Gavin B.

Be patient with me, I'm not evaluating your music taste, I'm simply giving you my honest opinion about an album you recommended. Music is completely subjective and I've spent my own fair share of defending my own eccentric tastes in music. My wife shares my own love of rare psychedelic garage rock, first wave punk and delta blues but otherwise she hates anything else I put on the turntable. She more of a musical primativist in her tastes and I'm more of musical pluralist who thinks musical genres are simply attempt to use marketing demographics to sell music.

I'm not an expert on hip hop but my appreciation of hip hop dates back to Afrika Bambaata, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Erik B & Rakim and Curtis Blow. I disagree that there is an abundance of exciting music in hip hop, reggae or any other genre of contemporary music. For me the release of Blowout Comb by Digable Planets in 1994 was hip hop's finest moment but that album tanked because everyone was too busy listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and gangsta rap.

My disagreement with you on the artistic value of Chant Down Babylon has more to do with my own involvement in reggae music. I played in a successful reggae band in Boston, gigged as reggae sound system operator and still do a reggae and dub oriented radio show. As a result I have some pretty stong opinions about social and cultural significance of reggae music.

Most of the current "reggae music" isn't technically reggae because the one drop, skank tempo of the music which made reggae music so distinctive, has largely abandonned for a gunned up sleng teng tempo that's closer to calypso or socca. The difference of the newer uptempo reggae is as different as ska, bluebeat, and rock steady were different from the tempo of reggae music.


I became aquainted with reggae because I grew up in St. Ann's Parish Jamaica at height of the 1976-1982 roots reggae explosion and there's nothing as musically significant going on in Jamaica today. Anthony B. is the best of the current crop reggae artists and he not an artist of the same caliber as his predecessors like Burning Spear, Marley, Tosh, Joesph Hill, Gregory Isaacs, the Roots Radics, Big Youth, U-Roy, Sugar Minott or Lee Perry.

It's rare for me to walk into a music store or shop on the internet and find an album, EP or single I'm really looking for. Especially now that most music retailers have devoted most of the inventory space to album titles that sell fast. I doubt if many storefront music retailers will survive the next five years. The reggae music intentory at my local collector's music store, Vintage Vinyl is down to mostly Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, some best selling reggae anthologies ([like The Harder They Come), the ubiquitous Shaggy and UB 40 (which is not really a reggae group any more than the Beat or the Specials were reggae groups). Perhaps British music retailers carry more of a reggae inventory but I usually end up purchasing from a friend of mine that runs a small storefront reggae specialty shop in Brooklyn.

I subscribed to I-Tunes for over a year and found their inventory of music was completely market driven and found very little music that I hadn't already heard or worth more than 2 or 3 listenings. I subscribe to Altnet music service which has extensive selections from Atlantic, Warner, Sony-BMG, Geffen, EMI, Universal and Interscope music catalogues. I'm surprised at the number of out of issue, rare and esoteric titles Altnet carries along with most new releases by first, second and third tier artists. It's $19.95 a month for unlimited downloads so instead of spending $19.95 for a single album that sucks and can download thousands of tunes and albums a month for the same price.

So we disagree about the abundance of good music as well since I believe you have to dig through a lot of dirt to find an occasional musical gem. I think most of the current innovations in contempory music are taking place in roots music (No Depression), the revitalized soul music scene, and dub. Some of the better pop oriented indy bands like Throw Me the Statute, M83, the Dodos, the Minature Tigers, City and Color, Devochka, Fleet Foxes and Koushik are opening up musical space that is new to most rock music fans.

Thanks for taking time to respond to my other post. I hope you won't it against me that we have a difference in taste on the Chant Down Babylon album. It's fair to say we probably agree on far more things musically than we disgree on.

I'm curious if you've explored the wide array of music that is the foundation of reggae music, like Culture, the Heptones, the Morwells, the Mediations, the Mighty Diamonds, Dennis Brown, U-Roy, Big Youth, Gregory Issacs, the Congos, the Upsetters and Ras Michael?