Jeremy Harding

Toby Laing

He’s a very busy man at the moment and an outstanding contributor to global music, traveling around the world, ending up in Japan, New Zealand, Antarctica. The sounds of these rhythms that he’s been making in Jamaica are just turning up everywhere. It’s great that he’s taken time out to come and talk to us today, so cheers. Thanks for that.

Jeremy Harding

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Toby Laing

I don’t know if you want to start with some music, or if you want to...

Jeremy Harding

Sure, I’ll play like five or six things. Some stuff I produced, some I engineered on and mixed. Hopefully you guys are familiar with most of it.

(music: Beenie Man – “Who Am I”)

(music: Tanto Metro & Devonte – “Give It To Her”)

(music: Kevin Lyttle – “Turn Me On”)

(music: Sean Paul feat. Rahzel – “Top Of The Game”)

(music: Sean Paul – unknown)

(music: Sean Paul – “Breakout”)

Toby Laing

Hearing a collection of productions like that, it’s interesting to work out how you came to music in the first place, when you were young, because I know you haven’t always been pursuing this career as a producer in dancehall music.

Jeremy Harding

I started off in Kingston. I’m from Kingston, Jamaica, born and raised, and I started off enrolling in a traditional music school. Choir lessons, playing guitar in little productions you have on stage when you’re a kid. This is seven, eight, nine, to 13 years old. I took an interest in guitar and at that stage I was convinced I was going to be a great rock guitarist, the next Hendrix. I wanted to go to Musicians Institute in California. My parents said, “No, you’re going to go to boarding school first.” So I went to school in Ottawa in Canada. Did two years at that, I said, “Now [Musicians Institute].” They said, “No, you’re going to university.” So I went to Montreal, to McGill University, to do chemical engineering. All this time I’m still thinking I’m going to be this great guitar player.

Montreal had a very vibrant club scene – this was around about ‘88, ‘89, ‘90 – a very vibrant club scene. This was around the time when you had the whole UK Soul II Soul movement and that music was coming across. I got involved in that club scene. So I was chatting to DJs, wanting to know the music that they played. Of course, you couldn’t buy it on a CD in a shop, so me and a friend of mine, who was from New York, started going to the import shops and buying all these 12”s from the UK. Started off with the harsher stuff, like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb, we used to buy these 12”s. Then, as the more mainstream house came out, we used to buy records and make tapes for ourselves in the dorm room. We figured out at McGill they had soundsystem equipment for when they had frat parties. So we went and opened the store room, threw out all these boxes, and there’s all these [Technics] 1200 [turntables] sitting there and a mixer. So we grabbed the stuff, took it to our rooms, started making tapes. So my friend now, he’s from New York, Jewish kid from Manhattan, he’s into A Tribe Called Quest A Tribe Called Quest, Native Tongues, Black Sheep, Red Alert and all this kind of music. And I had all this reggae stuff, reggae tapes that I’d bring from back in Jamaica, so we started DJing on campus together, playing frat parties.

Eventually we got this college radio station show, CKUT 90.3FM, which was more than just a college station, it was like the only real urban station in the whole city. Because Montreal is French, it’s all very Canadian content and French music. The only place to hear hip-hop and dancehall or reggae or dance was on that college station. So we did that for three or four years, and by now I realized there was a music production school in Montreal called Trebas Institute. So I dropped out of McGill. It’s very hard to get in, to get out is easy. You walk in and say, “Hi, I’d like to withdraw.” They say thank you and take your card: “OK, goodbye.” So I left. My parents of course were ecstatic about that move, and I went to this music production school while I was DJing at the clubs, and started to learn about MIDI and keyboards and sequencers all this stuff.

Of course, by now I’d sold the guitar and bought a Numark mixer and a 1200, so my whole path had changed by then. I started working in clubs, I was DJing playing house music and reggae, so I had two audiences, really. We’d play black music, dancehall and reggae at the black clubs. And then we’d also play the house clubs, the whole Montreal gay house vibrant scene. It’s two types of music. But it reached a point in Montreal where if you weren’t French, if you weren’t white and you weren’t gay, then it was a ceiling and you were stuck there. It didn’t matter how good a DJ you were. I wasn’t French, I didn’t speak French, I wasn’t white and I wasn’t gay, so my progress as a DJ in that scene got stunted very quickly. They knew I could play music on the radio show, but I just didn’t fit in to that whole culture – you’re still a foreigner, you don’t speak the language. You were a cool black guy, but you weren’t a gay black guy, it just didn’t work for them.

So I just concentrated more on the black music and started playing more hip-hop and reggae. The show was called Native Tongues and that was our whole focus. At this point I was convinced I was going to be a DJ. That was my new calling, no more guitar – I’m going to remix and produce hip-hop acts and that sort of stuff. I found some local rap talent in Montreal and started a little clique of production where I was producing these kids, producing a radio show, and also I would DJ in clubs. So if they’d come to my house and make demos, I could play them on the radio. So they’d feel like they’re in the hands of a big producer because they could hear their stuff on the radio. Then every big rap act that came to Montreal, we’d get them to open up. So my whole roster was that we had the baddest producer, we had the baddest radio show and you open for all the acts, everything was moving along that path.

Of course, after a while, you’re still broke, because you’re DJing once or twice a week and getting paid like 80 to 100 Canadian dollars. You still have to eat, pay rent, you have to buy records. You’re a DJ now, you have all these expenses. It wasn’t working out, so I moved to Toronto for one year because people convinced me Toronto had this big musical scene, all these rap artists having hits, but after a year I realized there really wasn’t anything there for me anymore in Canada. I reached a certain point where I realized this stuff was so local, it wasn’t going to go much further than this. I went back to Jamaica. A friend of mine who I knew from school days was working for an advertising agency. He said, "Have you ever made jingles, like adverts, for radio or television?" I said, "Well, when those guys used to throw parties, we used to make the ads for the parties. Which is happening at which club, but I never tried it before." He says, "OK, fine," so he started giving me jingle work and coaching me to make jingles. So now I turned into a jingle producer. I’m making jingles for the banks, and some kind of fruit drink, or whatever product that was available. It was paying the rent, it was good money.

So I’m doing jingles, and [I meet] a younger brother who has started to get involved in a soundsystem in Jamaica, right, a crew of DJs. Now I had this studio because I brought back the gear which I had from Montreal. I set up a small studio. He says, “Listen, can we use the studio to do dubplates and record stuff from artists?” I said, “Sure, no problem.” So he started bringing artists over. Cobra, Buccaneer, Capleton, Beenie Man... I think, at the time, Don Youts. Reggae guys at the time.

They come over and we start cutting dubs. We didn’t have the lacquer to cut the dubs but we recorded to DAT. And the soundsystem would take the DAT and then go press the dubs. So, I’m still convinced now that I’m going to be a hip-hop producer, it’s just a matter of time, right? I’m just doing this to pay the bills. Eventually he says to me, “We should try to do a production, a dancehall reggae production.” I said, “I never though about producing dancehall, I never tried to produce dancehall.”

My approach to producing dancehall was like how a hip-hop producer produces hip-hop. I had an S950 sampler, I had my sequencer, and I started thinking like, “Alright, put on this record. OK, that’s a cool song right there. Woop, let me sample that sound. Let me sample this, let me sample that.” The whole approach was I was thinking like a hip-hop producer, sampling bits and pieces from various things and putting it together, whereas typical reggae dancehall production is not like that. It’s more musician based. Some guy comes in and plays a keyboard, a guy hooks up a bass. But I was thinking like a hip-hop producer.

So I did a couple of rhythms, and the second one was where we did Beenie Man, “Who Am I?” That worked really well. That record came out. I think I remember the morning when I felt that I had done something, David Rodigan call me from London. Right? Rodigan, famous reggae DJ. He called me, he was like, [puts on British accent] “May I speak to Jeremy Harding, please?” I was like, “Speaking.” He said, “Hi, this is David Rodigan.” I was like, “Holy fuck. Hey, Rodigan.” He says, “Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve got a massive hit over here in the UK with Beenie Man. It’s taking off, it’s amazing, incredible.” And he’s like gassing up on the phone. I’m like, “Man, this thing is really something special.” I think when I reached that point, then I kind of realized, well, I guess now I’m a dancehall reggae producer. I’m not going to be a rock guitarist. I stopped DJing, I’m not going to make jingles anymore. Now I’m a dancehall reggae producer, and from there we went into full steam and just started producing and getting involved in the whole dancehall scene in Jamaica.

Toby Laing

So it was the right place at the right time? You didn’t really expect to end up doing this.

Jeremy Harding

Yeah, I think it was just like a path, you understand? Everything led up to something else. I think the DJing got me into club culture and understanding DJing, and the club, and playing on the radio and understanding how DJs like records to be made for them. Learning the production side of it now, putting that with the DJing and how to produce, led me to produce the way that I produce. It’s all a progression. I think everything helped.

Up to even last year, I still had my DJ stuff set up in the studio. I don’t DJ anymore but it’s such a part of me. I need to have my Vestax and my two 1200s, just there, even when I’m making music. I’m not DJing, but something just tells me that you need to refer back to this, because you’re making music for the street and for the clubs. So I press my own lacquer 45s and put them on. Play it, say, “Yeah, yeah, all right.” Queue up this one and play that one and feel like, yeah, I made the record right because I can play them so I understand... You know what I mean? It’s always a point of reference.

Toby Laing

An understanding of where this music is going to be going. You were away from Jamaica for a number of years there. It seems that you’ve got a perspective on the island’s music from outside that you brought back.

Jeremy Harding

Yeah, definitely. A lot of comments I hear people say about my music is that it doesn’t sound like the regular dancehall stuff in Jamaica, it has a lot of hip-hop influence in it, sometimes a dance music thing to it. Like that record I played earlier, the Devonte & Tanto Metro, with the Auto-Tune on the voice, the Cher. That was me reading a magazine about Cher when she did [sings a line from Cher’s “Believe”] and I went out and did it on a dancehall record and it blew everyone’s mind. “How did you do this? It’s the most incredible thing.” You understand? And then like five other producers did it for three or four years afterwards and killed it. I blame myself for that, my apologies for all those reggae records with that fucking Auto-Tune thing, overkill. But it’s just different influences. I can take this and make it part of dancehall music. Why not? My scope is different. I’m from Jamaica, but I am a musician, I can play a guitar, I know music, I’ve played in bands, but I have also DJed in clubs and the radio, I know what that’s like, too. And now I’m making the music behind the glass, so it’s just bringing all those things into my approach.

