drop the new cut at a party and folks would go nuts. At least that was the dream. SPEAKER_08: This whole process was one of the earliest iterations of a thing that would become really familiar in DJ culture. The one who got all the love for the music wasn't the person who actually created it. It was the DJ. The props were for his skills in reading the crowd, his taste in music, and his access to the best dance cuts. SPEAKER_07: But by the second half of the 1950s, the US to Jamaica pipeline that for years kept the sound system DJ's crates filled with jazz, blues, and R&B records was starting to go dry. And this was about to be a problem for the dancing. Blame it on rock and roll. SPEAKER_11: In America, the rhythm and blues was kind of fading, dying out. Then came the rock and roll. But the rock and roll didn't go over strongly in Jamaica. SPEAKER_08: Rock and roll exploded in the mid 1950s. But with its pushy, whining guitars and no discernible dance beat, West Kingston's party crowd was not feeling it. And as rock and roll became king in the US, soundmen like Dodd found it harder and harder to get their hands on the kind of bottom-heavy jazz and R&B that Jamaicans loved, and that sounded amazing on those giant speakers. Actually, America's running out of this stuff. SPEAKER_10: Tastes were shifting by that point. There wasn't so much Louis Jordan and all of that. SPEAKER_07: At the same time, there was just more sound systems around, and everybody was drawing from this dwindling pool of fresh American R&B. SPEAKER_08: Dodd and others could see the writing on the wall. They poured a lot into their sound system businesses. And it was paying well, but only if you could maintain your competitive edge, which was getting harder and harder to do. They needed recorded music from somewhere that would give their fans the kind of fresh, exciting, bassy dance music that they wanted. SPEAKER_07: And Cox and Dodd became one of the first soundmen to make a decision that was pretty simple on its surface, but would transform Jamaican music. About that time, we realized we had to really make some music of our own to keep the people SPEAKER_11: happy. So we went in the studio now and started recording. SPEAKER_07: Although a lot of artists had migrated out of Kingston, there were still some great musicians around. And Dodd corralled a few of those artists into whatever studios he could rent around the city. SPEAKER_11: We did some rhythm and blues, tried to copy the rhythm and blues with that driving beat. And after a couple of sessions, you see how the people accepted, they felt that, you know, you are then a good track. SPEAKER_07: These sessions were recorded on a plasticky material called acetate. The recordings were not meant to last. Dodd just needed something good enough for a dozen or so spins on his sound system. SPEAKER_08: Dodd wasn't the only producer doing this. Other soundmen started pulling together artists and renting time in one of several studios around Kingston. SPEAKER_10: Sound system owners would hire some musicians to record their own versions of American music. You know, so there's a bunch of early Jamaican recordings, which they call it J.A. Boogie, but essentially it's R&B, jump dive, you know, being recorded in Jamaica with a few Jamaican twists, but not much. Essentially, it was a fairly faithful reproduction of what had been recorded in the US. SPEAKER_08: But things were changing fast for Jamaica as a nation. In the mid 1950s, the British colony hit the gas on a campaign for independence. A real air of national pride was emerging, a faith in Jamaicanness that you could feel everywhere. People wanted to express themselves as Jamaicans and people were far more determined to create SPEAKER_10: their own culture than to import it from America. SPEAKER_07: The musicians and soundmen decided it was time to make something that felt less derivative. SPEAKER_10: They were thinking, well, it's kind of all right, but we've been playing this stuff for ages. We ought to be making something that a bit more of our own, you know, we ought to be putting our own twist on it. SPEAKER_08: One Sunday morning, sometime in the late 50s, Cox and Dodd invited some of the top artists at the time to huddle in the back room of his family's liquor store in Kingston. Cox had a meeting with a bunch of musicians and said, look, we've got to do something, SPEAKER_10: you know. And we all felt quite excited about, oh, at last we can express ourselves a bit. SPEAKER_08: They wanted to add to the music what one of the artists called a Jamaican feeling. For Dodd's powerhouse team of engineers, musicians and producers, that meant futzing with the rhythm structure. Dodd really liked that classic shuffle beat found in American R&B. But the musicians decided to change the emphasis from the first and third beats to the second and fourth beats, what's known as the afterbeat. So from something like this to something like this. SPEAKER_08: At first, they called it upside down R&B. Now, it might seem like a small tweak on the surface, but with this shift to the offbeat, Dodd's team was about to conceive a whole new modern sound in Jamaica. SPEAKER_07: The day after that backroom meeting, they did a song with pianist and singer Theophilus Beckford called Easy Snapping. It's widely regarded as the first recorded song in a genre that would later be called ska, a style that echoes American R&B, but it is clearly its own thing. People talk about Easy Snapping as the first ska song because it inverted the emphasis SPEAKER_10: of the beats. SPEAKER_08: