Popular Communication and the Postcolonial Zeitgeist: On Reconsidering Roots Reggae and Dub

Abstract

This article is an interpretive examination of roots and dub reggae and the musical genres' development in the 1970s and thereafter. It is comprised of a historical overview and discussion of roots reggae as political and aesthetic communication, and as an unusual communicative form that defied conventional economic, cultural, and national boundaries through a combination of music and commentary that rekindled vital elements of oral culture and tradition missing in most modern print and electronic "mass" communication. A focus on reggae further suggests the ways in which musical recordings are active documents capable of transcending their seeming fixity in space and time, thus confirming a certain social and cultural essence of a period. The article concludes with a discussion of dub, dub artists' affinity with and aural representation of the otherworldly, their preoccupation with phonographic technology, and the similitude of such interests and activities with 19th-century Spiritualists' attempted correspondences with the ethereal.