Danny writes:

“Read your piece on your blog with interest re. roots reggae. I think the guy from Agony Shorthand is onto something to a degree, though I’d never dismiss 70’s roots as irrelevant. Part of this comes out of my own tastes, part comes from things you can document. […]

A lot of old white skins and ska fans will say they moved away from reggae when it got more rasta/black conscious, think it lost a lot of white working class fans fer sure. In terms of my own tastes when I started listening to reggae, I liked the blood and thunder of steppers stuff, but later on I began to appreciate the vocal cuts and arrangements of rocksteady groups like The Heptones, Techniques etc. I think I was kind of primed for this by being into soul heavily a few years earlier.

A lot of roots fans strike me that they don’t appreciate this stuff as they never had these kind of tastes. Reminds me of my mates who were into house music who never liked garage because they’d been grown up on guitar stuff and punk wock. The classic verification of this is if you listen to any of the older electronic music off the continent – Front 242 and stuff like that. Never been near black music.”

And, as ever, I unashamedly bow down to his superior experience and knowledge in the area. But that doesn’t let Mr Agony off, oh no. I have no problem with people preferring Rocksteady to Roots – that can often be a preference which people who are deep into the music develop.

I think what annoyed me was the outright dismissal of roots and the objections to the relevance of class, something which Danny quite rightly reintroduces to the equation. There’s a lot to be written about this, and needless to say I’m not going to magically stump up 5000 words on the topic off the top of my head.

In a follow up email Danny pointed out that in some ways, roots is still relevant because there are still people making it and playing it out on soundsystems, whereas rocksteady is more of a retro collectors thing (not that there is anything wrong with that either because the music is amazing and should be heard).