Juggling sounds and clash tapes

Sound system history is usually told through the clash: two sounds, one crowd, exclusive dubplates and a winner. But most nights are juggling: one selector reading a room for hours and holding it. Both survive mainly on cassette, in tapes recorded at the dance and traded far beyond it.

Two different jobs

Ask what a sound system does and most answers describe a clash: two sounds facing each other across a crowd, trading tunes until one is plainly beaten. It is the dramatic form, and it is the one that gets filmed. But a sound spends far more of its life juggling (one selector, one crowd, four or five hours, no opponent) and the two ask for almost opposite skills.

A clash is an argument you can lose in thirty seconds. A juggling is an act of maintenance: reading who is in the room, noticing when the energy tips, knowing that the tune which would win a clash will empty a floor at one in the morning. The best juggling selectors are judged on a quality with no scoreboard at all: whether the dance was good.

The exclusive

Competition between sounds is as old as the sounds themselves; Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid were cutting one-off acetates in the 1950s precisely so that a rival could not answer them. That practice became the dubplate: a recording made for one sound alone, usually an artist re-voicing a known song with lyrics naming the sound and abusing its opponents.

By the 1980s and 1990s the dubplate was the currency of clash, and building a box of them meant flying to Kingston, booking studio time and paying artists directly. A sound's strength became partly a matter of who would voice for it and how much it could afford. The format is deliberately scarce: the point of a dubplate is that nobody else can play it.

Clash acquired formal structure as it travelled. Rounds are agreed in advance, and formats such as tune for tune and dub for dub restrict what may be played and for how long. Jamaica's Sting festival, running on Boxing Day from the mid-1980s, made confrontation its main attraction. Two separate international titles are often muddled together: the World Sound Clash staged by World Promotion from 1993, whose first edition at Rollers Express in London put Bodyguard from Jamaica against Saxon and Coxsone from Britain and Afrique from the United States (Bodyguard won, and Saxon took it the following year as the first non-Jamaican champion) and the World Clash that Irish & Chin built from 1998, staged largely out of New York, where Japan's Mighty Crown won in 1999 on its first appearance.

The tape

None of this was released by a record company, and almost all of it survives anyway, because somebody put a cassette recorder near the speaker. Dance tapes were duplicated, sold from shops and stalls, posted to relatives abroad and copied again at the other end. A dance in a Kingston lawn could be circulating in Brooklyn or Birmingham within a fortnight.

What the tapes preserve is the part no studio recording contains: the selector talking over the intro, the crowd's reaction deciding whether a tune continues, the rewinds, the dubplates that exist in no other form. For long stretches of dancehall history the cassette is the primary source, and the only one that captures the music as an event rather than a product.

It is also a fragile archive. Tapes were made on cheap stock, played until they stretched, stored in heat and humidity, and labelled by hand or not at all. Collectors and a handful of digitisation projects have rescued portions of it, but the losses are real and continuing, and much of what remains sits in private hands with no catalogue.

What the two modes leave behind

Between them, clash and juggling explain a great deal about how Jamaican music behaves. The clash is why exclusivity has value, why the dubplate industry exists, and why the music rewards a performer who can be devastating in one verse. The juggling is why a selector's taste is treated as authorship, and why a rhythm with fifty versions is an asset rather than a repetition, you need somewhere to go for four hours.

Both have gone global without much dilution. Sounds in Tokyo, Berlin, London and New York clash by the same rules and press dubplates in the same Kingston studios, and the tapes have become files traded through the same informal channels. The technology changed; the two jobs did not.