Toby Laing

Do you still play music on your productions? You still playing the guitar?

Jeremy Harding

No, I’ve put the guitar into my hobby side of music. Maybe sometimes I can bring it together, but I was into guitar like Hendrix and Van Halen and Robert Johnson and Clapton, and I haven’t found out how that integrates into dancehall yet. I go home and fool on a guitar, read a magazine and figure out how to do a solo, but then it’s time to go into the studio and make reggae. It’s a separate discipline.

Toby Laing

In that time that you were away did the country change very much?

Jeremy Harding

Well, I was still coming back for vacations. I was coming home at Easter, at Christmas, going to the record shop to load up on my 45s, ‘cause I had this radio show to support. So I had to make sure to come to Jamaica, get all this new music and take it back to Montreal, because it would take them months to catch up anyway. I was keeping in touch with what was happening, I wasn’t far out of the loop. My friend used to do the same from New York with the hip-hop, that’s how we’d run it.

Toby Laing

Could you see technology changing the music culture of Jamaica in that time?

Jeremy Harding

In that time it didn’t really change. I would say it changed radically in the last six years, from maybe ‘98, ‘99. That’s when the change started to take effect. Before that everything was two-inch tape, everything was big analog mixing boards. A very old school way of making records. Akai drum machines, but everything else would be live on top. I’ve started sessions with Sly Dunbar and their whole way of working is for Sly to build up a drum track and lay it down on tape and then everything else is live. They don’t sequence past the drums or what they’re doing. Robbie will come in and play bass live and Lenky, or whichever keyboardist they’re using, will play live the full length of the song, just play it down. And they keep adding and stacking and that’s the way in which they make it. When I came back to Jamaica and started going to studios, I once walked into a session with Michael Rose from Black Uhuru – this is a Sly & Robbie session. So of course Michael Rose, Sly & Robbie – reggae Grammy winners, legends. I’m going to see how these guys work. Walk into the studio, but you can’t see anything, it’s full of weed smoke, so it’s like this [mimics spliff rolling] with all these rastas lined up on the wall rolling weed. The whole place is like that. The engineer is there, he has a TV monitor and he’s watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark or something like that. Casually, this tape machine beside him. Then Robbie sitting there saying, “Ready?” Press record. Watch TV. Then Robbie’s like, “Yo, hold on, stop, let me take out my gun [mimics removing gun from waistline and putting it on table]. Alright, ready again.” He presses the thing, and Robbie’s like this [mimics playing bass], plays this thing. About ten guys turn up, not to play the session but just to smoke weed in the studio. They’re sitting there smoking and puffing. Michael Rose is in the corner watching Indiana Jones. I’m looking at the speakers, a pair of NS10s, and of course the tweeters are blown long time. You know the little square tweeters they put in car boxes? They have them stuck in the round holes with tape. All the meters are on red, everything is peaking, totally [laughter]. This is frightening, this is two Grammy winners, Sly & Robbie and Michael Rose from Black Uhuru, and that’s how they made music. The volume is ridiculous, they have these big JBL horn boxes, it’s cranked so you can’t hear nothing, you can’t see nothing. Engineer’s watching cable, whatever. And it’s amazing. But when you hear back the track… bambaclaat! [imitates rhythm track] And Michael Rose is there belting. That’s the way those guys work, that’s the attitude. And those guys in there smoking the weed, they’re giving you the feedback because they’re going [mimics puffing], “Yeah, man, wicked. Go on. Murder!” “You like that?” “Yeah, man, wicked.” There’s Robbie Shakespeare, he has his Sigma 9mm on the desk, you know, but it worked for them, it worked for them.

Toby Laing

And so your studio is a bit like that as well [laughs]?

Jeremy Harding

No. When Jamaica caught up to the computer late and then all these kids start realizing they can get a PC, get a program and record stuff in their house, the shift started to happen, away from the bigger studios to smaller studios at producers’ houses. Part of the reason why you had so much talent emerging and part of the problem of why growth was so difficult was the way those studios work.

If you’re at Mixing Lab or Penthouse Records, where Buju Banton and those guys were, you have the studio, then the perimeter, then the gate. Everybody’s trying to be an artist, so they’re hanging out by the gate, all these wannabe artists. The producers and engineers will be making beats, making tracks, and they’ll look outside and say, “I wonder who’s out there. Let me hear you, come.” And the guy would come and sing at his shoulder. “No, no. You, come here. OK, I like that.” They pick people that way. All those artists are dudes that hang out by the gate every day and refused to go away. So when you have Dave Kelly and those producers at Penthouse – and Penthouse at the time was doing Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths and those kind of reggae records – and there’s this little kid outside calling himself Buju, and Dave says, “Let me hear you.” So Buju come in [sings], “Gal yuh see yuh battyrider, murder.” “Me love me car, me love bike, me love money an’ ting.” And he’d record him. So that’s how you found the artists. But at the same time it doesn’t work well for developing artists because that’s all you’re doing, auditioning artists. You don’t have the time to sit down and say, “OK, these are the two artists I’m going to work with, everybody else please leave.”

So the more modern producers who have their home studios, that can’t work, obviously. You can’t have 30 guys at the gate, they live in a residential area, the whole thing is a lot more closed circuit. And they start dealing with computers and hard drives. Before they got them they were doing ADAT and Tascam V–80 digital tapes, smaller formats. So their process might be a little bit different, not so many hangers–on. But different people work differently. I prefer to do my stuff on my own, and when it’s finished I let everybody hear it. If I don’t like it, I just trash it. I don’t let anybody hear it. I don’t rely on a room of people because the more popular you get, the more yes men you have around. Any rubbish you do it’s, “Wicked, that bad, you’re the boss, murder.” And you’re sitting there like, “I don’t really like it, though.”

I prefer to work alone on a track, and as far as recording is concerned, some artists want to be private, they don’t want the feedback, they come alone. Like Vybz Kartel, they just come alone, they don’t want a whole lot of people there, they just want to work on their song, and that’s it. Other people travel with this whole entourage. If you ever record Capleton, he has ten guys that have to roll with him. He just can’t come by himself. Beenie Man used to come with five or six guys, because they need their boys around them to support them. Also, there’s a lot of ghostwriters in dancehall and reggae. You read the credits, it was written by Capleton. It was actually written by three other guys. It says Beenie Man, but it wasn’t written by Beenie Man, it was written by Future Troubles or Gringo or some other artist he was hanging around with. So the artist has this entourage.

Vybz Kartel used to write songs for Bounty Killer, he’d follow Bounty Killer everywhere. “Yo, Vybz, listen to this riddim.” And he’d be [mimics writing lyrics a piece of paper]. And Killer would say, “Yeah, ready,” and he’d go into the studio [with the lyrics]. But these guys have ghostwriters because we don’t have a formal system of publishing and radio stations paying royalities and all those things, so basically those guys were writing for them. [The artist would] take care of them. They go to a club, they buy them liquor, they need a new car, new pair of rims. They go to New York, they come back and say, “Yo, hold this chain, hold these shoes.” So they’re rolling with the big man. They’re really ghostwriters. Almost every artist in Jamaica has them. Elephant Man, Beenie Man. Capleton, the people around him used to write for him. Bascom X used to write for Frisco Kid. Some of them perform in their own right, some never do, some are good writers but don’t have the voice to be an artist. There’s another reason the entourage has to come, because they’re building vibes. “Yeah man, let’s go the studio and build vibes.” It just means, let’s go to the studio and try and get this thing written. It can be anything from smoking a spliff, drinking, to cracking jokes, exchanging stories. That’s very important for them. If the artist don’t like you as a producer, you can’t sit round and build vibes for them.

Toby Laing

Jamaican music has been traveling the world for 40 years in different ways and that community’s style of making music, it seems like there are a lot of people involved, there’s a lot of collaborations, things that can’t be written down. Maybe there’s a ghostwriter working, or someone might be copying somebody else, but there’s something deep going on in that music. But when you sell a record in Jamaica, that’s not where your main source of income is coming from, is it?

Jeremy Harding

No, the artists make money off dubplates, or the specials, which they record for the soundsystems, or they make money off the shows. That’s the source of income, not the actual sale of the records. A hit record in Jamaica, a hit 45, is going to sell 6,000 copies and they’re selling for $50 Jamaican dollars, which is like 80 cents US. By the time you cut that down to what an artist makes it’s peanuts, maybe a couple hundred US dollars. Forget that, they’re not even trying to pay royalties, it doesn’t make any sense. The 6,000 copies were probably purchased by 6,000 soundsystem guys across the world.

So you have guys in Europe, US, Japan, playing this record and making it popular, and people call Jamaica wanting a show: “We need a show with Beenie Man. How much you charge? $15,000? No problem. Send them the tickets.” So they’re touring constantly and doing shows because of the output of records. If you’re a traditional rap artist, or R&B, anybody, you do an album, you promote the single, you do a video, you do the next single, the next video, and the album goes for a year. You do a tour in the summer for three months, and then maybe you take some time out to record the next album. Jamaican artists, these guys are recording three, four singles a week, so after four months they may have 40 songs. Elephant Man, Sizzla, you should see how these guys work. I’ve seen Sizzla record six songs a night working for Don Corleone, producers like that. He comes to your studio, you better have more than just one track or you’re wasting his time. “I want six tracks now.” Boom, first track, rip through it. Next one, rip though it, rip through it. So the amount of work that they’re doing, the turnover is so constant, they always have 15 songs out there, maybe five or six of them are hits in the dancehall community, so they’re constantly doing shows. That’s they way they make their money.

Producers make money by licensing their tracks to the people who put out compilations – VP Records, Greensleeves Records, Jet Star. And then you guys go and buy Reggae Gold, Strictly the Best, Ragga Ragga, Greensleeves samplers, all of the reggae compilations. That’s how the producers make their money. So it’s a very different system from how people usually make money off records.

