Sleng Teng & the Globalization of Music
An editorial by Gavin B.
The rise of King Jammy's sleng teng riddim ended the 12 year rule of the one drop riddim in the dancehalls with the digital (or digi) riddim. Reggae mutated into another subgenre under the amophous umbrella of "worldbeat" music which blended elements of hip hop,international, socca, reggae and even synth pop.
Sometimes in our haste to move on to the next big thing, we forget about what was really great about the last big thing. Such is the case with the rise of the sleng teng riddim craze in Jamaica which all but pushed roots reggae out of the picture in the mid Eighties.
Digi riddims refer to riddims created around the time that Jamaican producers began to use the drum machine and the ubiquitous Casio synthesizer. Three major digi riddims, sleng teng, ragga (or raggamuffin) and raggaeton began to displace Carelton Barrett's organic one drop to the snare riddim he developed with the Upsetters.
The song that began this mind numbing synthesizer dance craze was Wayne Smith's 1986 smash hit
Sleng Teng Riddim. It's not rastaman, nor roots reggae... it's souless dance music for the Attention Deficit Disordered.
It's hard to believe that such an inane dance ditty would bring down the entire roots reggae musical idiom....But nobody looked back after the rise of the sleng teng & critics were all too quick to pronounce roots reggae dead on arrival. The next big thing had arrived, and even if it was lame, reggae music was the last big thing and therefore obsolete.
Producers, instead of performers, became front and center with the rise of digi riddims and skilled musicians playing old school roots reggae became irrelevant to both the production of and the performance of music. It was far cheaper to produce an album using canned soundboard riddims rather than having to hire an entire band of backup musicians to play in a recording session. And guess what?...Music producers got a much bigger cut of the royalties by eliminating the need for session players.
In the early Nineties the major American and British record labels were all too happy to drop roots reggae artists from their labels. In the late Seventies, the major labels saw reggae music as the latest gold mine but by the late Eighties record company executives were disappointed by the sales of reggae music. As it turned out, only Bob Marley & Peter Tosh sold millions of records worldwide, while other reggae artists were lucky to sell 100,000 units of their latest albums. 100,000 units is a respectable sales figure, but not good enough in a world where Michael Jackson & Whitney Houston were selling 30 million units of their latest album product.
Sometimes we forget that the production of music is driven by the all mighty corporate dollar...And we're deluding ourselves if we think that music is a special force of nature that transcends the even more powerful force of global capitalism. It's all about the money, honey...Musical generosity and artistic integrity was over with when Woody Guthrie died in a New Jersey hospital with Huntington's disease. John Lydon was right, it's all a big corporate swindle.
I don't like the post-reggae era (from 1986 and beyond) any more than I like music from the post-rock era. Nearly all of the real authentic roots genres of popular music have devolved into digitized parodies of the real thing. Even electronica and dub music have become subgenres of "dance music" in the music marketing nomenclature.
The end result is the globalization of all music. All genres of music are beginning to sound like they were produced using the same banal mass produced template. Pop music sounds like pop music, ethnic music sounds like pop music, rock sounds like pop music, rap music sounds like pop music, blues sounds like pop music and even country music sound like pop music.
We're all heading to toward the inevitable day when all music sounds like it's come off the same slick factory production line and all of those outlying fringe subgeneres will be consumed by globalization just as roots reggae was.
There's still the remote possibility that the music consumer might rise up demand real authentic music instead of crappy pop digitized dance music. The jury is still out, but the future of music looks pretty grim from where I'm standing.