That new ska rhythm made the dancers at sound system parties go totally nuts. They loved it. And songs like Easy Snapping helped make ska immensely popular all over Jamaica. SPEAKER_07: But if you were into this new music, the dance parties were still pretty much the only places to hear it. And when Dodd made those first recordings, he was focused only on supplying music to his sound system, not selling it to the general public. SPEAKER_11: When we started, we didn't have an idea this could be a business. This record was saleable. SPEAKER_10: Up to that point, people were only making records to play on their sound systems. And the uniqueness of a record was what made it important, what its value lay in its uniqueness. If there was even half a dozen copies of it knocking about Kingston, then it wasn't nearly as valuable as if there was only one. So the idea that you could sell records was ridiculous to most soundmen. It just went against everything they saw. You know, why on earth would I want more copies of this out there, you know? SPEAKER_08: But Dodd soon changed his mind about keeping everything exclusive. He'd been hearing buzz about the music that he was making for his downbeat sound system. Folks here and there saying if he did record that stuff and sell it to the public, there was definitely a market. It was so strong, people were saying, don't be trying to make a record of that. SPEAKER_11: I said, you think we'll sell? I said, yeah man. So we'll give it a try. SPEAKER_07: So in 1959, Dodd pressed up copies of Easy Snapping and started selling them. SPEAKER_10: Dodd took it round and was astonished that it actually sold. He was one of the first. SPEAKER_11: And that was the start of the business because then we realized, no, it could be a business because records like that sold a lot. SPEAKER_10: And that's how the industry started with, you know, a couple of guys on motorbikes going around selling these things to jukebox owners. SPEAKER_08: This music, which the soundmen had helped bring to life, marked the beginning of the island's recording industry, born out of the needs of the dance hall. SPEAKER_07: The musical revolution that the sound system had ignited in the 1950s got more intense over the next couple of decades. SPEAKER_08: In 1962, Cox and Dodd brought in some of Jamaica's best sound system engineers, and they helped him build a production hub for the island's music scene. Dodd named it the Jamaica Recording and Publishing Studio. But no one ever called it that. To the many famous artists who would record there, including Lee Perry, the Scatalytes, and the Wailers, it was simply Studio One. SPEAKER_07: Lots of other soundmen followed Dodd's example, opening studios across the capital city. SPEAKER_08: This was the early 60s, and Jamaica had just earned its independence. A strong current of Black cultural pride and even Black nationalism, led mainly by the explosion of the Rastafari faith, was sweeping the island. It became a definitive part of what local artists were recording and now selling. SPEAKER_07: Jamaicans were hearing themselves and their ambitions reflected back to them in their music, and the public could not get enough. It became increasingly about cultural pride, and then ultimately I think about an assertion SPEAKER_09: of a political autonomy over their own cultural forms. And they wanted things that were created at home and that reflected the Jamaican reality. SPEAKER_08: One, two. And then, in the late 1960s, Jamaica hit the world with songs like Do the Reggae by Tutsi Nemetau's, showcasing the island's most definitive sound ever. Reggae grew out of ska and a subsequent style called rocksteady. But reggae quickly surpassed both as the country's single most popular musical form. It was album-oriented, it was radio-friendly. Labels in the U.S. and the U.K. picked it up and packaged it for international markets. SPEAKER_07: And by the time I went to college in Ohio in the early 90s, just about every student in my dorm had a copy of Bob Marley's legend and a poster of him on the wall, as if they were handed out at orientation. Don't worry about a thing. SPEAKER_08: But never listen. The culture that emerged when those first humble sound systems popped up in West Kingston playing American jazz and blues, that same culture had spawned Jamaica's first recording industry. And it led to modern music styles with global reach. SPEAKER_09: Many people think that the Jamaican recording industry grew up and that the sound systems were there to popularize the records. Well, it was actually quite the opposite. The sound system then actually went into the studio to record records so that they could have exclusives for their sound system. So the recording industry was actually a byproduct of the sound systems and not the other way around. SPEAKER_07: The sound systems made Jamaican music an international sound. Coming up after the break, how sound system culture has influenced a lot of other music that we love, from hip hop to reggaeton to EDM. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. 