The sound system concept first became popular in the 1940s, in the
parish of Kingston. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and set up street parties.
Tom the Great Sebastian, founded by Chinese-Jamaican businessman Tom Wong, was the first commercially successful sound system and influenced many sound systems that came later. In the beginning, the DJs played American
rhythm and blues music, but as time progressed and more local music was created, the sound migrated to a local flavour. Sound systems were big business, and were one of the few sure ways to make money in the unstable economy of the area. The promoter or DJ made profits by charging admission and selling food and alcohol with often thousands of people in attendance. By the mid-1950s, the sound system was more popular at parties than live musicians, and by the second half of the decade, custom-built systems began to appear from the workshops of specialists such as
Hedley Jones, who constructed wardrobe-sized speaker cabinets that he called "House[s] of Joy". It was also around this time that Jamaica's first superstar DJ and MC,
Count Machuki, rose to prominence. As time progressed, sound systems became louder—capable of delivering bass at power levels of 30,000 watts or more, with similar wattage attainable at the mid-range and high frequencies—and far more complex than their predecessors. Competition between these sound systems was fierce, and eventually three DJs emerged as the stars of the scene:
Clement "Coxsone" Dodd,
Duke Reid and King Edwards. Besides the DJ, who rapped over the music, there was also a
selector, who selected the music/rhythm tracks. Writer
Lloyd Bradley has described Jamaican sound system sessions as highly participatory, with a close relationship between deejays and their audiences. Performances often involved crowd interaction, with attendees singing along to popular or exclusive tracks, sometimes encouraged by the operator lowering the volume during choruses. This dynamic reinforced a sound system’s reputation and encouraged showmanship, distinctive stage personas, and the continual pursuit of exclusive recordings. The popularity of a sound system was mainly contingent on one thing: having new music. In order to circumvent the release cycle of the American record labels, the sound system operators turned to record production. Initially, they produced only singles for their own sound systems, known as "Exclusives" or
Dubplates—a limited run of one copy per song. What began as an attempt to replicate the American
R&B sound using local musicians evolved into a uniquely Jamaican musical genre:
ska. An important part of sound system culture is the
sound clash, an organized battle between two systems. The Guinness Sounds of Greatness is one of many such clashes. In 2009, the Guinness clash was organized into three parts: a "juggling" round, where each system gets 15 minutes to get the crowd going; a "tune fe tune" exchange of "commercial releases"; and a "dub-fe-dub", when the systems alternate "specials done specifically for the sound system playing the recording". The culture of the sound system was brought to the UK with the mass immigration of Caribbean people in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable UK Sound Systems include
Sir Coxsone Outernational,
Jah Shaka,
Channel One,
Aba Shanti-I,
Jah Observer,
Quaker City,
Iration Steppas,
Fatman International and
Saxon Studio International. One of the first sound systems in the United States was Downbeat the Ruler, founded in
Bronx, New York, in the late 1970s.
DJ Kool Herc, known as the Father of Hip-Hop, was responsible for importing many of the elements of Jamaican sound system culture to New York. Having immigrated with his family to the Bronx from Kingston at the age of 12, Herc grew up around dancehall parties, and despite being too young to enter, he would hang out outside the parties and listen to the music. When he started hosting his own parties in New York, he was known for having the loudest and most impressive sound system of anyone in the city, which heavily emphasized
bass. He also introduced
MCs (Masters of Ceremony) to the Bronx party scene, who are considered by some to be the first hip-hop rappers, as they emulated the
toasting style of Jamaican reggae deejays. Sound systems were the method in which Jamaican migrants were able to maintain their cultural connection with their roots. They broadcast the remixed samples of reggae beats and created an underground music culture. These sound systems were played in warehouses, clubs, and street corners. This was not simply just music played on the radio for a few people to hear, but a culture that involved many people was developed out of being consumed by sound through large sound systems. Sound system culture presented what Julian Henriques refers to as sonic dominance. He is strategic in his usage of the word dominance because it is visceral and this term embodies the "power and the pleasure of the sonic" (452). The sound is an "enveloping, immersive, and intense experience" (451). The experience is so strong that "sounds carry people, as much as people carry sounds; 'vibes' find bodies to move" (230). Dance acts as a natural, immediate response to dancehall sounds, and as Henriques puts it, "bodies have no musical burden to bear; rather they are borne along, even berthed, by music." According to Henriques, the sound system has also played an influential role in the global influence of Jamaican music internationally. It has "proved itself to be one of the most efficient of musical distribution mechanisms," (218) which has resulted in Jamaican music's influence on genres such as
Hip hop,
Jungle, and
Dubstep. ==In popular culture==