ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, Melody Maker, along with the New Musical Express and Sounds, was one of Britain’s three main rock-oriented weekly music magazines. Addressing a mainstream audience, rock critic Richard Williams presents an overview in this 1976 article of one of reggae’s most influential offshoots: dub. As he describes, the placement of dub remixes on the B-sides of reggae singles allowed producers like Lee “Scratch” Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry, 1936) and King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock, 1941-1989) to assert themselves through the mixing board as active “composers,” reimagining a familiar song in a new, surprising way. Williams proposes that dub may also be understood as an “aesthetic,” one that could have a broader application and influence the direction of future musical styles. Since its emergence in the 1970s, dub has indeed expanded well beyond its specific associations with reggae music. It has become, in short, a familiar technique, where one isolates vocals and instrumental layers in the mix, shifting them in and out of the texture, or even “shrouding them in echo.” Nowhere is dub’s legacy outside of reggae more apparent than in rap and hip-hop, where producers have completely absorbed the essence of dub’s studio manipulations and tricks.