Toby Laing

So the music is still getting around there, it’s just bootlegging and illegal copying of CDs?

Jeremy Harding

Part of the problem is that people in Jamaica think that the music is them and belongs to them. They don’t think they should have to pay for the music. They figure, we’re in Jamaica, these are Jamaicans, it is our music. So a guy records a song, I love this song, I’m going to go to the stage or the club and make a lot of noise for him, this song should be mine. I’m going to beg the CD, I don’t have to buy that. I’m going to buy Usher’s album or R. Kelly’s album, because they’re not from Jamaica, they’re big R&B acts, they’re on MTV, I’ll purchase their record. But I don’t have to buy Bounty Killer’s album, why do I need to buy Bounty Killer’s album? I see him everyday, I see him on the road. “Yo, Killer, wagwan?” “My yout, what’s up?” So their whole mentality is they don’t buy the music.

Even worse, now you get into the downloading thing. We have guys selling music online telling you they’re promoting your artist. What do you mean, you’re promoting my artist – you’re robbing me, you’re selling the music online, where’s this money going? They’re selling mix CDs, like “We’re promoting your artist.” You’re not, you’re selling 20,000 copies of your mix CD with six of my songs on there and then when my compilation comes back I’ve only sold 10,000 copies. So you’re cutting it right from under me. They don’t get it. They think it’s a mix CD. But this is not hip-hop where you can sell 50,000 or 100,000 mix CDs, whatever, because Jay-Z is going to sell six million. For Jay-Z, it’s promotion – a DJ Clue mix CD, sure, get it out on the street, because my major label record deal can afford for me to sell millions of records and I can do big tours and have big endorsements and have Reebok shoes and whatever. But the Jamaican guys, your CD sales means I can’t sell my normal CD. So with the web and the downloading and the MP3 trading, it’s difficult. That’s why we have to hustle to find all these ways to make money.

Toby Laing

MTV has had a huge impact on the local scene. How long has that been happening?

Jeremy Harding

People in Jamaica got cable in about ‘97, ‘98. Before that the only people who could watch MTV or BET were people who could afford a satellite DSS system or whatever, a very small percentage of kids. So once you got cable, which basically started as illegal cable – a bunch of business people get together in a building, throw a satellite receiver on the roof and split off the signal and feed the whole community and charge them. That was going on for years until the US [communications regulator] FCC said, “No, no, you can’t just buy one subscription for HBO and feed 200 people on the road and charge money. What are you doing?” So they put in regulations, but the point was that it had sprung up so much.

So now, even if you’re an uptown middle-class kid or a ghetto kid, you had cable, you had MTV. Now everybody is like, “Oh fuck, MTV, BET.” They could get this information. So it started to affect how they were making music. They knew what the DJ was DJing about, how they dressed, everything. They latched into the culture. The language barrier at first, they couldn’t really understand how Snoop Dogg talks and all the slang, but they could understand their attitude, the same perspective. Particularly gangster rap music took to Jamaica really well, and even now the kids love that kind of rap music more. Tribe Called Quest, they’re not interested in that side of hip-hop. They like Snoop Dogg, Dre, 50 Cent, or the Southern [hip-hop], Paul Wall, the grills, the hardcore hip-hop, because it mirrors their culture.

Hip-hop mirrored dancehall in the early days, so there’s this exchange constantly going on. It’s influenced the culture to the point where it’s ridiculous. You see dancehall artists going on stage wearing North Carolina Tar Heels cap and they don’t even know where it is or what sport it is. But they see Fabolous is wearing the throwback jersey and they go, “Yeah, Fabolous, bad rapper.” And they want to dress like him. They get the baseball caps and the whole thing, and they go through this cycle of cultural exchange. You hear records about drive-bys. Jamaica is a violent countr,y but drive-bys is not our culture. Jamaican culture is when you want to shoot somebody, you walk straight up to the man and say, “Yo, pussy!” Boom, like that. It’s an aggressive culture, not like drive-by, boom, boom, boom and drive off. They want everybody to know. They walk up to the dude and, “Yo pussy, a long time now you been a bumbaclaat!” Blat-blat! It’s very different.

Toby Laing

I don’t know if I can even understand what it’s like to live in Kingston.

Jeremy Harding

They say the most warrior-like slaves were dropped off in Haiti and Jamaica. Serious thing, you know? The whole slave trade, the most warrior-like tribes were dropped off there. Those cultures are the most violent and aggressive in the Caribbean and it affects everything about how they operate. If you go to other places in the Caribbean – Trinidad, Barbados and all the other countries, they speak differently, they make soca music. [affects accent] “Soca, party time, how you doin’ man?” And they’re happy and funny. And in Jamaican it’s, “Yo, wha gwaan?” Everything’s dark and the music is slow and everyone smokes weed. They’re happy, they’re not upset with you, that’s just how they are. They speak in low tones [affects deep voice]. [Elsewhere in the Caribbean] you go to the carnival parades and see all the feathers. In Jamaica the trucks are like this [mimics playing a slow, heavy bassline] and everyone’s like [imitates smoking weed]. Everybody’s a bad boy, everybody’s aggressive. But it’s part of the whole culture and they come to the US and get infamous for being in gangs in New York and the whole drug trade. And look at Haiti, it’s in turmoil, and the poor and the class situation. And they really say, in the slave trade, with the warrior-like tribes, they got to Jamaica and said, “You get off now.” And the happier tribes they took to other places. So the warrior guys sit down in these islands brooding for generations and it affects your whole culture, the music, the food you eat. Jamaica is pepper and hot food. The whole thing changes.

Toby Laing

Dancehall does sound like it’s actually channelling something quite ancient. There’s a pulse to it. Maybe you don’t know that if you’re close to the source, but if you listen to it from far away, it sounds like music that has always been beneath the surface, that someone has just tapped into. But if you go clubbing in Jamaica, are you just as likely to go to a club that plays R&B or hip-hop?

Jeremy Harding

No, all the clubs play a mix of music now. The DJs now have to. There was a time when you had Stone Love and they played reggae and dancehall and that’s it. But now, all the soundsystems and all the DJs play a mix of everything. Mostly dancehall and reggae, a lot of hip-hop, some R&B, maybe the edgier kind of R&B stuff, they don’t really play much dance. You have some DJs who specialise in playing dance, like trance and techno, but they have very small followings. But that’s pretty much what you’re going to hear. They all have to be able to mix it up. You can’t have a hip-hop night, it doesn’t work. You have to be playing some dancehall. And if you bring big hip-hop artists out to Jamaica, you have to have dancehall guys on the bill. Or if you have an R&B artist, same thing, because otherwise people won’t come. They want to see Usher or Lil’ Jon or Wyclef, but they won’t go to see Usher or Lil’ Jon or Wyclef. If you put Bounty Killer, Elephant Man and Sizzla on it as well, then they’ll go. You still always have to bring it back to reggae and dancehall, they always want a piece of that in it, no matter what you’re doing.

Toby Laing

So these dancehall artists, even though they’re blowing up in the States, the work they do every day at home is what’s really important, rather than moving to New York City or whatever?

Jeremy Harding

It just doesn’t work because the culture changes too rapidly. You’ve had reggae artists out of New York, Red Fox and Mad Lion. Shaggy pretty much is a New York reggae artist, a kid that left Jamaica and grew up in the whole New York scene. You have guys like that but they have limited success. Shaggy’s a whole next thing by himself, but in general the culture changes too fast. The rhythms change too quickly, the slang changes too quickly. You can’t write a song after being out of Jamaica for a year. People will look at you, Jamaican kids will say, “What’s he doing that for? We don’t talk about that anymore, we don’t look like that, we don’t dress like that. That’s not what the street is.”

The language, the talk, is so quick. We had this thing where you used to greet somebody with your fist like this [knocks fists together], then all of a sudden it changed to this [knocks fists while lifting thumbs up]. I don’t know who makes this stuff up, but then it’s this thing with your thumb, and you have to do it like two, three, four times. I asked people where it comes from and some man says, “Yeah, man, it’s a badman thing, when you cock the gun with your thumb.” What the fuck? Then the next man says it’s not that, it’s a rasta thing, because rastas have this thing about the Pope being evil and Catholicism being this and so on. And they say it’s popping off the Pope’s head. So you don’t even know where it comes from, but it just changes so quickly. The next one is the “lion paw,” so if you greet someone and they do that [puts palms together with fingers interlocking] and then another where they say, “Bless,” and touch the heart.

A lot of these expressions come out of Rastafari and spread into the general street culture. All the kids in the street going [shows a mix of all these gestures]. It changes so quickly. You’re in New York, Miami, whatever, and you go, “Yeah, I’m a reggae producer.” You don’t even know, it changes so fast, the slang, the expressions. You can’t really keep up.

Toby Laing

So you just lose touch.

Jeremy Harding

Yeah, culture moves so rapidly.

Toby Laing

It sounds like a tough environment to live in, but obviously if you are born there, used to it, you can...

Jeremy Harding

Just like anywhere else. People said New York is a tough environment to live in. It depends where you’re going. You know the places where you need to stay out of, or what you’re going to get mixed up in. It’s the same type of thing. So if you live in Kingston, you live in Jamaica… If you’re not a drug dealer, and you’re not a murderer, and not trying to kill people, and you’re not hanging out in certain areas, you’re not putting yourself into certain situations... As far as the music is concerned, everything is now moved into uptown Kingston anyway. You don’t have to go to the ghetto to these dances anymore. They’ve brought it uptown. It’s all in the night clubs. It’s in the night spots uptown. It’s on hip strip. You see what I’m saying? Even entry level right now, if I want to jump into dancehall music in Jamaica it doesn’t mean you have to make this pilgrimage down into some really bad territory and hang out with the wrong crowd to get the music. You understand? You got four or five radio stations playing the music. You can go right in the business district uptown, there’s the IBM building, the Scotiabank and then there’s a club. That’s the spot for dancehall now. That is it. The club and the security and beep, metal detector. You’ve got like a regular night club. You know what I mean?

Toby Laing

Is there a competitive nature to the industry there? Do the producers get on with the other producers or artists with artists? There occasionally seems to be problems between artists, is that serious?

