Sicko Mode is the big single off Travis Scott’s
album Astroworld.
It was one of the most sonically adventurous
hits of 2018.
This song has been described as “whacked-out
and skittery” —
Billboard said “there's no disguising how
weird "Sicko Mode" is as a pop song.”
So what made this song so bizarre to so many critics
and listeners?
For one -- its structure: Sicko Mode is essentially
three songs in one, each section riding on
a completely different beat.
But even more so it’s the moments before
these beat switches that sounded like nothing
else on the radio.
Take this moment, halfway through:
“Who put this shit together I’m the glue”
"Shorty facetimed me out the blue"
Before the beat switches, two things happen:
First, all the music drops off except for
the vocal and what sounds like a distorted
kick drum.
“Someone said”
And then, this happens:
“Someone said, motherfuck what someone said
(Don't play us for weak)”
A vocal sample echoes over and over into silence.
These spacious interludes in the song can
be traced back to a genre of music that has
influenced everything from punk rock and hip-hop
to pop for nearly half a century.
Jamaican dub.
Jamaicans are a people obsessed with audio.
In the 1950s, DJs in Kingston, Jamaica’s
capital, would load up their trucks with a
turntable, a stack of American rhythm and
blues records, and massive speakers, to play
at parties.
These sound systems - the DJ and their setup
- gained cult followings - each one taking
on their own whimsical names.
Like Duke Reid’s The Trojan
Coxsone’s Downbeat
And Mutt and Jeff’s Sound
Named after the comic strip.
Through the 50s and 60s, the speakers got
more complex, but the basic set up remained
the same.
Deejaying was basically like one turntable,
a mixer, and an echo chamber. And it was really
about who had the cleanest, clearest, loudest
sound.
That’s Chris Leacock: He’s a DJ and producer
who goes by the name Jillionaire. He’s part
of the group Major Lazer.
For the most part you know you have a subwoofer,
You have a midrange speaker, and then you
have a horn or tweeter which is your high
end.
Certain frequencies you will hear out of certain
boxes. Whether
it’s a drum, the bass, the piano, the hammond
organ - it all goes in somewhere along the
line on the sound system.
This is Mikey Dread, he's one-third of Channel One, a UK based
sound system that's been around since 1979.
When the sound system drops the bass you feel
it from your feet right up to your belly.
Competition between the sound systems was
fierce - deejays would scratch the labels
off of their most popular r&b tunes so other
sound systems didn’t know what they were
playing.
And when American r&b was taken over by rock
& roll, Jamaicans looked to their own musicians
for a new sounds - that led to Ska which became
Jamaica’s first form of pop music.
Through the 1960s, Ska evolved into the slower
tempo Rocksteady, and then Reggae.
By the 1970s there were a handful of highly
prolific recording studios across Kingston
churning out reggae hits that blasted across
those sound systems.
It’s at Treasure Isle Records, though, where
things started to shift into new sonic territory.
This is King Tubby -
A radio repairman turned music engineer who
would radically change the sound of reggae.
He worked at Treasure Isle and was tasked
with stripping the vocals out of songs to
produce instrumental versions that would show
up on the b-sides of singles.
Through this process, he realized he could
produce unique versions of songs if he added
and subtracted different aspects of the track.
In doing so, he created a new genre called
dub.
Dub - in its most basic form - is taking a
song, stripping out the lead vocals, pumping
up the bass and drums, and adding effects
like echo and reverb.
That sounds simple enough, but King Tubby
and other legendary dub producers like Lee
Scratch Perry, Augustus Pablo, and Scientist
made this an art form.
Their studios were laboratories filled with
gear that they pushed far beyond their supposed
limits.
The best way to understand how dub works is
by listening to a song’s original version.
Since you likely won’t have time to build
a wall of custom speakers to feel the bass,
you should probably put on your headphones.
Here’s a few seconds of ”I Admire You”
“Hey, girl, I admire you”
On the flip side is “Watergate Rock,” King
Tubby’s dub version
The first thing you’ll notice is that the
vocals are stripped out and the bass line
has been pushed to the foreground.
You also might have noticed this sound right
here:
That weird snare hit didn’t show up in the original,
but it was a King Tubby staple,
likely achieved with this piece of gear right here:
The Fisher Space Expander.
Released in the early 60s, the Space Expander
was a spring reverb unit originally meant
for home hi-fi systems and even cars.
The idea was that you’d connect it to your
home turntable, and with the slight twist
of a knob, soundwaves bouncing through the
spring would simulate “the natural reverberation
of a well designed auditorium.”
In King Tubby’s hands, this machine did
more than its makers intended. He used it
in subtle ways to make an old fashioned snare
drum sound otherworldly.
But he also found a whole other way to create
effects that were anything but subtle.
The only way this effect right here:
could have been achieved is if King Tubby
physically shook the spring, and that’s
exactly what he did.
He turned the gear into an instrument.
The effect became a King Tubby trademark and
would go down as one of the most discordant
sounds in dub music.
Among the thumping bassline, wobbly snare
hits, and the clanging of metal springs is
another quintessential effect in dub, and
my personal favorite: Echo.
Tape delay, which creates that echo sound,
was developed in the 1950s.
It’s the process of recording sound to magnetic
tape and using the distance between the recording
head and playback head to create audio feedback.
By the 1970s tape delay had been used on
dozens of iconic recordings, albeit in very
subtle ways.
From Elvis Presley
“Oh baby, baby, baby”
To The Beatles
"Well they took some honey from a tree
Dressed it up and they called it me"
"Everybody's trying to be my baby"
Dub artists used tape delay like their lives depended on it.
Mikey Dread: The word echo, alone, is represented
in reggae music. So if you really don’t
have echo something is missing.
While there were dozens of different types
of units that could create echo - two that
found their way into many dub tracks of the
1970s were the Roland Space Echo and Maestro
Echoplex.
If you open the tops of both - you’ll see
that there’s not much to it: A single magnetic
tape spinning in an infinite loop.
But when the knobs of these machines were
turned to extreme combinations - the results
were trippy.
Take a listen to Jacob Miller’s song "Baby I Love You So"
That melodica you hear is being played by Augustus
Pablo, the producer of the track. He was a
protege of King Tubby and mixed the dub version
of this song at his studio.
The result is one of Dub’s most
celebrated tracks: "King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown"
 
A heavy dose of echo applied to the slivers
of vocals and melodica make the song feel
like it’s floating in outer space.
When King Tubby left Treasure Isle to
build his own studio, he did that not just
to have his own space to experiment, but to
produce unique dub versions for his own sound
system: Tubby’s Hometown Hi-Fi.
The story goes that the first time he played
a dub version, the
crowd went wild.
Today, we’ve come to expect a heavy bass
line, reverb, and echo, because dub’s influences
have made their way into nearly every genre
of music.
But sometimes those sounds still surprise
us:
Whether deliberate or not, Sicko Mode's production mirrors the sonic themes
that Jamaican dub music pioneered decades ago.
It is a very typical kind of like King Tubby, Lee Scratch kind of production
in terms of one song going in you know two
or three completely different directions.
Dub music has evolved with every generation
but its spirit of sonic experimentation has
always stayed the same.
In our sessions it's like a spiritual movement,
makes your mind go into your own - no matter who’s
around you.
We don’t stop playing reggae music. Rastafari.
