Editing Dub music (section)

==Afrofuturism and Diaspora==

Dub music is in conversation with the cultural aesthetic of [[Afrofuturism]]. Having emerged from [[Jamaica]], this genre is regarded as the product of [[diaspora]] peoples, whose culture reflects the experience of dislocation, alienation and remembrance. Through the creation of space-filling soundscapes, faded echoes, and repetition within musical tracks, Dub artists are able to tap into such Afrofuturist concepts as the nonlinearity of time and the projection of past sounds into an unknown future space. In a 1982 essay,<ref>Ehrlich, Luke. "X-Ray Music: The Volatile History of Dub", in ''Reggae Interventional'', ed. Stephen Davis and Peter Simon. New York: R and B Books, 1982, 104</ref> Luke Ehrlich describes Dub through this particular scope:

{{Blockquote|text=With dub, Jamaican music spaced out completely. If [[reggae]] is Africa in the New World, then dub must be Africa on the moon; it's the psychedelic music I expected to hear in the '60s and didn't. The bass and drums conjure up a dark, vast space, a musical portrait of outer space, with sounds suspended like glowing planets or the fragments of instruments careening by, leaving trails like comets and meteors. Dub is a kaleidoscopic musical montage which takes sounds originally intended as interlocking parts of another arrangement and using them as raw material, converts them into new and different sounds; then, in its own [[rhythm]] and format, it continually reshuffles these new sounds into unusual juxtapositions.}}

At the same time, dub music's role in the Black musical canon marks a theme of the diaspora the music was birthed from. Due to the sonic structure of echoes and reverberations, dub can create a dream-like world symbolizing the generational trauma of African diaspora as a result of slavery.<ref>Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.</ref> This understanding of dub gives it the power to take on the darker emotions related to the diaspora, including violence. In [[King Tubby|King Tubby's]] dub mixes, one can hear sonic elements of screeching tires, gun fire, and police sirens.<ref name="Veal, M. 2007">Veal, M., 2007. Dub: songscapes and shattered Songs in Jamaican reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.</ref> Artist Arthur Jafa said this about dub music and the diaspora in 1994 during a keynote address at the Organization of Black Designers Conference:<ref name="Veal, M. 2007"/> 
{{Blockquote|text=those group experiences that reconfigure who we [African Americans] are as a community. One of the critical primal sites would be the Middle Passage. If you understand the level of horror directed towards a group of people, then you start getting some sense of the magnitude, impact, and level of trauma that that had on the African American community, and how it was particularly one of the earliest group experiences that reshaped an "African psyche" into the beginning of an African American psyche. . . . Now, for example, you look at Black music and see certain structural things that really are about reclaiming this whole sense of absence, loss, not knowing. One of the things I'm thinking about is dub music . . . it ends up really speaking about common experiences because the structure of the music is about things dropping out and coming back in, really reclaiming this whole sense of loss, rupture, and repair that is very common across the experience of black people in the diaspora.}}

William Gibson frequently mentions dub in the 1984 science fiction novel [[Neuromancer]].
{{Blockquote|text=As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.}}

{{Blockquote|text="We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."}}