Danny writes:

“Read your piece on your blog with interest re. roots reggae. I think the guy from Agony Shorthand is onto something to a degree, though I’d never dismiss 70’s roots as irrelevant. Part of this comes out of my own tastes, part comes from things you can document. […]

A lot of old white skins and ska fans will say they moved away from reggae when it got more rasta/black conscious, think it lost a lot of white working class fans fer sure. In terms of my own tastes when I started listening to reggae, I liked the blood and thunder of steppers stuff, but later on I began to appreciate the vocal cuts and arrangements of rocksteady groups like The Heptones, Techniques etc. I think I was kind of primed for this by being into soul heavily a few years earlier.

A lot of roots fans strike me that they don’t appreciate this stuff as they never had these kind of tastes. Reminds me of my mates who were into house music who never liked garage because they’d been grown up on guitar stuff and punk wock. The classic verification of this is if you listen to any of the older electronic music off the continent – Front 242 and stuff like that. Never been near black music.”

And, as ever, I unashamedly bow down to his superior experience and knowledge in the area. But that doesn’t let Mr Agony off, oh no. I have no problem with people preferring Rocksteady to Roots – that can often be a preference which people who are deep into the music develop.

I think what annoyed me was the outright dismissal of roots and the objections to the relevance of class, something which Danny quite rightly reintroduces to the equation. There’s a lot to be written about this, and needless to say I’m not going to magically stump up 5000 words on the topic off the top of my head.

In a follow up email Danny pointed out that in some ways, roots is still relevant because there are still people making it and playing it out on soundsystems, whereas rocksteady is more of a retro collectors thing (not that there is anything wrong with that either because the music is amazing and should be heard).

Bizarre rant over at Agony Shorthand about reggae.

It seems to me that getting into dub and the more instrumental side of reggae is a common route for people who have previously been into punk or experimental music. But people often then move on to being interested primarily in the artists – the singers and players of instruments. This has been my experience and it’s something which seems to be shared with people who become reggae obsessives.

My guess is that this is partly because it’s easier to categorise (and therefore map) the vastness of reggae by holding onto a few names like Lee Perry, King Tubby, Coxsone etc rather than try to pick out the literally thousands of names which have ever been on the other side of the studio glass.

But, to dismiss the lyrical content of 70s roots as “the stuff they were prattling on about (Jah, weed, mystical Rastafarianism) was so goddamn bothersome and alien to the lives of so many non-Jamaican reggae listeners” seems unusually bigotted.

The music and lyrical content all emerged out of the experiences of people living in Jamaica in the 1970s, but you would have to be almost superhumanly retarded to not find value there if you live, oh I dunno, in Hackney in 2003.

And by this I don’t mean that everyone should embrace rastafarianism as a way of life – to me that is precisely missing the point of some of the more universalist aspects of reggae lyrics.

In fact, the removal of the lyrics from the equation makes me somewhat uneasy. It’s almost like people are saying “oh well of course it’s great to hear the music that those Jamaican chappies are making, I simply love to bounce about to their funky bass lines and ting. But you wouldn’t want to listen to what they have to say about the world”.

You ignore the message at your peril – there is far more there than a bit of creativity with bass and reverb.

Dig deeper.