Contents - Beth Lesser

Raining’ by The Three Tops, and ‘Queen Majesty’ by The Techniques.
As Jojo was a businessman first (or as he prefers to be known, a ‘hustler’),
and a music lover second, he admitted, “The problem is really that, we just
have to follow the trend to make money. If someone is doing a thing and it
doing good, everybody seems to jump on that bandwagon. If everybody could
do them own thing, the music would be really better.”
Dwight Pinkney, who as a member of Roots Radics was busy recording
lick-over rhythms in the ‘80s, felt it was unfair to always blame the producers
for using the same rhythms over and over. The artist’s had an equal share in
creating the problem by demanding the same overworked rhythms to sing or
deejay on when they came to the studio to record. The artists would come up
with new lyrics in the dance, performing over the versions of popular records.
Once, in the studio, the artist would request that same rhythm because it
matched his lyrics and he had been rehearsing the song over that track. *
Jah life recalled that Junjo, at the height of his success and popularity as a
producer, still had many unreleased rhythms that were “wicked”. But Junjo
was afraid to release fresh rhythms that people weren’t familiar with. The
tried and true were sure to sell a certain portion. So, Junjo kept reworking the
big sellers. For example, Junjo found gold with his ‘Mad, Mad’ rhythm and
used it over and over, creating hits like Smiley and Michigan’s ‘Diseases’, Josie
Wales’ ‘Leggo Mi Hand’, Yellowman’s ‘Zuggazuggazuggazengzengzeng’ and
Cocoa Tea’s ‘I Have Lost My Sonia’.
“When you are in the studio, really, and you have a good rhythm”, Jojo
Hookim explained, “everybody want to go on it. And what usually happen.
If you come out with it on a disco or on a 45, as a good rhythm, you find that
10 producer or 20 producer make over the rhythms. So we usually say, better
we kill the rhythm, and done! So, if somebody version it again, it probably
don’t make sense.”
One of the ways Jojo came up with for maxing out a popular rhythm was
to voice an entire album over the one backing track. As before, Jojo didn’t
invent the idea, but he exploited it, and it soon became a competitive album
format. The first LP of the type had been the Rupee Edwards’ Conversation
Stylee, a compilation of versions of the popular Slim Smith song, ‘My Conversation’.
The LP featured the same backing track played over by Joe White
or voiced by The Heptones and Shorty the President (including his tracks,
‘Yamaha Skank’ and ‘President Mash Up the Resident’).
As it became more acceptable, and even expected, to see multiple vocal and
instrumental versions of the same rhythm track, the one-rhythm LP became
the obvious solution to the problem of what to with all the 45s by a artists
with whom the producer didn’t have enough tracks to fill a solo LP.
* The musicians, who were relying so heavily on the older rhythms, were not the classically trained
Alpha School Boys who created Ska. Most of the new generation where self taught and lacked the
sophisticated musical knowledge possessed by the previous generation of musicians.
254 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall