your losing me a bit here droid, your argument a few pages back was that house/techno is all well and good but nothing new has happened for 30 years, but now roots reggae is the avant garde?
not that it isnt all the other things you say
i hear more diversity in house/techno broadly defined over the past 30+ years than in roots/dub/dancehall
i suppose its all to do with our ears and what theyre attuned to, theres plenty of people who'd go to a reggae dance and think it was the same track on loop and others who go to a psytrance party and be in awe of all the wonderful diversity on offer :S
My argument is that the total domination of 4 to the floor at (more or less) the same tempo across multiple genres: house, techno and its derivatives, plus EDM, pop and various global sounds is regressive and stifling.
I kinda shoehorned this in, so apologies if I wasn't clear. When I mention the avant garde in roots and reggae I mean both the sonic quality of the music itself - arguably the first time in human history that we've had this occurrence of incredibly heavy bass led music, often accompanied by deeply intricate and psychedelic rhythm and percussion. On a phenomenological level it is very strange music, especially when played through a soundsystem.
The comparison of diversity is demonstrably false I think. The 70's alone brought at least a dozen or more rhythmic templates in reggae. Dancehall expanded both the timbral and rhythmic palette, and ragga blew the doors off in terms of radical shifts in the use of timbre, harmony and rhythm. The tempo range from (say) 1970 - 2010 in Jamaican music varies from about 60bpm to 150bpm.
Compare this to the lineage of house and techno. Disco probably started out in the low teens, let's say 115bpm, and gradually travelled to the mid 120s to settle about 128-130 in the 90s, and it hasn't shifted since. Techno started at about 130, accelerated during the innovation stage up to as high as 150 but typically sits in the low 140s.
So you have two main strains of genre both with the basically the same drum pattern and both sitting between 128-138bpm - for about 25 years, and another umbrella genre with a range of about 90bpm that features countless variations in rhythm, some of which have even spawned entire genres.