The power of cultural reclamation

‘Version’ is an old reggae term I’ve always loved. It refers to a stripped-down, rhythm-heavy instrumental mix of a song, traditionally dubbed onto the B-side of a single. On paper the concept sounds throwaway, and often it was. Over time, however, using reverb and a fair degree of ingrained madness, pioneering Jamaican producers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, King Tubby and U-Roy twisted ‘versions’ into mind-bending shapes. Time-stretched DJs toasted new rhymes over the top, and dub was born, an art form built from borrowed parts and hair-brained ingenuity.

The notion that popular music is now obsessed with recycling old content is not necessarily fanciful, but it can be reductive. It’s true that release schedules – and my inbox – are filled with news of reissues, anniversary editions of half-forgotten albums, padded-out ‘deluxe’ versions of records younger than your car, box-sets of demos and studio scrapings. That’s before all those tours where vintage artists dutifully perform an entire record from their glory days.

Cherry understands that interacting with legacy does not have to be nostalgic or lazy

But this churn of cultural reclamation is not new, and it comes in many different stripes. One of the joys of Bob Stanley’s recent pre-pop history Let’s Do It is how it illuminates the extent that popular music, as far back as the early 1900s, has always been a dialogue between an eternally evolving now and a constantly looming then. Jazz artists and the most adept interpreters of the Great American Songbook spent entire careers circling the same repertoire. Frank Sinatra recorded ‘Night and Day’ on umpteen occasions, each time bringing new slivers of weathered experience to the reading. Remake. Remodel. If pop has a raison d’être, there it is.