Jeremy Harding

It’s extremely competitive, because everybody feels as though it’s a small pie and they’re all trying to get a piece of it. I think the new generation of artists have a better relationship now. I’m good friends with a lot of these producers out there, like Shams, Don Corleone and Birch. If any of you follow dancehall and read the album credits, you’ll see their names. And I’m friends with Steely & Clevie and Sly & Robbie. We’re not buddies, but I could call them on the phone, I could ask them questions about stuff. The whole thing is different. With early reggae music, the cost to put together a studio… We need the same studio as everyone else to make the records, but we’re only selling 5,000 copies at less than a dollar a song, so the cost to put together the studio and how difficult it was meant the thing that came out would be, “I’m the boss, I control the studio, I’m the producer, you artists are nothing. You should be happy to record for me.” So the relationship was different. You were the big man. “I am Coxsone Dodd, Stereo One. Who the fuck are you, some pickle artist? I own this big tape machine, this big board, you should be happy I let you record here. When you finish, sign this piece of paper.” [mimics writing on paper] “I sign all my rights to this song to Coxsone Dodd, all my publishing, all of my royalties, my first-born child, everything.” [Laughter] Not to try and cut up Coxsone Dodd and these guys, they were producers, they made good records, but the whole reasoning was a lot different. A lot of them weren’t there in the studio making these records, they just owned the place. So the artists had no choice. You wanted to record, you had to sign that paper to make the song.

The relationship has changed now, where the artist and the producer are on the same level. Like, I will play soccer with Wayne Marshall. He comes to my house to play Playstation. He knows I’m the producer and he’s the artist, but we’re friends. It’s not like, “I’ve got this big Pro Tools rig and who the fuck are you?” It’s more like a working thing, we’re the same generation, we can go the sporting club and talk shit. “Yo, I’ve got a new track.” “OK, let me hear it.” Boom. Then we’ll go into the studio and it shifts to where I’m the producer, “Tell me what to do, I’m the artist, I need to take instruction from you.” Then when it’s all said and done, we’ll go back in front of the TV and play Fifa. So that relationship is a lot different now.

Toby Laing

So the legal things have changed with publishing?

Jeremy Harding

Nobody’s trying to behave that way anymore. They’re more aware. I build a track, you bring the lyrics, 50% is me, 50% is you. Some guy plays keyboards on it, I give him a little piece of the publishing. It’s not like a big issue, we’re a lot more knowledgeable about it now. In the past you could do what you want because the artist wouldn’t dare come back and say anything. Now, they’ll come back and say, “What’s the deal with the publishing?” “What do you mean?” “Because I saw the thing and... dude, we hang out and play video games all the time. You trying to jack me for my publishing? What’s going on?” Before, you’re the big heavy producer, the artist is a mouse. He can’t come back to you and ask you for money. Impossible, no way.

Toby Laing

You’ve got into another side of things with artist management and projects. You manage Sean Paul?

Jeremy Harding

I manage Sean. I never intended to be an artist manager, or really to manage him, but when we had found him, my brother heard him DJing at this little outdoors club and said, “Yo, my bigger brother just came back from Canada and he has a small studio, you should come by.” My brother said to me, “I saw this kid and he sounds like Super Cat. He’s wicked.” So Sean came and DJed a few things, and he did sound like Super Cat. If Sean sings a Super Cat song for you, you can’t believe. Now he has his own style, but back then, the living Super Cat. So we recorded a few songs with him. My studio was the first one where he had a chance to come and work, be a reggae artist and record. I thought he had a great-sounding voice. On record Sean was always fantastic. As an individual [performer], his stage show was weak and he might not really look the part, but when you heard him it was unmistakable. “Is that a Super Cat record? It must be a Spragga Benz record.” ‘Cause he had the chops to do it on the record.

I kept working with him and his records are coming out with my name and number so people are calling my studio and my house. “Yeah, wha’ gwan? The artist Sean Paul, I want to book him for a show.” “Yeah, OK.” “Yeah, a show in Miami, how much do you charge?” So I’d look at Sean, “How much do you charge?” He’d be, “I don’t know.” So I’d say, “$2,000?” “Yeah, no problem. How many people flying?” So I’d look at him, “Shall I come with you?” “Yeah.” “Two tickets.” And we’d just go. I’d go and carry the instrumentals, the tickets, I’ll collect the money backstage. I go with him, I get up onstage, I cue him so he does a little show, we’ll finish, I go to the promoter, I get the money.

I’m doing this for three years. At the same time I’m thinking, “That’s cool, I’m helping this kid out, and I get to fly all over the place. And I’m a producer, I’m making songs with Beenie Man and Elephant Man, I’m happy. Sean’s cool, but I’m helping him out.” But then it dawns on you after four years that you’re managing him. You realize you’re his manager, they’re calling you for everything. His shows are coming through you, you’re collecting the money. He’s looking to you for guidance.

We go shopping in New York, the stores look at us like we’re lovers. “Sean, I think these pants look really good on you.” “I don’t know.” “What’s going on here? This black dude telling this guy how to dress?“ Sean doesn’t care about these things, he doesn’t care about clothes and jewelry and bullshit. He just cares about music. “Why do I need to buy that?” He doesn’t really get it to this day. He dresses well now, but he doesn’t really take his money and go shopping. Stylists come to music videos and give him clothes and he’s like, “Can I keep that? How much is it?” His whole thing was different, but you end up doing so many things on his behalf. You start to realise, I’m managing this kid. Not with a signed contract. At that point I wasn’t even taking any money from him because I was doing well as a producer so I didn’t really see the point. He does a show for two thousand dollars, I’m going to take two hundred dollars? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve had a big hit, David Rodigan’s calling me. I’m getting cheques from EMI publishing for £50,000, leave him with his two hundred bucks.

So the whole relationship was done because I liked the kid’s talent and want to help him out, and enjoy the music I’m making with him. And if he’s sticking by you and coming to you for advice, in a management relationship, to me that’s much more important than getting up and signing this big fat contract, because it doesn’t make any difference. You’re going to get married. You and this person have to care about each other. You can’t just think we’re married now, the paper’s signed. They don’t care. If you’re an asshole, they’ll be the same way. What difference does the paper make? That doesn’t bind the relationship. Yeah, legally it’s important, but you need to have your relationship with that person because you’re going to go through a lot ups, a lot of downs. And when you’re up, they are the greatest thing. “I’m the artist, everybody loves me.” And when they’re down, you are the worst manager. But you’re never the best manager when they’re on top. “It’s all about me, the people love me.” And when they’re down, “Yo, my management is fucked, they’re not doing nothing.” ”Maybe you recorded some crap songs, I’m just the manager.” It’s that kind of job.

Toby Laing

Is this something you’re going to pursue further or is just something that happened? Are there people coming up in the studio who you think have great talent?

Jeremy Harding

There might be. But most of the successful management of reggae artists came from guys who were doing everything for the artist. They were the managers, the producers, everything. You talk about Shabba Ranks, Cobra, Patra, that was Clifton “Specialist” Dillon. He was their producer, he was their manager. So he had that control where he was making their records and guiding their careers. Then you have Robert Livingston, who manages Shaggy. He’s a producer, he has his producers, they have their studio, they make the records and they also manage the artist. My thing with Sean is similar. If I don’t make the records, I supervise the records that are being made and I make the decisions as well. It is very difficult to manage the artist if you don’t have anything to do with them creatively, because then they just go off in a direction you can’t manage. To just produce them and make hit records leaves another void, because you have this big hit that’s a smash on the radio, but there’s no follow–up.

The record business is about way more than getting your song on the radio. It’s the follow-up, the whole promo, the videos, the imaging, the interviews, the press, everything he has to do to create this artist that people want to buy into. If kids like the song, alright, it’s number one on Hot 97 in New York, on 1 Xtra in the UK. “Great. Search, download.” The only time you have to buy is when you buy into the artists. There’s something about them you like, then I want to buy the album, I want to look at the pictures, I want to read the thing. It’s difficult to think about it separate in our music, because as big as reggae music is, we don’t have that fertile breeding ground for the development of artists. If you’re in the United States you have booking agents, you have publicists, stylists, choreographers, video directors. You have all these people dedicated to the fostering of growth of an artist. You find a girl, you say, “You sing R&B?” Then you have all these people who go, “OK, no problem. I can dress her and make her look like Beyoncé, I’m a stylist.” Here’s the clothes. You have a choreographer, “I can make sure she dances like Christina Milian.” You go to that producer, “I wrote all the songs for Destiny’s Child, for Amerie,” they go like that. You hook it up, it’s all mapped out for you. They can create stars and artists from nothing, easily.

Toby Laing

[How] do you find their idea of manipulation, say, when you take Sean to the States and they’re putting it out on a big label, maybe they’re asking you to do certain things you don’t want to, manipulating the sound and so on?

Jeremy Harding

We have certain guidelines by which we do our thing. We have lawyers based in New York, we have stylists, accountants, we have to create our team around Sean for him to step up to that level. If you don’t do it the record company are going to try and make you do it anyway. You’ll get there and it’ll be, “I’m a stylist.” They’ll push something on you and you might look at it, “No, that’s not his image.” So we have our own stylist. “Oh, we have a great photographer.” “No, we have our own photographer, his pictures are done. This is how I want my artist to look.” The label can’t exist without that whole machine to sell those records. Once in a while, yes, you get a great artist that puts out great records and none of that matters.

But the machine is geared towards a whole different age. We spent hours and hours doing interviews for websites. Five years ago no one cared about websites. Now it’s, “We’re going to have your album debut on AOL Sessions.” The whole way the web works, this website gets 50 million hits a day, so you need to do the interview. It’s a lot more involved than just making a good song. We always make great songs in Jamaica. They get reggae songs in the club, you always get breakthrough reggae hits but then there’s no follow-up after. “Ah, remember when that reggae guy had that song? That’s wicked.” The industry in Jamaica doesn’t understand how to foster that growth, so you have to know how to get with the program.

Toby Laing

That’s a good insight into international music business. Would you mind telling us how you work in the studio and what you use?

