EVERY.TING’S.GONE.DIGITAL
THE
DEATH
of
THE
7.inch!!!
January 26th, 2008
Reggae’s already had one digital revolution. On the night of February 23, 1985, at a packed venue on Waltham Park Road in Kingston, Jamaica, the producer Lloyd “Prince Jammy” James used a soundclash against the Black Scorpio Sound System to unleash the song that changed Jamaican music forever. Wayne Smith’s Under Mi Sleng Teng was based on a stripped-down Casio keyboard loop, with a thunderous computerised bassline. It was the first wholly electronic reggae recording, and its distinctive rhythm marked the birth of the style that came to be known as dancehall.
Now Jamaican music is in the midst of a second, further-reaching technological revolution. This time it’s not how reggae sounds that’s being turned inside out, but how it’s being consumed. In a strange anachronism, reggae has long offered groundbreaking music - its experimental impulses explored through roots, dancehall and dub - but for the past two decades that music has been dependent for exposure on what, in most of the rest of the world, is considered the preserve of collectors only: the seven-inch single. For years Jamaica has been the world’s most prolific manufacturer of vinyl, with antiquated pressing plants working full tilt to keep up with the warp-speed productivity of Kingston’s studio system. However, over the past year fans have noticed a startling drop in the availability of new music on hard-copy formats.
“The reduction in vinyl production in the West Indies has dramatically affected the way I access music,” explains the legendary DJ - or selector - David Rodigan, host of the weekly Rodigan’s Reggae show on London’s Kiss 100 FM. “In a nutshell, vinyl has been eliminated by the people who play the music to the public. The key players - and by that I mean the sound system selectors that people go to see every weekend, who can make or break a song - are no longer dealing with it in any shape or form and have all switched to CD. Now if someone wants to send me a song, they just email it to me as an MP3. This process has been gradual, but it’s now absolute.”
The slump in vinyl releases actually turns out to be more or less irrelevant to the industry’s health on home turf. As Rodigan says: “The domestic Jamaican market for singles has been negligible for quite some time. Turntables are no longer available there and the home audience buys sound system mixtapes and DVDs of live shows and dances instead. Then there’s the matter of piracy, meaning that people can now purchase burned CDRs of new music on the streets at a fraction of the price that legitimate releases would command. It’s a reflection of the economic realities in Jamaica that the emotional motivations of overseas collectors have for years propped up vinyl manufacture. Particularly in Europe, people still want to own reggae in that form because it helps them connect to the music’s original roots and culture. Now that’s coming to an end, though.”
A better gauge of the health of reggae, however, is the demise of another phenomenon specific to Jamaican music. After recording a new backing track, reggae producers have traditionally asked several different singers to record their own vocal interpretations of the tune - so each could be released, and the producer would be able to make as much money as possible out of each studio session. That process, known as “voicing”, was then followed by each version being released as a separate single. The more popular the instrumental proved, the more songs were cut. With each new production averaging around 20 different versions, labels such as London’s Greensleeves and New York’s VP Records began to collect these songs on individual “riddim albums”, a signature format that became pivotal to reggae’s international infrastructure - until now!
Dan Kuster, Greensleeves’ head of A&R, says things are changing fast. “We’ve scaled back our release of dancehall riddim albums because they don’t sell any more,” he says. “Reggae is in a period of transition and the way people consume music has undergone huge shifts lately. It used to be that producers cut test pressings of new music to give to sound systems and radio DJs, then, if the songs received a good reaction, they’d be released as proper singles. Now, with everyone playing from CD, it’s much easier and quicker for people to burn a copy of their work and pass it directly to the guy they want to play it.
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