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Dub Poetry In And From Jamaica

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 2
2 History and Development of Dub Poetry 3
2.1 The Development of Jamaican Creole – Short Overview 3
2.2 The Oral Tradition 4
2.3 From the B-side of a Record via “Toasting” to Dub Poetry 6
3 The Correlation of the Rastafarians, Reggae and Dub 9
3.1 The Rastafarians 9
3.2 The Peculiarity of Dub 10
3.3 Artists and Scenes 12
3.3.1 The Jamaican Scene 12
3.3.2 The British Scene 13
3.3.3 The Canadian Scene 14
4. Structural Characteristics of Dub Poetry 15
4.1 Patois – the Language 15
4.2 Rhythm 15
4.3 Performance 17
5 Linguistic Analysis of Dub Poetry Lyrics and Performance 18
5.1 Linton Kwesi Johnson 18
5.2 Wat about di Workin Claas? 19
5.3 Tings an Times – Performance Aspects in Comparison 21
6 Reflection 23
7 Bibliography and Discography 24
8 Appendix 25


1 Introduction
Dub poetry is often said to be a musical genre due to its close connection to reggae music, but a second glance reveals quite obviously dub poetry’s affiliation to a literary form rooted in the oral tradition of Jamaica. The generally accepted creed of dub poetry is “Word, Sound and Power”, it is self-proclaimed and clearly underlines it’s peculiarity in terms of the spoken word being the central medium. It is therefore not comparable to western poetry because the content of a dub poem achieves its value through the Creole language and the integrated rhythm (cf. Habekost 1986, 9f.).
But the term “dub poetry” as such is not easy to define and aroused controversial discussions in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, because some of the artists simply did not see themselves as dub poets. The term itself was coined by Oku Onuora, referring to it “as a technical term describing the process of sound engineering at a mixing desk in a recording studio”(Habekost 1993a: 206), but many poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka front this term rather critically because they fear to be restricted to reggae (cf. Habekost 1993a: 206).
Even...