Jeremy Harding

When I started off, I had an AKAI S950 rack sampler. I had an Atari with Mastertracks Pro and I had one Korg module for the M1, I think it was an M3R, Tannoy monitors and a little Mackie 16–track mixer. Then Digidesign had a program called Session 8, which was like an 8–track version of Pro Tools with this big interface. Did it have an EQ? I think it had an EQ, but you couldn’t use plugins, it was just eight tracks and you could cut-and-paste the same way. It had a big unit and you could plug the mic in. I used that to make a lot of records, like “Who Am I,” by Beenie Man, that was made on that system. Then I tried using the hard disk recorders. That was a piece of garbage, and I lost a lot music on that thing. It works good until the drive crashes one day for no reason and the whole 80GB drive goes.

Now I’m in the studio, I mean success brings the money and you can buy the stuff you you want. So now I have MPC 2000, 2000XL, MPC 4000, MPC 3000, Roland Fantom, Triton, Alesis Ion, Access Virus, Nord Lead, some E-Mu modules, Pro Tools HD system, Reason, Logic, what else? Tons of outboard gear and preamps, like Avalon and Viper tube preamps and API preamps, SSL bus compressor, which is all fine and good.

To be honest with you, now it’s more difficult to make music. You have too many choices. You sit in the studio like, “Let me program the drums. Let me use this drum machine. Where was that sound? It was in the Roland. No, there’s some good drums in Reason, oh wait, no, Logic.” It gets confusing, you have so many options and you get caught up in being a techie. I’m a junkie, I love gadgets and electronics and software and laptops. All these things come out, “Oh, a new Pioneer mixer? I need it.” “What do you mean you need it? You don’t even DJ any more.” You get so much into the gear, and you start to afford high-end gear. So now I can buy API pre–amps, because I’ve heard about these things. Now I can buy the Sony C800G microphone that Dr Dre uses for Eminem that costs six grand, because you’re making some money now. You can afford it. At the end of the day you sit down with five mics in front of you, four drum machines, ten keyboards, three pieces of software, all the outboards, you’re crammed in your little studio. And you’re like, “Fuck, how do I make music again?” You get lost.

The lesson to be learned is that the gear doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t make a difference. It all comes from your head and your heart. Most of the rhythms out of Jamaica are made on Logic and FruityLoops. Most of the new kids can’t afford a drum machine, but they can afford a PC and they can go on the web and download a cracked version of FruityLoops. And they make records, and all these big dancehall records, like Capleton and this Drop Leaf riddim, these big one-drop reggae records that sound like Sly & Robbie in the studio with the weed, are made by one producer on Logic. Don Corleone, a good friend of mine, he programmed the whole thing on Logic and if he needs a guitar part a guy comes over [imitates guitar playing], he puts it in the sampler, lines it on top of Logic, he does everything. He takes that, drops it into Pro Tools, takes Pro Tools, mixes it up and when you hear it, “Yeah, this is what I’m talking about, this is the real reggae, live bass, not that programmed bullshit.” It’s Logic, dude, relax. That’s how that kid’s working. The gear doesn’t really make any difference in the creation of the music.

Recording-wise, you still can’t beat good preamps. I know yesterday Jimmy Douglass was talking about the outboard and the vintage gear and all that. I don’t really subscribe to that. I have plugins that sound great to me. The plugins can do sounds that outboards cannot do. It’s really not practical to be buying every single reverb, costing thousands of dollars and taking up so much space. I love plugins, sure, but I use them both. If I have the outboard gear, I’ll use it. If I have the plugins, I’ll use it if I need this kind of compression. This outboard gear works good, and then the next time I’ll be thinking that plugin sounds wicked because it can do the thing with compression that the whole box cannot do. Altiverb, a lot of these big plugins, Lexicon, it’s at that level where the plugin manufactures are approaching that level.

People have that analog [versus] digital debate. A lot of the reason you have that thing in your head about analog sounding better is that the records you listened to when you were growing up and made you love music, they were recorded in that format. That to you is what’s supposed to be a good sound, that’s the emotional connection. You listen to today’s music, “Oh, it’s digital, I don’t hear the tape compression. It doesn’t sound like my old records.” All that is going to pass by because in a generation coming up, a 15-year-old kid is not listening to the sound of tape, he’s growing up listening to Pro Tools. So when he starts making music he won’t have the frame of reference that tape sounded better. Why? It’s non-existent for him. They watch films, they see Star Wars, it’s all digital. So when they watch an old film, “Why does it look so mushy? Clark Gable, I don’t get it.” No, you want explosions, bright colours, surround sound. Your whole reference keeps changing.

You can’t sit here and talk about your audio tape, it’s all closed down. You can’t buy the tape. A kid wants to record to audio tape. How? Go buy a tape machine for that much money? Are you mad? Who has that much money? $70,000 for an Atari tape machine? It doesn’t make any practical sense. Old-school engineers will tell you about it, they learnt on that system and I’m happy for them. But I can’t sit here and tell you, “Yeah, the vintage gear’s the best thing. Fuck the plugins, Pro Tools don’t sound good. CD sounds shit, vinyl sounds better.” You have to move along. You can make music on anything, it doesn’t matter what you have. That’s what makes you good, to use what you have and make that music. A guy can go, “Yeah, I’m a producer,” and go to a fancy studio with three other programmers around him, a guy with a Pro Tools rig, an MPC programmer, a guy who’s a whiz at Logic, some wicked keyboard player who’s going to sit down and say, “Yeah, man, it’s my track, I did it.” Versus a little kid with a little controller, FruityLoops, headphones and he’s mapped out his thing. Now, who do you think is the more talented person? It doesn’t make a difference. I have all that gear and sometimes I just turn on one drum machine and use that.

Toby Laing

So are you in the studio a lot at the moment?

Jeremy Harding

I’m trying to get back into it, the management takes up a lot of my time, energy and focus. But at the same time I feel like I’m doing something for the greater good, because if you don’t manage the artists well, then making the records almost seems like it’s not going to go anywhere anyway. I have to keep pushing down the doors with the artists. I have to make sure that Sean Paul can sell millions again, to prove to world that we’re here to stay, that reggae music can sell, it can work. Sign these kids, give them record deals, put them on the TV, fly them all over the world, make them do the promo so they can sell the records. So when that happens now, it’s good, now we can go to America because America is thinking, this can sell, this can go on the Elephant Man album, or the Vybz Kartel, or Beenie Man, give them all a shot. So to me it’s more important to make sure it works for him as an artist. Otherwise we’re making the music, selling 5,000 copies of the vinyl. Where’s it going in the long run?

Toby Laing

That’s an investment in the future. It would be great if you could get back into the studio and keep doing what you’re doing. I’d appreciate that and so would these guys. I think it might be a good idea to see if there’s anyone who wants to ask any questions out there.

Audience Member

My buddy just came back, he was in vacation in Kingston with his girlfriend. He came back with a big box full of 45s. He just went into the record store, he’s like, “Okay, give me everything that’s hot. Give me what they play in the clubs.” I noticed that there would be like four records with the same label, the same beat, but all different artists spitting on it.

Jeremy Harding

Right.

Audience Member

Can you maybe talk a little bit about how that works?

Jeremy Harding

We have a culture in our music where we have a thing called riddim juggling. Juggling like a circus, riddim juggling, which really refers to when DJs play the records and they play that same track with multiple artists on it. They play a song and they queue one and play the next one and play the next one. One whole five-minute experience really gets you like four or five artists at the same time. The reason for it primarily was an economic reason, because of how much it would take for you to get a track of music done. You say you want to be a producer, but you’re not a musician. You find a guy, you’re like, “Yo, program some drums.” You put it on tape, this is back in tape days. You get a keyboard player, “Yo, play something in for me.” You do this and that. Now you have a three or four-track tape that has cost you the amount of time in the studio, paying studio time and hours and to pay all these musicians, that you can’t make back enough by just making one song on this one track. They go in the studio, you have 24-track tape. That might fill up like 10 tracks with music. They’re looking at it like, “Well, you know, I have 14 more tracks on the tape.” They go and they get 14 artists. They mix the song and they push up this fader, that’s that vocal and they run it off. They bring that down and they push up the next fader and then that’s that artist. It all lives on one 24-track master. Every fader is a different artist.

The reason was just an economic reason because you spend so much time and energy and money to put together this project that the sale of one record could never make back the money when you’re selling 5,000 copies in Jamaica, whatever. It’s impossible. You have to have 14 artists on it. Now you’re selling upwards of 50,000 copies, which would cover the cost. That phenomenon they started to call juggling the riddim track. The DJs play the music like that. It was an experience where it was like a community-based thing. If you had this riddim, all these different artists would give it their different version of the song that they think should go on the riddim track.

So as you said, he’s going to come back with all these 45s and it’s the same label because the it’s same producer. It’s him with his thing. You’re lucky you only got five. Usually it’s like 14, 20 on the same riddim track. It becomes such a culture of how they play the music. It was positive in many ways. That would give a young artist a chance and opportunity to be able to record. If I was a producer and had my tape, or whatever, and I recorded all the big artists I wanted to get, I had Cobra, Buju Banton, Beenie Man or Ninja Man, whoever you had, then there’s this little kid that nobody knows but you say, “All right, I’ll give you a shot. You have a track, go.” Right? He got one track. He did his best now to do his song on this one. No double track and chorus and harmony, fuck that. You got one track. He has his shot. That small artist would feel like, “OK, I’m on the same riddim track as these big artists. When the guys get in the club now and they’re going to play the big artists, maybe they’ll play my song. Now they listened to 30 seconds of my song. If they can mix it in with the big artist song I’ll get a little bit of shine.”

In that way it was very useful for the younger artists. The producers felt good, like, “OK, now I can make back my money. If I make 14 songs on this riddim track, I have 14 separate records to sell. Maybe I can get three or four hits, or five hits, or six hits.” The foreign companies come along and they want to license the project and they license the whole CD: “Give me all 14 tracks, put it on a CD." Now they’re making these kind of production albums. The focus for us in Jamaica, or the producer and musicians, it don’t really matter to us if it’s on the same riddim track. They care about what the artist is doing on a track. You didn’t really have that marriage of, like, this track is for this artist. No, they can say it’s just like a riddim. It’s just a track. It’s really about what the artist is doing. That’s sort of why the culture of that whole thing takes place.

