In Jamaican popular culture, a sound system is a group of disc jockeys, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music.
As time progressed, sound systems became louder—capable of playing bass frequencies at 30,000 watts or more, with similar wattage attainable at the mid-range and high frequencies—and far more complex than their predecessors.
[4] Competition between these sound systems was fierce, and eventually three DJs emerged as the stars of the scene: Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Duke Reid and King Edwards.
[7] What began as an attempt to replicate the American R&B sound using local musicians evolved into a uniquely Jamaican musical genre: ska.
[6] This shift was due partly to the fact that as American-style R&B was embraced by a largely white, teenage audience and evolved into rock and roll, sound system owners created—and played—a steady stream of the singles the people preferred: fast-shuffle boogies and ballads.
Nevertheless, as a cultural and economic phenomenon, the sound system was affected by the vast socio-political changes taking place in Jamaica at this time.
DJ Kool Herc, known as the Father of Hip-Hop, was responsible for importing many of the elements of Jamaican sound system culture to New York.
He also introduced MCs (Masters of Ceremony) to the Bronx party scene, who are considered by some to be the first hip-hop rappers, as they emulated the toasting style of Jamaican reggae deejays.
[14] While part of its influence can literally be credited to its superior audio fidelity over radio, the sound system also acts as a symbolic transmitter of shared experiences across the African diaspora.
The film Babylon, released in 1980, so accurately captured the raw smoldering tensions between White and British Afro-Caribbeans centered around Brixton in the 1970s and 1980s, that it would be given an X rating in the UK and blacklisted in the United States, due to its depiction of institutional racism.
Believed to be too incendiary for general distribution, it would be buried and forgotten following its premiere at Cannes, and would take another 40 years before it would be re-released by Kino Lorber in 2019 and made available in the United States on The Criterion Channel in 2020.