Hippity-Hop
If tricksters are consumately artists, it stands to reason that they should be found in all areas of artistry. In a text about the rise of the Hip-Hop Generation entitled, Can't Stop Won't Stop, The roots are traced in part to the Jamaican music scene. An anecdote related about a "mistake" (a portal to discovery) struck me as particularly tricksterish in spirit. It is as follows:In 1967, a sound system head affiliated with Duke Reid named Ruddy Redwood stumbled onto Jamaican music's next great innovation. One afternoon Redwood was cutting dubplates when engineer Byron Smith forgot to pan up the vocals on The Paragons' hit, "On the Beach." Redwood took the uncorrected acetate to the dance that night anyway, and mixing between the vocal and the dub, sent the crowd into a frenzy during his midnight set. Rather than apologize for his mistake (emphasis mine) the next day, Redwood emphasized to Reid that the vocal-less riddim could be used as a B-side on the commercial release of the singles...A single band session with a harmony trio could be recycled as a DJ version for a rapper to rock patwa rhymes over, and a dub version in which the mixing engineer himself became the central performer - experimenting with levels, equalization and effects to alter the feel of the riddim, and break free of the constraints of the standard song. Dub's birth was accidental...A space had been pried open for the break, for possibility."
Isn't this the work of the Trickster, to pry open spaces/places of creative potential?
posted by Charity @ 2:31 PM
2 Comments:
This is like what Hyde says in "An Attack of Accidents" about hearing music versus noise. John Cage would be proud.
This also seems very much like the traditional idea of how rock and roll began, especially in the United States (the film "Footloose" is a good example). Musical society became so homogeneous that it practically offered an open invitation to tricksters who could shake up the music scene, as well as the social mores that were tied to it (think Paul Anka or "Moon River" here).
Long live rock.
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