ABSTRACT
Reggae and other Caribbean sounds were not the only types of music available to young black Britons. Quite apart from Western classical music, pop, rock and so on, there was an enormous amount of black music to listen to. In the 1940s there had been blues, swing and bebop jazz. In the 1950s there had been hard bop, cool jazz and r&b. In the 1960s there was free form jazz and soul. And gospel, like the Church itself, was always there to be turned back to when people needed inspiration and support. By the 1970s and 1980s the record buyer faced an even wider choice. First there was a growing interest in the black musical heritage, so people were going back to all this earlier music. Then there was funk, African pop and jazz, West African HiLife, all kinds of Latininfluenced pop and salsa. And by now completely new types of music were available too-jazz-funk, hip hop, rap, duck rock, pop based on the African Burundi beat. The choice was overwhelming. Some of these musics had been created by mixing together sounds and rhythms from different sources. When music from two or more sources is so completely blended that a new sound is created it is sometimes called fusion music. Jazz-funk is a good example of a fusion sound. In other cases, the different sounds are all jumbled up together but can still be traced back directly to their sources. Hip hop is a good example of
this second type of music. In hip hop the hard funk beat stays the same throughout but the dj mixes in snatches of sound from other records. A hip hop record can contain recognisable snatches of hard rock, electro funk, salsa, soul, new wave, jazz, and so on. In fact a hip hop dj can pull in any sound, from a recording of a car screeching round a corner or a television news broadcast to Frank Sinatra singing My Way. It can all be added to the mix. What we get at the end of all this cutting and mixing is a kind of mosaic effect. Just as in a mosaic the overall pattern is made by placing little bits of differently coloured stone together, so hip hop is made by splicing together fragments of sound from quite different sources and traditions. And just as you can see the joins between the stones in a mosaic if you stand close enough, so you can hear the breaks and joins between the different sounds on a hip hop record if you listen carefully. In the next chapter, we shall return to hip hop and the relationship between this kind of music and the new British reggae.
