BASS, RESISTANCE, AND
REVOLUTIONARY LOVE
THE GLOBAL SOUND
SYSTEM REVOLUTION
Sound system culture didn’t begin as a genre. It began as survival technology and ritual space — a people’s broadcast and a sanctuary of bass — built by communities shut out of official power to create their own public square, their own media, to chant down Babylon, and to turn despair into hope.
A sound system is a machine: speaker stacks, amps, turntables, dubplates, a crew. But it’s also a social force — a way of taking space, telling stories, and building unity loud enough to be felt in the ribs. When the official, mainstream channels preach one reality, people build their own congregation around the speakers.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, that same culture has braided into Māori struggles for tino rangatiratanga (absolute sovereignty) and mana motuhake (self-determination). From the land occupations at Bastion Point (Takaparawhau) and Raglan (Whāingaroa) to contemporary hīkoi for Toitū te Tiriti, reggae and sound system culture have often been a soundtrack of resistance — not as borrowed symbolism, but as lived solidarity. Herbs’ “One Brotherhood” names Raglan and Ōrākei directly, grounding the vibration in local history and reminding us that revolutionary music is also community care: love with teeth, rhythm with purpose.
Kingston: building a people’s broadcast
In 1950s Jamaica, the sound system rose in the cracks left by colonial culture. For many working-class people, radio wasn’t speaking to them — and often wasn’t accessible anyway — so the streets and yards became the station. The BBC and its local echoes didn’t just broadcast music; they broadcast ‘authority’ — the manners, priorities, and “respectability” of Empire, with working-class Black life mostly filtered out or talked down to. And the lie of “neutral” broadcasting hasn’t gone away: the BBC’s framing of Gaza has made plain to many people that ‘neutrality’ often tracks power.
So the dance became the people’s media: a fashion show, a newswire, a marketplace, a flirt zone, a community meeting — all at once. The crew — operator, selector, DJ/MC, engineer — weren’t just entertainers; they were organisers of public life. And if the medium is the message, then stacking speakers in the open air was a message in itself: we control the channel now.
Competition did the rest. Rival systems fought for dominance with ‘exclusives’ (rare tunes, secret versions, custom dubplates) and with sheer physical force: the feeling that your sound could ‘move bodies’ more powerfully than anyone else’s. That pressure drove innovation — not just louder rigs, but new studio techniques, new rhythms, and the birth of ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, and dancehall.
London: diaspora, clashes, and the state pushing back
When Jamaican migrants carried the sound to the UK — especially after Windrush — they didn’t just bring records. They brought a method: build your own infrastructure, gather your people, and make a temporary zone where you can breathe.
It wasn’t always easy; the establishment pushed back. In London, police regularly raided or shut down early sound system parties, deeming them a nuisance or worse. Duke Vin recalled “battles with officialdom” and racist harassment — one police inspector even threatened him with “10 years in prison” if he kept running his sound, and another officer smashed his speaker with a shovel, snarling “We don’t want this thing in this country.”
That’s the spirit of the culture in one ugly snapshot: joy criminalised, conscious community space treated as a threat, and the sound system refusing to disappear. Those nights helped seed a wider UK tradition — blues dances, Notting Hill sound systems, and later the bass-heavy lineage that runs through dub, jungle, drum & bass, grime, and beyond.
The Bronx: sound system logic becomes hip-hop
In the US, the same blueprint helped ignite hip-hop. Kool Herc brought the sound system approach — big speakers, crowd-control, competitive edge — into Bronx park jams. Even the “trade secrets” traveled: techniques like scratching labels off records to stop rivals finding your tunes were already standard in Jamaican sound clash culture. The point wasn’t just novelty. It was sovereignty: own your selection, own your style, own the room — and build a culture that answers to the people in it.
Bass, vibration, and embodied resistance
If you’ve never stood in front of a real rig, it’s hard to explain what makes sound system culture different. It’s not just “loud.” The bass is a ‘physical event’ — a pressure system. The session becomes an “auditory beacon,” pulling people in from streets away, because the promise is visceral: the most powerful music machines in the world vibrating every cell of every body.
