We can agree to disagree on some of this. I agree on some of it.
I never said they stole it brother. I said it had influenced it. I was never in the Bronx but I was at Sound System dances in Bed Stuy in the 1976-77 time frame and there was no one else doing anything like that anywhere. I also never implied that it was Reggae that influenced, other than that was the music that was playing in the sound systems. I said Black Americans took what they saw and heard the Jamaicans doing and made their own thing out of it. I stand by that.
As for toasting, we called it DJing too, whereas in hip hop that is the person who spins the discs. In Sound System he’s called The Selector.
But Jamaicans were “ toasting” way back in the late 60’s.
This is from 1970, U Roy toasting over a Paragons ryddim
I’m not going to battle with you over this.
You can Google all you want, but I lived it. I was at Madison Sq Garden when Bob Marley and Curtis Blow opened for the Commodores, and I was with them a week later when he played his last show in Pittsburgh and I was there when they got word the tour was cancelled due to him taking sick.
I’m also the only American who ever produced an album with Bob Marley’s band while he was still living.
I just have to ask you a couple of things though. Why did you focus on an almost throwaway remark I made, mostly to support my contention that twerking, as we know it, started in Dancehalls in Jamaica in the early 80’s. It’s something I saw with my own eyes, but nothing else that was said, caught your attention?
Also, I don’t understand why you have to make this stuff so personal with me. To my knowledge I’ve never had any conflicts with you in the past. You did the same thing in the Tony Boselli- Bruce Smith thread, even though plenty of other people were saying the same thing I did.
We agree on a lot of stuff. No one was more supportive of the young ladies in this thread than I was. Yet you see stuff like people saying it was “ affirmative action for black chicks” or “ a Marxist plot to further segregate”campus” or whatever. Crickets.
Instead you do 9000 characters on Herc and Coxsone, lol.
I just don’t get it. We can disagree without being disrespectful or insulting.
FYI, most of my opinion about the topic is based on those experiences I had in Brooklyn.
I only heard the Cool Herc stuff when he was on an episode of Anthony Bourdain and he certainly didn’t refute AB’s contention that his experiences growing up in Kingston and hearing sound systems shaped his approach to creating music when he grew up.
Not sure if you’ve ever been to Jamaica, but you don’t need to be inside a Sound Sytem dance to know what it’s like. It can turn your body into a tuning fork from blocks away.