Even in recent times, Sean Paul had a big number one record with “Get Busy,” if you know that song. Wayne Wonder had a song on the same riddim track. Lumidee had a song on the same riddim track, you understand? Afterwards you had like Nina Sky and Pitbull and Mister Vegas and they all had songs on this same dancehall riddim track. It still kind of happens. In hip-hop it happens once in a while. You get a track that has “Smiles” and “Southstar” and it has like Ja Rule and Ashanti and it’s the same riddim track, you know what I mean? If you go back into hip-hop and talk about all those Roxanne records, they were all on that same beat. It was like the Real Roxanne, Roxanne this, Roxanne that, Roxanne’s Revenge. They were all cut on the same. They had a certain amount of that culture in some of the stuff that they were doing as well. We have never really let go of it though. As I said, it started off really as just economic reasons. It’s just trying to make back your money.

Toby Laing

It does work in the dance as well though, that’s the thing. You can listen to one riddim, and when you’re spinning the records, it can work for an hour.

Jeremy Harding

Right. Because if you think about it you’re not playing three minutes and 30 seconds of every song, so you’re playing a song, chorus, verse, chorus. By the time you’re into five or six minutes of time you heard five artists so it all gets very compressed. It doesn’t really feel like, “Oh fuck, I’m listening to the same thing for half an hour.” No, because it’s really five or six minutes a time where you got so many artists in there. You know what I mean?

Audience Member

Is there a competitive element among singers to see who can do the best version on one riddim?

Jeremy Harding

Definitely. Very, very competitive. You have some artists who’ll wait until a bunch of guys record a song to see the caliber. People like Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, those guys. You have a track, they don’t come in at first to record nothing. They’ll say, “Go ahead,” and wait. And they’ll listen to the radio and say, “Oh, that’s what that artist is doing.” Then they go write their song, they’ll try to write a better song than all of them. So it’s very, very competitive that way. Some guys don’t care, like Capleton, Elephant Man, these guys, they don’t care, it doesn’t matter. Riddim, record, headphones, spit. Some of them are a lot more calculating and they want to make sure this thing has a certain class, is at a certain level, so if you have a riddim track and you only have these little unknown artists on it, they don’t want to put their song on that riddim track because what kind of company is that to be in? They want to be on a riddim with the big artists, so it is very tactical this whole game of who records what track, because they’re all fighting for the same stage shows and the same bookings and the same dubplates.

Kids will come all the way from Japan and they want exclusive reggae dubplates, they want specials. “I have a soundsystem. Here, it’s in the paper.” And the guy’s going to read it and cut an exclusive song for that soundsystem. So the kid from Japan comes and he’s got $10,000 dollars and he’s going to spend it. So you as an artist, you better make sure that your song on that collection, that riddim, is the baddest song so he’ll want you do an exclusive version for them. So you can’t take it lightly, like, “We’re all friends and we’re all one big happy family and we’re all in the dancehall community, we’re Jamaicans, everybody hug.” Nah, fuck that, you don’t have the hot song, you won’t get the dubplate and make a lot of money, and you won’t get the stage show, or you won’t get top billing on the show. “Your song wasn’t that big, you can come on at like ten o’ clock at night. Your song was huge, we’re saving you till three in the morning. How much money do you want?” So, very, very competitive.

Audience member

With the specials, how accessible are the artists for doing that and how much does it cost?

Jeremy Harding

Specials can cost anywhere between, depending on the artist, like an artist you really care about, maybe $200 all the way to $1,000, $1,500 per song. Usually, a lot of guys will come to Jamaica and hunt them down, go to the studio and get the specials done. Nowadays everybody has laptops and Roland VS880 machine, you can cut specials anywhere, hotel rooms, it doesn’t matter. Before you had to go the dub studio and pay the money, and have the lacquer plate and have the guy do the thing and it’s cutting at the same time, and you couldn’t fuck up, and you go [mimics blowing on dubplate]. That’s why you call it dubplates, because of the acetate lacquer that you use to press the mother stampers to make records. But they just take that acetate lacquer, that big heavy thick thing, and play that, that’ll be the dubplate.

But we’re in modern times, so it’s Pioneer CDJ, it’s all about Roland VS880 CD, that’s your new dubplate. But they’ll either get the artists that way, or if the artist is going on tour, say he’s going to Seattle and you have a guy in Seattle, they’ll find out where the artists are, go to the hotel and get the dubplates from them. Or they have guys in Jamaica who know artists who’ll go and beg them: “Listen, there is a friend of mine that has a soundsystem. Could you do something for them?” And they’ll do the transaction and get back the money. You have a soundsystem, you might be friendly with another soundsystem in Jamaica and they’ll do you a favor. So, yeah, anywhere between $200 and $1,500.

I’m not going to hide, most successful soundsystems are run by drug money, straight up. Nobody else can afford to pay that. Drug dealers who have soundsystems playing out, they can afford that. I’ve seen guys cut dubplates for one party, one time, with that person’s name in it. That record’s going to be played once, ever. It can never be played again. You come and cut a dubplate, say Bounty Killer. [imitates Bounty Killer’s voice] “Hey yo, king of these, biggest sound around town, bass odyssey, we’re going to kill you tonight, in New York, run the track.” And he’s saying it on the record. It’s for that dance, that particular night, it can never be played again and they pay Bounty Killer $1,500 for that. But that’s about soundsystem dominance, so when they get to the club it’s, “My sound is the biggest sound, I can afford to make a record with your name on it just to kill you tonight. I can play it once. I can take it off and it’s no use, but that’s how big I am.” It’s soundsystem dominance, but the dubplate thing, these guys take it seriously. It’s a whole subculture unto itself, it doesn’t have anything to do with what I do with managing Sean Paul and producing beats in the studio. In the same way that turntablist culture has split off from hip-hop. DJ culture and turntablist culture doesn’t have anything to do with what 50 Cent’s doing or Jay-Z’s doing. This is turntablists doing culture stuff, making beat CDs, making scratch things, doing DMC competitions, winning them, it’s a whole next discipline. The soundsystem thing in Jamaica, too, the clashing of the sounds, a whole other discipline. Nothing to do with us making records and the music.

Audience member

When you are producing a riddim do you work specifically on each song for each artist, or do you do it and then give it to the studio and then just run all the tunes?

Jeremy Harding

Some guys work differently. I can’t write DJ songs, I can’t write songs like that. I can make the rhythms, but I can’t think like them, I can’t write like them. So I will just create the track and to me, I don’t create the track. You create the lyrics and then I’ll produce the record from there. “I like that, I don’t like that. Do the melody this way. How about using that melody?” That’s how I work.

Audience member

And do you play with the arrangement after the vocal is recorded?

Jeremy Harding

Not usually. It depends. If it’s my artist, if it’s Sean Paul, then yeah. But for someone else, no, because then you start going haywire, everybody’s going to want to do something different. You’re going to have keep changing the whole riddim every two seconds. Take out this keyboard part, put in that part, replay this part and it goes all over the place. Some guys now will do a basic rhythm track, let the guys record their song and they might play a keyboard line with a melody to follow what the artist does. Some producers are writers who’ll actually create the riddim and have the song already written, guys like Dave Kelly and Tony Kelly. Those guys are real writers of music and have all the hits. That’s why they’re so successful. They’re writing the songs as well as the riddims, then saying, “This one will be good for Beenie Man.”

Audience member

The big tune on that riddim will be one that they wrote?

Jeremy Harding

Yeah, yeah. All of them, anything you hear from Dave Kelly, he writes all those songs. A lot of artists, when they’re on that that label, he writes. Some people work differently, they write songs for the artists, have ideas and sketch them out. Others like me, I just do the track. They’ll come with a song, and if I don’t like it, I’ll tell them to alter it. But I don’t consider myself enough of a writer of lyrics to pretend I can sit down and write a song for these guys. Depends how it works. Some people are even less hands-on than that. They’ll make a track and then give it to the artist, and the artists will go, “I have Digi02 Pro Tools at my house,” and they go and do it. But I don’t subscribe to that at all because that’s not producing. Fuck that. Give them the thing and they go off and do it and come back. Producing what? That’s not production, you made the beat. You had nothing to do with the recording of that record. I don’t like that personally but that’s what some people do.

Audience member

I know you’re not a part of the soundsystem culture, but what do you feel about a German sound winning the world clash now?

Jeremy Harding

It’s fantastic. That just goes to show you how much the culture is spreading. That’s amazing. From my perspective that’s great, because I’m trying to manage an artist and make records to reach people internationally. Maybe some people in Jamaica will be like, “That’s fucked up. How can a German sound win the soundclash? That’s bullshit.” But the soundsystem thing, the people decide. If you play in a hall that is 90% Jamaicans anyway, and they decide that the German soundsystem played best, who are you to talk? German sound wins. Canadian sound wins sometimes, Japanese sounds. Japanese kids playing reggae is tripped out. Mighty Crown and those guys.

They’re good and they can’t speak English, but they speak Jamaican patois and that’s what’s amazing to me. They come to Jamaica these kids, and not just Mighty Crown, and you’ll say, “How are you doing, you guys going out tonight?” And they’ll look at you and say, “Wha’? Me no unnerstan’.” “Wha’ gwan, you a go to club tonight?” “Yeah, man. Me a go to club tonight, man.” And it’s so weird, I met these chicks from Tokyo, and you know those travel books, the translation books? I swear to god, Japanese to Jamaican patois. I don’t know who makes the book. The girl had the book and she says, “Hold on.” And looks in the book and then says, “Yeah man, ya dun no me wan’ go tonight.” And she’s reading and I say, “Let me see that book.” Japanese–English–Jamaican patois, it’s her travel guide and she’s in Jamaica and her English sucks. You know what I mean? We’re an English-speaking country. I have my accent and we have our little slang, our patois, but it’s English, I’m talking English all the time. They don’t get it. Mighty Crown and these Japanese kids, they get on the mic, “Yo, you dun no, big up all the massive in the ‘ouse. Yo, come down.” And they can’t speak regular English and you’re like, “Yo, you’re students of the culture. That’s amazing, you take on language, everything, and you can play a soundsystem.” How can you not respect that? Come on.