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Since the 1980s, sound system culture has reached way beyond reggae. The innovations of sound men are deep in a lot of the stuff that we listen to now. SPEAKER_08: One of the best examples, dub. Producers invented dub by taking reggae recordings and chopping them up, shuffling instruments, adding sound effects, and then reconstructing everything into entirely new songs. Dub music turned studio engineers into arrangers. They relied heavily on advances in audio technology, especially multitrack recording. And at first, dub was created exclusively for sound systems. SPEAKER_07: Frank Broughton says that dub and the sound system culture that created it had a huge impact on the way that music is made and performed today. SPEAKER_12: It laid down the principles of remixing. It made an artist and a star of the producer. SPEAKER_07: Here's Frank reading a little bit from the book he co-authored, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. SPEAKER_12: It transformed playing records into a live performance, and it showed how music could be propelled into whole new genres by the needs of the dance floor. SPEAKER_08: And even though these kinds of ideas developed independently in other music scenes, Broughton says Jamaica did them first. SPEAKER_07: Sound men were among the first DJs to be seen as celebrities. Behind the sound system turntable, the DJ, maybe more than the artist that they're spinning, becomes the hero. SPEAKER_08: And over the last 50 years, the influence of sound system culture has gone way beyond Jamaica. In New York City, artists with roots in the Caribbean were heavily influenced by Jamaican music trends. Especially this hugely popular part of the sound system scene where Jamaican MCs like Big Youth, Prince Jazbo, and Iroy toasted in patois over instrumental reggae records. In the Bronx, artists like Funky 4 Plus One More picked up mics and rap while DJs spun SPEAKER_08: disco and funk breaks. SPEAKER_07: And then there's England. SPEAKER_12: Sound systems in the UK were really the initial gene pool that created all the dance music that is indigenous to the UK. By 1968, nearly 200,000 Jamaicans had made the post-World War II migration to England. SPEAKER_07: Many brought with them the culture of sound systems, which took deep root in places like Bristol and Birmingham, spawning some legendary DJ crews. SPEAKER_08: British and Jamaican producers continued to make reggae and other music designed especially for those sound systems. Engineers kept building more and more powerful rigs to blow everyone's minds. There's a direct line from UK sound systems to other British music that emerged from the 80s on. SPEAKER_12: The sound system was more than just reggae. It could be this thing that transmitted other musics. And without that, you wouldn't have, you know, the indigenous British dance music like Jungle and Drum and Bass and Garage. It was all from the sound systems. SPEAKER_08: Frank also says that the way sound system engineers, DJs and dub producers have always been willing to play, the way they experiment so freely with sound and technology, all of that has really influenced British dance music. SPEAKER_07: Even little techniques that West Kingston DJs first dreamed up decades ago, some of those are now cliches in electronic dance music. SPEAKER_12: I mean, one of the cheesiest tricks of an EDM record is that you drop the bass line out and there's that expectation that you really want that to come back. So after this long break, it suddenly comes thundering back. And that's fundamental. You know, those sort of things are fundamental to most dance records. And then, you know, that all came from Jamaica. SPEAKER_08: When Herbie Miller, our party chaser from the intro, was growing up in Kingston, he enjoyed seeing the couples at sound system dances move together to the music. He might see a girl he liked, invite her out onto the dance floor and feel how those awesome speakers made the whole place just shake. Herbie's had a long career in music. He was once Peter Tosh's manager. And today he directs and curates the Jamaica Music Museum. And he gets a big old smile when he talks about seeing his country's music go global. SPEAKER_03: Can you imagine when sound systems came into being in Jamaica? Nobody imagined that the world would be a sound system world, regardless of where in the world you end up. SPEAKER_08: But it still kind of blows his mind that so much of it came from this little party scene in the middle of the Caribbean. And that's, you know, that's the damn thing about this little violin, you know, man. SPEAKER_03: How the hell did they come up with this big old box? And you run some music through it and take over the world with it. I cannot answer that question. But as some of my brethren would say, aja's ja. Aja are the works of ja. Aja works. SPEAKER_07: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson, edited by Emmet Fitzgerald, sound mix and additional production by Martine Gonzalez, music by our director of sound, Swan Rial, additional music by our former superstar intern, Keiko Donald, with production help from her sister Kayla Donald. It's so nice to have you back, Keiko. Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Leigh, Loshma Dawn, Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Carter Van Pelt from Coney Island Reggae and VP Music Group for editorial assistance. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and now TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org. Amika is a different type of insurance company. SPEAKER_05: We provide you with something more than auto, home, or life insurance. It's empathy because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year. Amika. Empathy is our best policy. SPEAKER_06: With the McDonald's app, every order gets you closer to free McDonald's. So ordering a Big Mac today could earn you a free Big Mac in your future. Earn free food with the McDonald's app. And participate in McDonald's. SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.