Even before Paul Meme emailed me this I felt a very tiny pang of guilt for painting Soul Jazz black, but hey I was in their shop buying (cod) Reggae so you shouldn't necessarily take what I said too seriously (i.e. "lets all lighten up a bit"). 100% Dynamite sucks (good music, but rubbish compiling oblivious to chronology and sporting a dearth of information about the music, where's the Respek?). Furthermore other Reggae reissue labels do a much better job in general, namely Pressure Sounds and Blood and Fire, and arguably have stronger historic connections to Reggae. However, the Studio One series (artfully put together by Mark Ainley, of Honest Jon's who also does their excellent compilations) are not bad. They're useful for the more serious geek too, because beyond being widely available, they focus on 12"s and 7"s and don't double up on material you can get on the LPs (Coxsone Dodd's own reissues of his stuff have been available across the UK for years), though these comps too have scanty liner notes.
If any of the alleged thousands of people who have read anything I've said on this blog which stops them from buying a Reggae record, because they would have bought a Soul Jazz one and now because I've been a little mean about SJ that they're not so sure, then I will personally buy a Soul Jazz record of my choice and mail it to them First Class. Failing that, ahem, I will email them a list of Reggae which is available on the High Street but which is also TWANBOC-endorsed (whopee that's brilliant!) which may even contain some Soul Jazz titles, possibly the Roots one, cos its quite nice.
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Postscript
Despite sending a civilised email back to Paul, I felt much of his letter was completely innacurate and wrong-headed, loaded with strange assumptions and guilty of extrapolating a very long distance from what I actually wrote. I'd say judge for yourself, except for the fact that I don't want to get b(l)ogged down in the matter, or indeed any of the topics in his email. I very nearly posted a very vicious reply here on TWANBOC but decided to try and keep things above the belt and as "to-the-point" as possible. I would say, however, that charity has never influenced my taste in music.
Posted by Woebot at January 27, 2003 12:42 PM