That latter disc aside, The Best of Studio One Collection boasts some of the best music in reggae’s developmental period. Heartbeat’s new four-disc The Best of Studio One Collection box set collects those three compilations, newly remastered and appended with previously unreleased tracks, and adds a fourth disc, Rebel Discomixes, an admittedly slight and inessential volume of six extended remixes.
#Real rock riddim stems full
The legacy of Studio One and Dodd has been canonized over the years by Rounder Records’ Heartbeat imprint, including three “best of” volumes - The Best of Studio One, Full Up: More Hits from Studio One, and Downbeat the Ruler: Killer Instrumentals from Studio One - that serve as introductions to well-known and obscure sides alike. Many of reggae’s major figures (Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown) were discovered and/or produced by Dodd, while others (producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, for one) were shown the ropes while under his watch. Like the hallowed connection between rock ‘n’ roll and Phillips, contemporary Jamaican music stems from Dodd’s detail-oriented cultivation of not only a genre, but an entire culture. Studio One has been called the “Motown of Jamaica”, but Dodd was more like Sun Records’ Sam Phillips than Motown’s Berry Gordy. This music, built on a strapping skeleton of adamant bass lines, puckered guitar upstrokes, and to-the-point rimshots, continues to sound like it should have been produced in a community of hammocks or under heavy hypnosis. A track like Soul Agent and the Soul Defenders’ “Popcorn Reggae”, for instance, is the exact opposite of James Brown’s “Mother Popcorn” their executions of the same titular image couldn’t have employed more noticeable discrepancies of pace and stress, even if the former learned of rhythm hounding from the latter.
Though Dodd helped create the template for reggae out of his love for American R&B - which he imported to Jamaica while working as a DJ and sound system operator - he drained his product of all urgency and agitation, instead favoring post-fever moodswings and groove-laden comedowns. Perhaps, more significantly, this music was never marked with “newness” - its natural, patient sound is something that had always existed, a manifestation of human movement extracted at last, not an unknown thing that had to be learned over time. These days, it’s impossible to identify mid-tempo Jamaican archetypes as radical or fresh, because they are just that: archetypes permanently embedded in the consciousness of popular music and culture. What remains so astonishing about the ska and rocksteady music made at Clement Seymour “Sir Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One in the ’60s and ’70s isn’t its innovation, but rather its effortlessness.
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