I can still remember hearing the sound of dub for the first time in 1980 on the Clash's Sandinista. It was a gateway drug that led me straight to Linton Kwesi Johnson's Forces of Victory and Dennis Bovell's Brain Damage. And then, of course, I recognized how much its sound had influenced everyone from Culture Club to the Police, all of whom had been soaking in the work of reggae geniuses like King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry through the 70's. Dub was a reggae beat slowed down and opened up with reverb and echo. It was a musical rebuke to Margaret Thatcher.
But who would have thought that more than three decades later this beat would animate Wellington, New Zealand's Fat Freddy's Drop, a self-described "seven headed soul monster"? Their Blackbird is a a gumbo of soulful horns, organ, and swampy rhythm guitar that could have easily have been Sly Stone's follow-up to Fresh (if he had gone to Kingston and gotten his shit together).
So forget that it's from way down down under and sample Fat Freddy's Drop and their "Blackbird." Time to get wise.
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