The origins of music are a mystery. Though music has been universal in human cultures for tens of thousands of years, it doesn’t have an immediately-evident use, or for that matter the sort of obvious evolutionary function that such a ubiquitous adaptation presupposes. Perhaps, anthropologists speculate, it’s used to coordinate collective tasks or help create specific small-group identities.
I'm sure it does those things, but I’ll speculate: the origin of music is its role in the fundamental human task of soothing babies. If that's music's job, as well, I have a candidate for the evolutionary culmination of music as a whole, a name for the goal at which music was always aiming: Dub Syndicate, the British/Jamaican reggae collective, largely a project of the great London producer Adrian Sherwood and the late Jamaican drummer Style Scott.
My daughter Emma, born in 1988 in Charlottesville VA, was a "colicky" baby. In my recollection, she cried from two-six p.m. every single day for months on end. She was our first, and we didn't know what to do aside from go mental with love and desperation. It's really hard to listen to your baby cry. You're responsible for soothing her. When you can't, you get exasperated with everyone and everything, especially your parental self. We tried everything. But we evolved a routine: every day I carried her about or danced with her, her belly pressed to my shoulder. And played reggae music LPs, softly if possible, loud if needed. This was the only thing that worked in an enduring way.
No doubt this had to do partly with me rather than little Emma. I wanted to listen to reggae music. I still can't help moving and swaying when it comes on. The relatively slow, steady rhythm persists from song to song. It's like the whole genre is a single beat or a single song, and I thought it might remind Emma of the sound of the heartbeat in the womb (a lot of the reggae I was playing was on the label Heartbeat Records). To be honest, I couldn’t have listened to that much pop music or that many show tunes or any more Mozart (as actually recommended by our pediatrician), without losing it even worse. But the reggae soothed not only Emma, but my own jangling nerves.
That's why I'll always associate that period of my life with the music of Augustus Pablo, the reggae melodica player and producer whose "far east" sound is half-Marley, half-klezmer, and whose meditative instrumental tracks create a mood of relaxation, as well as routes to Rasta enlightenment. As we went on, I started amassing dub albums by fundamentally innovative producers like King Tubby (an all-time classic is his collaboration with Pablo, King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown) and Scientist. In Charlottesville, it wasn't that easy to find these records. My brother Adam, a club deejay in DC, sent import dub albums along.
Adam was a particular fan of Sherwood, whose work he played constantly in clubs from around 1980. Pretty soon he was meeting ships in Baltimore to try to get the latest from Sherwood and collaborators in the "On-U" sound system such as Tackhead and Keith LeBlanc. Sherwood was doing different sorts of electronic/pop experimentation, but his straight-up reggae dub was about the wildest and hardest thing out there. In the 1990s, after Emma had stopped being a colicky baby and started being a beatific toddler, kid, tween etc., Sherwood and Scott with many collaborators (including the aforementioned Scientist) issued records as Dub Syndicate, classics of the form. I might particularly recommend the early compilation known as Murder Tone.
Sherwood seems to be in the process of re-issuing or remastering the Dub Syndicate catalogue, one early result the new album Obscured by Version. This re-issue program, as it happens, is emerging just in time. Emma, now 37, has a fussy baby of her own, Louisa. We're not sure what's wrong really, and Louisa is pretty severely underweight. She's in the hospital as I write this, and I've just returned from a week or two trying to help out. I found myself with Louisa on my shoulder, trying to give her parents a break by swaying to music. After various experiments, we returned to reggae. After more experiments, we narrowed fully down to Dub Syndicate.
Often when Louisa appears inconsolable, Dub Syndicate calms her bit by bit. The effect seems pretty dramatic and hard to miss: her whole body relaxes. When the song starts to fade, she starts crying. When the next one kicks in, she stops. Her parents and I just look at each other with amazement. It's hard to deny that, in the words of William Congreve, "Musick has Charms to soothe the savage Breast." Or, for that matter, the baby's breath.
Soothing fussy babies might be key to concealing a vulnerable group. It might be key to helping the baby calm down long enough to eat and hence survive. It might be key to de-frazzling parents and grandparents and keeping everyone in a relatively non-hostile condition. After that, these human babies might grow up knowing and expecting music in their own lives, to soothe their own babies and to stimulate their adult selves, to help establish rhythmic relations to the seasons, the gods, and one another. Obviously, that’s speculative.
But aside from the speculation, I can't believe I've gotten another chance to test the hypothesis live in my function as "Pop-Pop Au Pair." Walking around with a baby on my shoulder listening to Dub Syndicate puts me in the weirdest time warp, well represented by Sherwood's dramatic echo effects. At times I seem to forget, as the dub reverberates down the decades, what generation it is or which person is a baby and which a mama, which person is a parent and which a grandparent (I think it's me, though).
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell