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Ray Hitchins Vibe Merchants: The Sound Creators of Jamaican Popular Music. Farnum, U.K.: Ashgate, 2014. xiv + 240 pp. (Cloth US$ 109.95)
In Vibe Merchants, Ray Hitchins presents a historical and ethnographic analysis of the Jamaican recording studio, tracing the development of Jamaican popular music (jpm) from the perspective of the island's audio engineers and studio musicians. He argues that while Jamaican recordings are often evaluated according to Western production standards, local studio practices and preferences have emerged in response to a uniquely Jamaican set of cultural values and economic conditions, and therefore constitute a distinctive local recording culture in which creativity, spontaneity, and an experimental approach to technology outweigh the more rigid technical conventions associated with Western studio models. In the process, he highlights the often underappreciated contributions of studio engineers to jpm history, challenges several dominant narratives that have come to define that history, and makes a case for further study of the intersections of sound, culture, and technology in popular music production more generally.
In the introduction, Hitchins outlines his main argument and methodology, noting that his thirty-year tenure as a professional musician in Jamaica afforded him broad ethnographic access to the...