sound system
A mobile DJ rig consisting of large stacked speakers, amplifiers, turntables and (crucially) a crew of selectors and MCs who run it.
Definitions
A mobile DJ rig consisting of large stacked speakers, amplifiers, turntables and (crucially) a crew of selectors and MCs who run it. Sound systems are the foundational cultural institution of modern Jamaican music: starting in 1950s Kingston with operators like Tom the Great Sebastian, Duke Reid and Sir Coxsone Dodd, they were the public dance halls of the Jamaican working class and the engine room of every major Jamaican genre that followed. Out of the sound-system tradition came ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall and the toasting style that later seeded hip-hop. The model travelled with the Windrush generation to the UK, where Caribbean sound systems gave birth to lovers rock, jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and grime. "Sound system" can mean the equipment, the crew, or a sound clash event.
their sound system been running every Carnival since 1976
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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Other words near "sound system" (S)
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Related terms
Semantically related
- rude boy62%
Originally a label for a 1960s Kingston street-youth subculture: sharply dressed young men in slim suits, narrow ties, pork-pie hats and dark glasses, associated with sound-system dances, ska and rocksteady, and (in the moral panics of the day) with violence and the burgeoning urban gang scene of post-independence Jamaica. The figure was immortalised in songs like Desmond Dekker's "007 (Shanty Town)" and the Wailers' "Rude Boy". When ska reached Britain via the Windrush generation, the rude-boy aesthetic was adopted and adapted by the UK mod, skinhead and especially the late-1970s two-tone revival (The Specials, Madness, The Beat), becoming a defining look of British working-class youth culture. Today the term is also used loosely and affectionately for any bold or fashion-forward young man.
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A style of reggae music involving mixing of different audio tracks.
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American slang for a boombox — a large, portable radio and cassette or CD player that could be carried on the shoulder, popular from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The 'jam' element refers to music ('jams'), and the 'box' to the device itself. Part of the vocabulary of hip-hop and street culture in urban America. Today the word sometimes extends to portable Bluetooth speakers.
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Trinidad-born dance music — soul of calypso — with fast, driving rhythms that dominate Caribbean carnivals. Machel Montano and Destra Garcia are genre figureheads. 2024 saw multiple soca crossovers into US/UK pop charts.
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A genre of music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1970s and developed into a range of styles during the 1980s and after which primarily includes influences of African and Indian rhythms.