You wait til Droid gets put on a 6 month record shopping ban for inducing Greensleeves Sampler Vol 12 to break its contract with MVE Soho...this toothpaste fiasco and counter accusations are some of the funniest things i've read since chelseas 2 year transfer ban yesterday.
Early nineties cod
What was it around then that had so much reggae based stuff in the charts?
Guess there would have been some spin off from the rave melting pot but it was bigger then the UK. What was crossing over from JA, or was dancehall just popular at the time
Carly's Why was much earlier, though it was big on the balearic and mainstream dance scene round 89/90. That was probably my favourite period for Jamaican music since the 70s – all that Gussie Clarke, 2 Friends stuff. Hard to see where it fits into what was happening in UK clubs though - at least until it kind of crossed over via the US a couple of years later. Stuff like Beats Intl owes more to Soul II Soul/Smith & Mighty.
Stuff like Beats Intl owes more to Soul II Soul/Smith & Mighty.
iv) there's a weird sort of uncanny valley when you hear music that sounds almost but not quite authentic, because your brain goes mental trying to figure out exactly what's not quite right and the whole thing sets your teeth on edge. You don't get this if they just go all over the park and put clear space between them and the original sound eg by mixing reggae elements in with hip hop or prog or highlife or sludgecore or whatever - it might be good or it might be shit, but it doesn't make you twitch in the same way that something almost-but-not-quite authentic does.
Back to the top of the thread, hypothesis:
i) most reggae is made by people who are, and have been for some time, immersed in a common culture, both in terms of growing up in the same broader culture and in terms of currently being deeply and relatively exclusively involved with the same music scene (blah blah obvious exceptions handwave "hardcore scene" Reynolds blah)
ii) music mostly made by people immersed in a common culture tends to develop fairly complex, subtle and unpredictable expectations of what is "right" - it's a lot more complicated than just getting the snare in the right place and the right sort of chord progressions, someone who's got it can break the apparent conventions and still sound "right" while someone who hasn't can follow them and still sound "wrong". And it's easier to notice when someone's doing it wrong than it is to spot what they're doing wrong.
iii) it's extremely hard for people who aren't immersed in that culture to avoid doing stuff subtly wrong
iv) there's a weird sort of uncanny valley when you hear music that sounds almost but not quite authentic, because your brain goes mental trying to figure out exactly what's not quite right and the whole thing sets your teeth on edge. You don't get this if they just go all over the park and put clear space between them and the original sound eg by mixing reggae elements in with hip hop or prog or highlife or sludgecore or whatever - it might be good or it might be shit, but it doesn't make you twitch in the same way that something almost-but-not-quite authentic does.