Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd

摘要

When the post-war Jamaican immi-grants stepped off the ship in London- the women in A-line dresses, the men in neat hats- Jamaican music was a sleepy and harmless thing. Tallymen tallied bananas, and yellow birds sang in the trees. Few would have believed that in half a century the island's sound, played round the world, would be so heavily percussive and explicit that it would form a natural background for Yardie fights for drug turf in Brooklyn or Brixton. Clement Dodd (the "Sir" was adopted, and the "Coxsone" was borrowed from a Yorkshire cricketer whose style he admired; he was always "Sir Coxsone" on the streets of Jamaica) never liked what the music had become. Reggae was meant to express peace, love and human solidarity. He lost patience with it once computers were brought in and obscenity cluttered the lyric line. Yet much of it was his music all the same, based on rhythms he and his players had invented in his tiny studio in Kingston. In the time-honoured tradition of the Jamaican recording industry, brash young musicians kept copying his "rid-dims", sampling and recycling them, to lay under new songs. In his later years, Mr Dodd employed lawyers to watch for copyright infringement. They may as well have policed an ants' nest.