Leslie Galbraith once owned Galbraith’s Electronics, from 1970 to 1994.

He is, like our living icon of the music industry Hedley Jones, a local pioneer in the electronics, sound system and music recording business. Jones, who is now in his 90s, built a solid-body wooden electric guitar in 1940, many years before the American musician/inventor teamed up with Gibson guitar company to launch the famous ‘Les Paul’ solid-body instrument.

In Marley’s 1964 song It Hurts to be Alone, the guitar solo is by Jamaican great Ernie Ranglin. The synergy in the days when Jamaican music involved people of immense talent saw Bob Marley at the microphone singing, Ernie Ranglin the master guitarist with his hands on Jones’ invention and at the recording console none other than Hedley Jones.

Synergy of this nature was the rule in those days and not the exception like the present times when every bark has a chance to be recorded in a Jamaican studio. Little did Toots and the Maytals know that in the mid-1960s when they recorded Dog War they were scripting a title that would best describe the quality of recorded music in Jamaica 40-plus years later.

Galbraith was the builder of amplifiers for most of the big sound systems which came about in Kingston in the post-World War II years. His story documents the rollicking ride of the sound system in which he was the silent man who gave life to the heavy thump of the bass and the reach of the higher notes to an audience eager to dance.

“There is no mystery to the Jamaican music phenomenon. People loved music; talented people made music; enterprising individuals got the music recorded; and the radio stations and the sound systems took the music to an enthusiastic public. To this day it continues. Somehow, Mr Graham Goodhall made it happen for some early singers and they were able to record a session in studio. A master was produced and a stomper press turned out the first local 78 and 45 discs. Then, of course, the dam broke and a deluge of rocksteady, ska and reggae erupted. Music and the sound systems have been and remain the voice of the Jamaican people,” he said.

Presently, there are many voices and personalities trying to communicate a message. At the top of the pack is the politician who comes alive twice in every decade. He has dreams to sell and bundles of promises to unload. The preacher comes at least once per week, selling us his idea of a Biblical paradise. The talk-show hosts and the newspaper columnists are in it too, pretending they have the power to save the people from the bad guys. Parents try to convince their daughters to remain virgins, at least until they have passed a few CXC subjects. Many are the voices and the frayed edges of those parents trying to transmit a message to their sons that guns and drugs are nowhere to be found on a school timetable.

Then, of course, as we remove the chalk from the cheese we are left with the music DJs, the real masters of communicating a message. Add the power of the politician, the preacher, the media and the parent and it does not amount to 10 per cent of the power of the DJ in communicating a message.

Filth demanded, filth delivered

In the late 1980s I was in a bar off Whitehall Avenue when a ‘song’ recorded by a DJ who was popular then was being played. The DJ was relating his sadness at leaving his humble country home to come to town to seek his fortune.

In the song he spoke about his problems in finding sexual partners. After he had consigned all of the stinking dregs of his still untapped dementia on me the poor listener, his solution at the end was to return to country ‘to mi one-teet granny’ to have sex with her. To make matters worse, when I suggested to the barmaid that I and my friend found the song most offensive, she told us, with a screwed-up face, “Nuff people like it.”

Long before Gully/Gaza gained its infamy, Jamaican DJ music was caught in a downward spiral, even as we were told by a few academics that critics of the genre were doing nothing more than launching class warfare against DJs. The thinking was that those of us who wrote newspaper columns were nothing more than hurry-come-up brats spoiled by too long a stay at the rich man’s table. This was laughable because more than a few of us grew up and went to school in the very geographic areas where the present DJs sprang from.

Our real sins were that we saw times of good music and eagerly absorbed the good music which came out of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Even as we became entranced with the magic of a Della Reese and Sarah Vaughn, we were captivated by Burning Spear, Israel Vibration, Peter Tosh, Bob Andy and Beethoven. As Marley told us in One Drop that he did not ‘want no Devil’s philosophy’ we found time to ‘drop legs’ to Earth, Wind and Fire’s Let’s Groove Tonight and later make love to the strains of anything coming from Donna Summer.