This is where sound system culture turns into politics without speeches. “Sonic dominance” names that immersive feeling — when the audible becomes haptic, when “space” between the stacks becomes full, when listening involves your whole body, not just your ears. Meaning doesn’t only arrive through lyrics. It can arrive through vibration: the way repetition, dropouts, rewinds, and pressure create a shared state — a collective nervous system.
That matters in post/anti-colonial life because colonisation has always managed bodies: where you can gather, how you can move, how visible you’re allowed to be. A sound system session flips that script. It says: we will occupy this space with frequency. Not politely. Not quietly. But with a force that makes you feel less alone.
Aotearoa: Raglan, “One Brotherhood,” and the local roots of global bass
Here’s where the global story lands close to home. In Aotearoa, reggae didn’t just become “popular.” It became useful: a language for land, dignity, and anti-racist organising. Herbs’ “One Brotherhood” is a perfect example — naming Raglan and Ōrākei (Bastion Point) directly: “They’re fighting for land in Raglan, they’re fighting for land in Orakei.” That line puts the struggle on a map you can stand in.
It reminds us that bass culture can be a way of listening and learning: to the land, to community — and to the histories that sit underneath the party.
And this isn’t abstract. It lives in the soil of Ruapuke itself. Before Ruapuke Royale, there was Ruapuke Roots — described as Aotearoa’s first dedicated outdoor reggae sound system festival. It brought international crews like alongside local legends like Lion Rockers Hi-Fi into that coastal valley just south of Raglan.
It set the blueprint. Ruapuke Roots helped establish Ruapuke not just as a location, but as a destination for sound culture. Ruapuke Royale pays homage to that foundation — walking the path they cleared, keeping the bassline rolling and the community connected.
Love as activism: why this culture endures
Sound system culture can look like conflict — clash, competition, police, bans, etc. But what keeps it alive is something softer and stronger: revolutionary love. The session is a place where people cook for each other, look out for each other, fall in love, heal up, and step back out with the strength to resist Babylon to create and nurture something better.
That’s why the culture travels. The “echo” keeps bouncing — Jamaica to London to the Bronx, then out through Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and back again — because sound is a way of building community myths that help people survive dispersal. And because “sound” in this tradition isn’t just a thing; it’s a process — a community strategy, with people who build it, follow it, test it, argue with it, and keep it moving.
In the end, a sound system is a simple proposition: where we gather, we set our own frequency — raising a positive vibration — and we refuse Babylon’s script, outside us and inside us; we won’t be managed, muted, or made small. In a world that still polices joy — still tries to hush the voices of tangata (people), whenua (land), and moana (ocean) — the rig remains a stubborn, beautiful answer: love made audible.
Sources
Norman C. Stolzoff — Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press): https://www.dukeupress.edu/wake-the-town-and-tell-the-people
Lloyd Bradley — Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (Penguin): https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/bass-culture-9780141928173
Julian Henriques — Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sonic-bodies-9781441144294/
Louis Chude-Sokei — “Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process” (OpenBU reprint): https://hdl.handle.net/2144/40189
Louis Chude-Sokei — “The Sound of Culture: Dread Discourse and Jamaican Sound Systems” (PDF): https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1513/Chude-Sokei%2C%20Sound%20of%20Culture.pdf
Julian Henriques — “Sonic Diaspora, Vibrations and Rhythm: Thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session” (DOI page): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17528630802224163
Sabine Sörgel — review of Henriques’ Sonic Bodies in Volume! (open access): https://journals.openedition.org/volume/5200
Chris Salewicz — “Duke Vin: ‘Soundman’ who brought sound systems to Britain” (The Independent): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/duke-vin-soundman-who-brought-sound-systems-to-britain-8336228.html
London Museum — “Duke Vin, first UK sound system operator”: https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/v/object-1007386/duke-vin-first-uk-sound-system-operator/
Babylon (1980) — film depiction of UK sound system culture: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080406/
AudioCulture (NZ) — “The Rise of the Sound Systems in Aotearoa”: https://www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/the-rise-of-the-sound-systems-in-aotearoa
AudioCulture (NZ) — “Dubhead: Part 2 – The Twelve Tribes”: https://www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/dubhead-part-2-the-twelve-tribes