Gentleman from Germany, he’s an amazing reggae artist, period. I don’t care where you come from or what color your skin is, the man is a tough artist. He comes and records for my friend [Don Corleone’s big smash record [starts singing]. You know what I’m saying? He plays in a dance in Jamaica, the place goes wild, mash up. Those guys are students of the music, of Luciano and Sizzla, and practice [their] craft. And he’s not trying to be fake. He don’t have no dreadlocks, he’s not trying to look like nothing. He just has his head shaved bald, and a little beard, dressed like a normal kid and he really loves his music.

Any time any culture outside Jamaica do it, Jamaica embraces them. They embrace Snow from Canada, they embrace Gentleman. They embrace all of these guys from the soundsystem because they’re showing something. “We really like your culture and we’re into your music. We’re not here posing or pretending to get something out of it.” What is there to get out of reggae music? What are you talking about? I’m barely able to sell any records. You have to rely on dubplates from drug dealers to make any money. It’s not like when guys say, “I want to be a rapper because I want to get on MTV and have a chain,” and all that dumb shit. Because we don’t have that. When you come into our music it’s because you really love our music. You’re making a pilgrimage to Jamaica to learn about the music, to get involved, and they will accept you. “Yeah man, my bredren from Germany, him a wicked selector.” And they work with you. And they love you because you love their thing. So it’s all good, the soundsystems just keep spreading the music more and more. If I can have a German soundsystem playing my music across Germany and Europe, playing the records that I make, that’s what I need. I need a New Zealand soundsystem playing the records that I make. UK, South America, all over the place. It can only help my music, so I can sell records and my artists can tour and go all over the whole world.

Sean Paul had a show three months ago in Madagascar. How the hell you get to go places like that in the world based on music? 50 Cent doesn’t do a show in Madagascar, neither does Jay-Z or Mariah Carey, but we do. So that whole cultural exchange is brilliant. Some of the places Sean has been to he didn’t even know where to find it on the map. “I don’t know, where is that? Here? There’s a show?” “Yeah. Someone’s paying you to go and perform there?” “You’re going to Poland, why?” “My record’s number three.” How the fuck can a Jamaican artist have the number three record in Poland? It’s bizarre to me. But you’re spreading music and they love it. It’s fantastic, man.

Audience Member

Earlier when you started talking you referenced a lot of different music that’s not directly connected to reggae and influenced you, like Nitzer Ebb and house and whatever. And it feels to me like the best riddims are always ones that are somewhat divergent from the regular patterns, like rhythm-wise and bassline-wise. To what extent do you think a producer has to be music-savvy person and understand about completely different styles in order to make the next big riddim and make it unexpected and make it go somewhere else no one else is going?

Jeremy Harding

I mean I think it’s very important, me personally, because I’m a lover of music, you understand? Not just reggae music or dance music. I love music. You listen to all kinds of music throughout your life and it influences how you want to make music. You get what I’m saying? I mean, I’ve got my hard rock guitar stuff or whatever and at the same time I can go and listen to soft R&B music, whatever. When I was a kid my dad would listen to classical music. Understand? I grew up listening to classical music. I think all influences are good. I don’t think you should be able to close yourself off. People have this impression, like, “I’m a hip-hop head so I listen to hip-hop because I’m keeping it real and like, fuck that soft shit.” That’s garbage. You understand what I’m saying?

People think that to try and prove something that they must listen to only this kind of music or only listen to only that kind of music. It doesn’t make any sense. You love music so you listen to all various influences and types of music. I think it’s very important because it makes your whole spectrum very broad. If you consciously try and take the music to put in, that’s one way of doing it, but sometimes subconsciously it will just come into it when you are making your music. You don’t realize it that you are playing some kind of melody and your friend will look at you like, “Yo, that kind of sounds like a little Spanish-y jazz type guitar. How come?” And you’re like, “I don’t know.” It doesn’t occur to you. You know what I mean, but you actually listen to that music. You are a fan of music. Understand. It can only make you better. Being able to play an instrument.

I’ve been producing music for years. I recently got back into playing my guitar. I had some reggae artist come by the studio last year and I’m fucking around on the guitar playing like a Les Paul and running some scale and they’re like, “You can play guitar?” I’m like, “Yeah.” That’s wicked. I didn’t know you were a real musician.” “What do you mean I’m a real musician? What the fuck?” Yo, I’ve been making records since like ‘93, ‘94 you know, but all of a sudden I’m now a real musician because they saw me playing a guitar. So all the records I’ve been making with all my keyboards and drum machine, I never qualified in their head as being a real musician. “Turntable? You’re not a real musician. You’re scratching records. Oh, you can play guitar. Now you are a real musician.” You know what I’m saying? Impressions that people have. You’re shocked. Jamie Foxx is a big actor and then he goes sings with Kanye and everybody’s like, “Oh, Jamie Foxx can sing. He can play piano.” Like, all of a sudden. He could always do it, but he was trying to be an actor. You know what I’m saying? He used to do the soundtracks for his [films], nobody cared. He was an actor, but he of course is a musician.

It all depends on your perspective, so the more things that you can learn… let me tell you something. It can only make you way more versatile as a DJ as a producer, as an engineer, like Jimmy [Douglass] was saying yesterday. He is an engineer. He can play a bass. He can play guitar. He can sing a little bit because part of his job when he’s making music... Artists come into my studio and start with something, I’d be like, “No, hold on. Do it this way.” “You can sing?” Dude, I make music. I can do it. Yeah, I’m not the greatest singer or the greatest guitar player or the greatest DJ, but I’ve found a way to take all those things to do what I need to do, so the more influences that you have, you know what I mean? Don’t be shy. You want to go join a choir right now? Go and join it. Don’t make your friends say, “Oh, what kind of sissy thing is that? You’re in a choir. You’re supposed to be this big producer.” No. Fuck that. Go learn to sing. It’s going to help you. You understand? Learn an instrument, guitar, piano, fucking saxophone, anything at all.

Go and work with hip-hop producers like the Neptunes. Them guys are multi-talented, you know. Work with them, like Pharrell and them guys. Believe you me, instruments, keyboard, they’re sick. Guitar, saxophone, they can play all the shit. Drums, they actually can play. Not because they are hip-hop guys making beats and stuff. They’re actual musicians. They can sing. You know what I mean? It really, really helps. So all them musical influences that I’ve taken and used to make music, and you can use it in a capacity. It makes you more versatile. You don’t know where the road is going to take you because, I’m telling you, I thought I was going to be a guitarist. Swore to God I was going to be a guitar player and then I was going to be a DJ. You understand what I’m saying? Now I end up being a reggae music producer and manager. You don’t know where the path is going to take you and all these influences helped you all along the way. You have to know about computers.

Everybody in Kingston comes to me to fix their Mac. All these kids with Pro Tools, Steely & Cleevie, they all come to me. “Jeremy is the guy, he knows about Macintosh. Oh, my shit crashed.” I know how to do it because I’ve taken an interest in learning about the tools which I have, so I’m saying to myself, “OK, at any given time I could go back and play on a radio station. I could work for a record company because I’m experienced in managing artists and fighting with the fucking record company for four years.” Right? I know what they think and how they work. I could be a Pro Tools engineer. You understand what I’m saying? I could just program beats.

You have so many other talents that you know that you could end up in different situations, so you never know what the situation is going to drop yourself into. You guys are all here. You’re DJs, you’re producers, you’re making music, you have your own dreams and ideas of what you think you want to do in the business. You never know what you are going to end up doing. You understand what I’m saying? To be so versatile. To be in any situation where... I keep referencing Jimmy yesterday. He had a great talk. He’s going to work with Jimmy Page. How can you do that? You have to know something about rap music and guitar playing. This guy’s like a guy who’s trying to be a producer, ends up being an engineer at Atlantic Records and is now recording something with Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, because the approach is so wide, so you know, “Oh, guitar. I understand that. Les Paul. No problem. What are you trying to do? Solos. Let me hear it. OK, let’s try this.” He can do it because he has the knowledge, and that’s all influences of music that you listen to all the while.

Embrace it all. All music is one thing. Music is just one whole thing. Yeah, OK, these guys are from this area and they are called rap and we are from here and we call it dancehall and some guys make this and they call it dance music and whatever. To me it’s the same. It’s just one. It’s just music. You know?

Audience Member

Stupid question probably, but where is Jamaican music going next?

Jeremy Harding

Where is it going?

Audience Member

Yeah.

Jeremy Harding

Well, I wish someone would tell me so I could know what to do. I don’t know. That’s a hard question, where is Jamaican music going next? I don’t know. Sometimes you think that with the success of a few international acts that it’s going to blow up. I don’t know. I think the influence of the music is spreading a lot. We have a lot more reggae in a lot more American music and music from around the world. People have a lot more... Hip-hop is at the point right now where everything can be hip-hop, like every beat can program and have a hip-hop feel to it that doesn’t really... Every commercial on TV has like a hip-hop beat or something. It changes. I think dancehall has reached a point where I can get like R. Kelly records and hear it and be like, “That’s dancehall, you can’t trick me, that ain’t R&B, that’s a dancehall beat, R. Kelly.” You know what I’m saying? [sings] It’s dancehall. Christina Milian, dancehall. Beyoncé. You hear so much influences in so much of the music. Certain rock groups do the certain things, and it’s spreading that way.

Jamaican music itself, where it’s going, I don’t know, that’s a very hard question. I guess the whole idea is that this new generation, we have our hands on the steering wheel. You understand? It’s not so much about where is it going and we’ll follow it. No, we can take it to them. It’s this generation right now, these kids here playing the music, me trying to manage the actors. It’s up to me, because the baton has been passed.