A reader, Sherman Escoffery, sent me a well-written piece on the rise and fall of Jamaican music. His piece focuses on what he sees as the rise of untalented people in the business and the demand by people for delivery of their flawed productions.

In it the fly in the ointment is the DJ. He states:

“Jamaican music has caught up to the politics of country to be a broken wasteland of noise that is filled with incompetent, narcissistic people who have no allegiance or care to anything but themselves. The thing is that everyone wants to act like this just happened: it didn’t. This cancer of noise has been spreading and slowly eating away at our music for over 15 going on to 20 years.”

According to Escoffery, the slide began in the 1990s.

“In the early 90s when a lot of dancehall acts started interacting with American labels, a lot of the producers, musicians, artistes and managers took the money and didn’t invest in quality music but instead short-changed the music. Talk to someone like Sly Dunbar and he will tell you about a lot of so-called reputable producers/musicians who got free work from their peers, with the idea behind such a move being reciprocity. They did not credit a lot of their peers who worked on their initial projects, and those who did were credited as work for hire. A lot of favours weren’t returned for the initial free work and a lot of these so-called reputable musicians/producers, by the second run, delivered substandard results because they could not get any decent musicians to work with them the second time around.

“After that, everybody locked themselves off and did almost every aspect of production by themselves, ending a lot of great collaborations. Reggae music, which could be compared to a game of soccer, was basically turned into a game of tennis by selfish and egotistical musicians-turned-producers who just did not want to pay up front for work-for-hire or share possible earnings with their peers by giving them credit for their free work.

“Some musicians/producers did not even try again, they just took their lot, bailed on the music, and sat back criticising all day. The thing that a lot of people don’t realise is that a lot of great Jamaican producers were not necessarily musicians or singers, but they were people who felt the music, understood the streets and understood the elements of bringing the right people together to create great sounds.

” Some were engineers, sound system operators and even record retailers. Some musicians criticised the Jammys, Germaine, Techniques, Digital B, Music Works because the producers for these labels weren’t musicians for the most part, but these labels consistently put out great music for decades and they weren’t one-hit or one-decade producers, but producers who endured and also ushered in many revolutionary changes in Jamaican music.

Substandard music of the present

“Bobby Digital was initially an engineer by profession but in his role as a producer, he still worked with people like Dean Fraser for harmony and vocal arrangements and individual brothers from the

Brownie family as musicians. Outside Of Clevie Brownie, Bobby Digital has found more success as a producer than the other Brownie brothers and Dean Fraser. The simple fact is that a lot of great music that has come out of Jamaica has been the result of great creative collaborations and not necessarily any one individual, and a part of the downfall has been the selfishness and greed that led a lot of people to isolate themselves so as not to share in the reward that comes from good music, not realising that 100 per cent of crap is still crap.”

I was never a fan of Yellow Man. I have listened to some of his pieces and I find them revolting. But we should also remember that when he responded to the critics and tried to clean up his act, whenever he went ‘conscious’ (whatever that means) his fans were few. He would say, “Unnu want slackness?” and the fans would roar in response.

According to Escoffery, as the professional producers gave way to the pseudo producers, most of the production resulted in crap.

“Just pick up a good reggae album from the 70s to the mid-90s and look at the musicians’ credit and the producers’ credit, then find any album after the mid-90s with the same producers and look at the difference in musicians’ credit and think about the results of both albums.

“I remember a producer telling me in the late 80s that one of the worst things that could happen in the Jamaican music is if DJs rose to the top of the musical ladder. You see, in Jamaican music, the initial order of importance in music was musicians, singers, and then DJs came last.

“After a while the order changed to singers, musicians with DJs still last. I still remember a well-known DJ refusing to sign on to a show because Sanchez was getting paid more than him. Granted Sanchez was selling more records, but that didn’t matter to the DJ.”

