A New Chapter of Dub: Tracing the Technological and Conceptual Influences of Jamaican Musicians and Producers on British Popular Music and Society

Academic literature on Jamaican popular music has highlighted its vital connection with Caribbean emigrant communities to the UK and with the British pop music industry more generally. While the British reggae scene has been the subject of much inquiry, the influence of Jamaican practitioners on British popular music has received less attention. Despite being originally confined to spaces that were racialised, marginalised and often constructed as criminal, Jamaican musicians have made it to the top of the British charts and have left a deep imprint on musical practices in the UK. This article focuses on technological innovations brought about by Jamaican musicians, producers and engineers over the last decades, analysing their aesthetic and political implications on music-making processes in the British underground scenes and mainstream music industry.Practices such as sound system parties, versioning or dubbing, and deejaying have profoundly altered the production, circulation and reception of popular music worldwide, and more specifically in the UK where they were directly imported by Jamaican immigrants. This has notably led to the proliferation of hybrid styles, from the two-tone and ska-punk scenes to the free party movement and digital genres such as jungle, drum and bass or grime. Mainstream British artists from the Beatles to Amy Winehouse have also quoted Jamaican musical idioms more or less extensively and explicitly, to the extent that British pop music can be said to have undergone a process of creolisation. But beyond these stylistic borrowings, Jamaican practitioners have contributed to changing the very fabric of British popular music and the way it is consumed and conceptualised, creolising not only its stylistic content but also the very materials and operations through which it is produced.