I love Sly and Robbie, they’re legends, and they did a great job, but the baton is passed. It ain’t up to Sly and Robbie no more to make this happen, or Black Uhuru, or Shabba Ranks, or the Wailers, or Bob Marley, or none of these people. It’s not up to them. No, it’s up to this generation. They have done their work and said, “We have done it, take this and build. This is a foundation. You guys carry it where you want to go.” You get mixed up with hip-hop, go ahead. Dance music, what you want to do? It’s your choice how you’re going to deal with it now, we’re good. Same with Sinead O’Connor, like on late night TV, [Sy & Robbie] backing her up. They’re cool, them guys nice, plenty Grammys, money. They’re good, they’re named legends, you can’t take that away from them. They’ve done their thing, understand? So we’re trying to build our new thing right now. Where is it going? I don’t know. We have to carry it there. So we’re still trying to figure it out ‘cause there’s no map. It’s all uncharted territory so we’re just trying to figure it out as we go along.

Audience Member

I know a little bit about the existence of riddims and stuff but maybe you can help me out from a Kingston point of view. What is the difference between reggae, dancehall, raggamuffin – do people in Jamaica make a real difference between these words, or is it just a label?

Jeremy Harding

Between the words? To us everything is reggae. It’s just one music, it’s reggae music. Dancehall specifically referred to a place. The dance hall, the place where they played the reggae music. Understand? So where the party is being kept, it is being kept at that dance hall. You get me? And they started calling it dancehall music and created a subgenre. For us, it’s just still reggae. The definition to us is just reggae music straight up. We make the friendship between an uptempo dancehall track and a downtempo one. We’ll call a downtempo one “one drop” or a “culture riddim.” Then we call an uptempo one dancehall, or you used to call it bashment but you don’t use that word again. “Jump up riddim,” they say that now. You say, “Yeah man, that’s a jump up riddim, it sounds nice.” [imitates riddim] A one drop is kind of like... [imitates riddim] A slow thing. We call it that, but to us it’s just reggae. We don’t really title it very different than that.

People keep trying to make a distinction but I don’t know, what passes for rock nowadays don’t have nothing to do with fucking Elvis and Chuck Berry and that shit. Linkin Park and Chuck Berry? It’s worlds apart [laughter] but you still call it rock music though. It’s rock, right? So then why is it you think that if it doesn’t sound like Bob Marley it can’t be reggae, it must have a different name? Not all music progresses the same way.

Audience Member

I’m not in need of a real labeling, I was just wondering because you’re from Jamaica, you’re from the streets of Kingston, so maybe you could help us out. It was just a question.

Jeremy Harding

It’s all reggae to us. We’re not trying to divide it up or nothing like that. We know the difference between a jump up and a one drop and all of that but we don’t really make that distinction. The problem happens when outside of Jamaica people want to say, “You’re not reggae, you don’t sound like Bob Marley so it can’t be reggae. You’re dancehall, it’s something that’s close to hip-hop.” Who made you decide what you can tell me my music sounds like. What the fuck are you talking about? This is reggae. Do you understand what I’m saying? So we don’t really make that distinction, you understand? Why should the distinction even be there? It doesn’t really make sense to me what’s different. The process is the same.

If you have an artist like Sizzla or Luciano, they record on the same jump up riddims and they record on the one drop, more traditional sounding riddims. Where does that really put them? They’re a dancehall artist? What’s Buju Banton? He’s a reggae artist, he’s not dancehall... They do all styles. So it’s pointless for us to try and divide it. To us it’s just reggae. The evolution of reggae sure, we call it dancehall as a young catchphrase for it. It’s still just reggae.

Audience Member

A lot the recent big riddims were going back to the roots, the Drop Leaf, Hard Times, Seasons riddims. Do you think that’s the new… trend? I wouldn’t call it trend because I think they’re all good.

Jeremy Harding

It gets popular right now. I think the people sometimes just want a break and they want to put their minds somewhere else. You have a lot of fast, uptempo, clubby sounding reggae or dancehall music not really talking about much. Talking about dancing or dance moves in the club and stuff like that. I think after a while people just kind of turn... That music is always there. Sometimes it’s not as popular but those artists always exist and they’re always there. It’s not really like them guys that is making that one song now and again. Yeah, it got very trendy recently to listen back to a lot of that downtempo, one drop stuff. It was embraced very well across the world as well. It suits what people’s traditional thinking of what reggae should sound like to them, and they really embrace it.

By the same token, what are we really talking about here? The world embraces it but by the same token my artist doesn’t do music like that necessarily and I can sell lots of records across the world. He’s popular and people like him the same way. It doesn’t really prove that any one form or any one style is no better or no better embraced by anybody. It’s just what they feel to do. I know the kid that produces that music, Don Corleone, he’s a good friend of mine. He just got sick of making that uptempo shit. Him personally, he just got bored. He just say, “Yo I’m going to make a one drop yah know, fuck it.” He just made something slow and nice.

To us it’s like old R&B music, put it that way. Like how hip-hop has R&B as the softer side of the black urban music. That one drop reggae sound in slow tempo stuff is like our R&B listening. When we don’t want to be into the hardcore, Bounty Killer, Vybz Kartel… That’s how we kind of see it. As our cool down, as our chill music to listen to. Inside the box of reggae it’s our down-time music.

Audience Member

Is it true that there’s a hatred for homosexuals in Jamaica?

Jeremy Harding

Jamaican culture...

Audience member

Maybe it’s a cliché?

Jeremy Harding

No, no, no, I’ll address it. Jamaican culture has a very strong sense of homophobia in the culture. I don’t want to pretend to tell you what the root of it is. There’s a lot of sexual repression in Caribbean countries. They also have a big problem with oral sex, for example. They see it as a demeaning act. A guy cannot go down on a girl, it is a demeaning act. It’s wrong, it’s evil, it’s dirty, it’s nasty. And homosexuality comes under that catalogue of those sexual acts. People have told me that the [anti-]oral sex phenomenon is to do with slaves and slave masters forcing slaves to perform sexual acts on them. I don’t know how far it goes. But yeah, as a culture they’re extremely homophobic.

It manifests itself in the music. You do have a gay community in Kingston, just like you anywhere in the world. My perspective is different. I grew up abroad and played house music in clubs, I don’t have time to be prejudiced against gay people. It’s bullshit to me, and there are a few people who might think that way too. But by and large the musical community, because it’s something that is inbred in the society, especially in the ghetto, they play on that a lot. You’ll have an artist that doesn’t have a hit song, he’s playing on stage and the crowd isn’t responding, he plays on the homophobia of the audience. “Yo, everyone who don’t like batty man put two hands in the air.” “Yeah, we don’t like them.” So they play on that so the artist gets some reaction. “Oh fuck, that works.” So if he keeps making records like that then they can’t deny the records, because if they deny the record that’s like them admitting that they’re gay. You see how it works? They go through this bullshit, it’s garbage. They’re homophobic but their favorite designer is Versace. It doesn’t make any sense. They embrace so many things around them that are part of gay culture or might be created by gays. But then they go, “Yo star, bun out.” But they do it because they get a reaction from the people so they keep making these records.

Now, with the backlash, what happens is this. They used to make records that used the words figuratively. When you hear a soundsystem record that says, “Killa soundboy,” they meant kill him with music. When they started making these records it wasn’t only homophobia – somebody who’s a thief has the same resentment toward him. It’s like a whole list of rules. If you do oral sex that’s a no-no. If you are gay, that’s a no-no. If you are a thief, that’s a no-no. A guy can be a murderer and get more respect than a thief. They’ll go, “Yeah man, respect man, bad man, gangster, kill nuff yout.” If you’re a thief, “Yo, bloodclaat thief.” They hate you. They have that kind of village justice. They catch a thief and they beat him to death. The police come and he’s dead in the middle of the road. Why? “Oh, he did steal two orange from there.” They hate it, and they have that mob violence mentality.

So the whole homophobic thing, they started to take it past the figurative speech and make it so literal, you have “bun a batty man,” “bun” meaning fire and “batty man” meaning gay. No, they started to [become], “Chop them up, hang them up, kill them, kill them with an AK.” That’s when the gay rights groups start saying, “What are you doing? You can’t make records like this. You’re advocating violence towards a group of people.” “No, we just mean it figuratively.” “Dude, you’re saying hang them, shoot them with the AK in the middle of the head. You’re giving instructions.” This is not figurative speech anymore, like, “Yeah, we just don’t like them so we’re saying throw the fire on them.” You take it to a next level. And they have every right to protest it.

The thing in Jamaica is that the artists are trying to make it an issue of freedom of speech, that they can do whatever they want to do. Dude, you’re advocating violence. They’re not saying you must embrace the lifestyle. But the violence is wrong. You want to make a record saying, “I don’t agree with the gay lifestyle, I’ll stick to the girls.” That’s fine. But when you’re telling people how to kill people? Now you’re advocating violence, that’s when it’s getting ridiculous. “So you know what? We’re going to protest every show. You’re not going to get your visas. You can’t come and perform here because you’re inciting violence against a group of people.” Some artists view it as a waste of time, why bother making these records anymore? Everybody knows Jamaica is a very homophobic society, which probably means you have a very large gay community there struggling to get out, which is why everyone’s so fucking paranoid about it. Every little thing, if a guy says to you, “Yo, nice shirt.” “You a faggot?” “No, I’m just telling you your shirt’s nice. Calm down.” So clearly you have problems with your own sexuality, or why do these things offend you so much? “Yo, it’s a batty man stance. Why sit so close to me on the couch?” It’s a mentality.

So they’ve been trying to encourage these artists to listen. “You know what? For the sake of your hardcore ghetto credibility, I know you’re never going to get up and say homophobia is rubbish, but you don’t have to make these songs about killing other people. That don’t make no fucking sense. And if the only way you’re going to learn is if we take it our of your pocket, then that’s what we’re going to have to do. So a lot of them say, “OK, fuck it, we won’t discuss that topic.” They might have their own personal viewpoint about it, that’s just your personal view, but advocating violence, that’s wrong. I don’t care, they know the position and they know the point and they’re only doing it because they cannot be creative enough to make other songs for people to like. So you’re trying to make a song that must get instant approval because you’re praying on the homophobic nature of the audience, They have to like the record. They can’t say, “I don’t like that record.” “Why, are you gay? Why don’t you like the record? We don’t like gays, remember? So we love that record.” And they play on that fact and it’s a cop out. It’s stupid. We don’t need to make records like that anymore.

Toby Laing

That was a good explanation for that phenomenon. And thank you very much for coming in today. Appreciate it.