Incidentally, the DJ he mentions was the same one who I had mentioned earlier in relation to the bar on Whitehall Avenue. Escoffery further notes: “In the very late 80s to the early 90s the DJs managed to come to the top and the musicians were relegated to last with the singers in the middle.”

DJ’s musical literacy under question

It is no secret that the music industry is a rough business. Much of it involves ‘badmanism’ as desperate youth struggle to gain a foothold inside a studio to gain the acceptance of a well-known producer. Add to it the fact that a star DJ is the toast of his community and the wider constituency of wide-eyed youngsters starved for role models but equally hidden from all other forms of musical expression.

Many times the star DJ is forced to admit into his company youngsters with direct links to guns and criminality. At some stage the badness and the business merge and the result is all too often what is demanded by a brain-dead population: crappy music. In time the whole process from studio recording to producer acceptance to labelling to marketing to release becomes steeped in a crazy mix where the worst crap is produced.

Escoffery continues: “Now the simple fact is that the DJs were the deafest and most musically illiterate of the three. The DJs’ musical illiteracy combined with the loss of competent musical collaboration because of selfishness basically guaranteed the downfall of Jamaican music. We see the results in the lack of quality music and the promotion of noise as music today. These songs are so bad they can’t even make it to the Harbour View roundabout much less to get on a plane to go anywhere outside of Jamaica.

“The pinnacle for these songs is getting played at Passa Passa or being acknowledged in a local tabloid.

“Until we see a return or rise of competent and visionary producers in collaboration with good musicians that will guide the DJs and singers to record music that aspires to getting more than a forward at Passa Passa, Jamaican music will be stuck in the vast wasteland of irrelevant noise.”

I am flattered, but no thanks, John Maxwell

Observer columnist John Maxwell is easily the most competent of the pack of columnists writing in the Jamaican press. Indeed, I feel more than privileged to be writing in the same publication as he does. But I am afraid that he may have the wrong idea about who I am.

In a recent letter to the Gleaner, the columnist, veteran journalist and university lecturer suggested that a forum of opinion leaders should be established. Somehow, according to Maxwell, this forum could begin to have effectiveness in steering this society back to basic decency and acceptable social norms.

Said Maxwell in part, “There could, I suggest, be merit in having a forum of opinion leaders who might lead the charge, and I would presume to call the names of some I recall who have, at some time, or, indeed, currently, addressed this theme in the public media. (Note: I am most familiar with contributors to the columns of The Gleaner) Ian Boyne, the commentator who has most regularly addressed this theme, Esther Tyson, Peter Espeut, Barbara Gloudon, Henley Morgan, Leahcim Semaj, Kevin O’Brien Chang, Al Miller, Franklyn McKnight, Mark Wignall and, of course, Martin Henry, all find a place on my ‘first 11’. These, along with other representation from church leaders, educators, cultural agents and the private sector organisations, could hopefully develop some blueprint for action by the state, the private sector and civic society that will be effective. This will also necessitate paying due attention to the reasons for the failure of the values and attitudes to-have-been campaign of the mid-90s.”

John, I am really flattered, but to the extent that my sojourn as a public commentator since 1993 has provided me with a medium to provoke change in public policy or merely to incite the thought processes of readers, I continue to write in the hope that my pieces educate, inform and entertain.

I am no more than that! Worse, how could I, along with the others you have suggested, goad a people into changing when it seems obvious that significant numbers of them are quite comfortable in their skins? I have no power, no constituency, and no paid gunmen at my beck and call to enforce any dictates which my mind should conjure up. And worst of all, John, why should I believe that my values are better than those espoused by others and thus should be imposed on others?

Politicians were elected to lead, to take us to prosperity and happiness. To do so, they should first harness and develop the human potential. It is obvious that they have failed, but John, allow me to do my bit among those who I come across, either in these pages or live and direct on the streets.

I am what I am. Respect always, John.

observemark@gmail.com