Science into Pop: Triangulating Legitimacy in Three Experimental Music Traditions

How can the case of Jamaican dub reggae broaden our understanding of music experimentation?

This paper revisits Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s important 1987 book Art into Pop with a view to revising its central premise; rather than focus on the influence of fine art theory on mid-century rock, I strategically reorient the discourse towards “science”—not science in the conventional sense of the word but, rather, the vernacular tradition of tinkering and experimentation with audio technology associated with Jamaican dub reggae. Using historical analysis of music press discourse, this article restores a third musical tradition largely missing from Frith and Horne’s original analysis, a musical tradition marked by a different set of infrastructural conditions and evaluative logics when compared to those that characterise the broad umbrella category of the avant-garde art and what Frith and Horne call art rock. I therefore triangulate the until-now bidirectional flow of ideas in mid-century experimental music in a way that has far-reaching ramifications beyond the focus of this paper. By conceptualising music press discourse as a mediating technology across the three categories of art rock, dub science, and high art, I uncover an inchoate genealogy of musical experimentation where the exciting dissolution of the boundary between music and sound emerges not from mid-century musical modernism but from dub reggae.

Mimi Haddon is a musicologist with research interests in issues of genre, identity, and cultural legitimation. She is the author of What is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 (2020), and led the AHRC Networking Grant Music for Girls: Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music. She is currently working on a book about the list as a hidden technology in music culture.