Bass Culture

Bradley has been a music journalist for 20 years. In this comprehensive social history of reggae, he uses his deep love and knowledge of the music to argue that reggae was the cultural protest movement of a black underclass, whose roots were in Africa, slavery and colonialism but who were disillusioned by the results of Jamaican independence. This may be news to people who think reggae begins and ends with Bob Marley. In fact, Bradley argues that Marley's best-known music was more influential outside Jamaica. Bradley traces reggae from its 1950s roots in sound systems. He discusses R&B, ska, rocksteady and the influence of Rasta, then shows reggae's full flowering in the 1970s and its massive influence on British pop music. He has interviewed the most influential singers, players and producers in Jamaica and the UK and quotes from them extensivley as a form of oral history. Throughout, he locates reggae in its cultural, social, political and economic contexts, always returning to the experience of the Jamaican dispossessed, the 'sufferahs'. Why 'bass culture'? Not just because of Linton Kwesi Johnson's poem of the same name or because reggae is a bass-led music, but also because, in sound systems, the reggae bass is so prominent you feel it physically vibrate through you, making the music part of a total cultural experience. Bradley shows how, despite its misadventures in the world of global pop music, reggae always returns for refreshment to its spiritual and cultural roots. This is no lightweight pop music book, but a serious work of cultural reclamation, reminiscent at times of E P Thomson, which shows how, in reggae, black Jamaicans created their own cultural form. Although it has no discography, my advice would be: if you have the slightest interest in reggae, read this book! (Kirkus UK)