Contents - Beth Lesser

How Cassettes Spread
Dancehall
T echnology has always been the invisible hand shaping the development of
Jamaican popular music. When Jamaicans see something new, they take
it and find a use for it that involves music. One of the first uses made of the
individual boom boxes with recording capability, was to carry them inside the
dancehall and tape the session. A cassette, although not cheap in Jamaica, still
beat buying 90 minutes worth of 45s. But, more importantly, one could record
the kind of music one wanted, the kind of music that never made it to the airwaves
- the live deejays chanting over the raw rub-a-dub rhythms.
The practice of recording live sessions started in the ‘70s but took off and
spread rapidly in the ‘80s. With easier travel and more goods coming into the
country, people were able to acquire different types of recording decks – boom
box to Walkman – and soon dance cassettes were competing with records for
the attention of hard-core reggae music fans.
The earliest cassettes, from the ‘70s, were largely recorded ‘open air’, recorded
from the spot the tape recorder was placed, through either the internal
microphone or an auxiliary microphone that plugged into the deck. The giant
boom boxes, or ‘ghetto blasters’, were carried into the dance and left resting
by the owner’s feet as he took in the proceedings. Tapers would move around
the dance to find the sound “sweet spot” and when the vibes were right, the
owner popped in a cassette and 90 minutes later he had his ‘field recording’
of the dance. These recordings were usually such bad quality as to be almost
inaudible. Nothing can be distinguished apart from the prominent, pounding
bass. The deejay sounded like he was down a deep well. But you could still feel
the rhythm of his vocals. And the vibes came through clean and clear.
For this reason, Brigadier Jerry was a great exponent of internal mic taping
(as opposed to taping from a direct feed), feeling it rendered a more authentic
experience of the session. “When you listen them tape now, you can hear some
weird noise ina them. Cause in those tapes, you get the real thing. You can
hear the peanut man. You can hear, ‘Peanuts!’ You hear some man a bawl out,
‘Bwoy them deejay a wicked, nuh…blah blah blah…’ It give you the real vibes
of the dance.” Usually, only the owner and the top sound personnel could
patch their decks directly into the amp to get a clean recording. On Jah Love,
for example, according to Brigi, “Nobody never plug [their deck] into the
amp those days. Only the sound man could do that because them no allow
nobody to run nothing through the amp. Just like Belcher and Mickey and
166 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall