Saturday 20 June 2009

Dubstep Poetry. Part One, an LKJ Mashup






Here at BLS we love dubstep, but the sparse minimal beats are often crying out for some vocals and spoken word and poetry seems to work much better than rapping/spitting. We are currently working on some new studio tracks in collaboration with the veteran Poet and writer Jon Row with help from the band the Hipniks. You will be able to hear that on these pages soon.

In the meantime i was inspired by Malorie Blackman's (author of 'Noughts and Crosses')recent TV documentory 'My Life In Verse' that featured some of my favourite poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. (Watch it here)

Linton Kwesi Johnson's 'Dread Beat An Blood' album produced by dub master Dennis Bovell was the album that turned me onto both dub and spoken word/poetry in the 1980's. Revolutionary music and words that seems just as relevant to society today.

What better way to highlight this than to mash up some vintage verse and interviews with L.K.J with the best of the music that is the new dub reggae, and specifically by the master of the genre called dubstep, namely Skream. The tracks are Digital Mystic's remix of 'Request Line', 'Lightning Dub' and the 'Get Up, Stand Up' sampling 'Babylon Timewarp'. The L.K.J verse is culled from two TV interviews/features pasted below where LKJ counters accusations that he was partly for responsible for the 1981 Brixton Riots and one of the poems itself 'The Great Insurrection'.




We are also loving this deeply dubby disco LKJ mix from the Noodleman : check him out here http://soundcloud.com/thenoodleman
LKJ - Reggae Sounds (The Noodleman Dub) by The Noodleman

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