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MICHAEL VEAL. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 338 pp. Recommended listening appendix, notes, bibliography, index of songs and recordings, index of general subjects.
Michael Veal's Dub is an informative and welcome contribution to the reggae literature, to studies of Caribbean, Afrodiasporic, and (Afro-) American music and culture more generally, and to the growing field of writings concerned with recording technologies and the social as well as musical dynamics of recording studios (Meintjes 2003, Katz 2004, Green and Porcello 2005). Dub is a multifarious phenomenon: a substyle of reggae; a process and set of procedures for working with musical materials; a network of concepts about authorship, community, and the inner and outer reaches of musical experience and memory. Accordingly, Veal situates dub in deep, rich context, explaining its significance for Jamaican society and Jamaican music and making a strong (if familiar) argument for dub's impact on music production the world over, in popular and experimental spheres alike. In the process, Veal articulates dub's symbolic connections to such notions as diaspora and modernity, engaging with the discourses of Afro-futurism and the post-human as well as with postcolonial studies and the emerging literature concerned with sonic or audio culture (Sterne 2002, Bull and Back 2003).
Veal's attention to both sonic and social matters - and, in particular, their intersections - makes Dub an especially important and distinctive addition to extant writings on reggae, which too often focus on biographical details and record-collector minutiae at the expense of historically and culturally grounded musical-technical exegesis. Although a smattering of articles and chapter-length treatments of dub can be found across the disparate reggae (and electronic music) literature, Veal's study is the first extended work to approach what he calls the "sonic, procedural, and conceptual aspects" of dub in substantial depth. One way that Veal gets at the myriad intersections of the sonic and the social is through the term "soundscape," originally coined by Canadian composer, theorist, and environmentalist Murray Schäfer to describe the sonic profiles or acoustical environments of the physical spaces we inhabit (see, e.g., Schäfer 1977). In what seems like a useful if, to my knowledge, unprecedented (and ultimately confusing) application of Schafer's term, Veal often uses soundscape as...