Post #90675 by DaneTiki on Tue, May 11, 2004 4:04 PM

This is very, very sad news. Coxsone Dodd's contribution to music (and not just bluebeat, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dancehall and dub) was massive. Without Dodd and the also sadly deceased Duke Reid and Leslie Kong, it's unlikely that we would be listening to anything like what's available to us today. We shouldn't forget that the soundsystems run by Carribean people living in New York in the 1970s played a major role in the birth of hip-hop. Not only that, but punk rock had some of its origins in reggae too, through its influence on people like Johnny Rotten and the Clash. Of course, the specific sounds of Jamaican music have also been appropriated by other musicians around the world, from the U.S. and Canada to England to South Africa to India.

Certainly, the rough-and-tumble world of Jamaican music in the early 1960s left many artists cheated out of a decent share of the royalties. But those were also times when studio owners had to pay the Kingston gangs protection money while creating an industry from scratch. Dodd, Reid and Kong were people with enormous vision, and even more importantly, an ear for quality.

I think this news has made me at least as sad as, if not sadder than, I was when Johnny Cash died.