Q Among lesser known artists from less mainstream cultural traditions, which ones would be good for our hearts to listen to?

I would hesitate to claim anything is “good for the heart”. There are virtuous, emotionally-healthy people who listen to very boring, very obvious mainstream music, or to no music at all. And then are people into all kinds of experimental, adventurous, exploratory music who are not good citizens or nice people. I don’t think someone’s music taste or how wide open their listening is, is a reflection of that person’s moral or personal qualities. But perhaps I misunderstand the question and you are just hoping I will recommend something that most readers may not have heard?

I personally do feel I am elevated in some hard to explain way whenever I listen to roots reggae or dub reggae. It is spiritual music and even though I am not personally religious, let alone Rastafarian and indeed find many of the moral values of that belief-system to be the opposite of my own values, I find myself uplifted. The meditational serenity, the sense of belief and purpose that suffuses the sound and the singing, irradiates me. And then the grooves, the vocal melodies, the amazing production effects are just wonderful. So I would recommend the 1970s albums and productions of King Tubby, Lee Perry, Linval Thompson, Augustus Pablo, Keith Hudson, Creation Rebel, The Congos, Burning Spear and many more. And there are some beautiful examples of lover’s rock, a more romantic and secular form of reggae – artists like Janet Kay and Kofi.

 Better an honest curmudgeon than a career generalist with Botox prose, say I!

(A seasonally appropriate maxim)

in response to someone hailing jungle-in-1995 as the genre's mature peak, and using the phrase  "adulthood - a zenith of identity" - i.e. when the genre is most like itself, least like other genres, has sloughed off its formative influences...

I agree with this idea, but it raises a question or two

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it. 

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts. 

The character hardens and becomes a confinement.

It happens to genres and individual artists alike - they become predictable. You know what they are going to say before they open their mouths. They repeat the same anecdotes. They have their little catchphrases. 

It's that thin line between achieved style and self-parodic mannerism.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's a playlist I made recently based on the Dissensus thread - it's enormous but still far from exhaustive of the year's mature brilliances. Frontloaded with the thread-starter's selections (sadly he never completed his own enormous run-down) and then into my own faves not as yet listed by him, and then some of the forum member's own choices...  What a year! 

(1994 is still my favorite jungle year, though - 1993/1994: something about sounds emerging, on the cusp. Jungle's early adulthood, maybe, as opposed to mature prime)

"music is the superb illusion"

 E.M. Cioran having a rare chat with Jason Weiss - in this excerpt talking about music, without which life would be a mistake

 “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start.The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.

“I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”

- Theodor Adorno, 1968, televised interview, with imagery of Vietnam War and Joan Baez singing "Oh, Freedom".

 Sabbath = the great deaf-spot (auditory and ideological) of the Last Waltz/Stranded generation of rockwrite

Every generation of rockwrite has one, and has to have one. It's the essential by-product of having a value-system, a metrics of valorization.

So what was ours? (I'll leave the "us" of "ours" open-ended for now).

Thought: the vitiation of contemporary music-write = its attempt not to have any deaf-spots ... none at all, not one.

One of my favorite word twists, which I think I only ever used on  my blog, is "common groove"

Basically I have this perspective that the best black music, whether it's funk or disco, tends to be the most commercially successful stuff. The cream rises to the top. 

Because of all these obscurantist reissue labels, you have a generation of hipsters who have listened to all this objectively second or third division disco, funk, etc  - but never actually listened to Rose Royce or Stevie Wonder or whoever - the stuff that got into the charts and that masses of people bought and listened to.  

All that stuff is common groove because there are loads of vinyl copies lingering in the world, going cheap - and full of wonderful music. You could probably pick up 7 albums worth of it for the price of one of these stupid reissues. 

It relates to Northern Soul actually - that was the original 'rare groove'  although they didn't use that term, they talked about "rare soul".  

They had a whole inside-out perspective where they wouldn't play Motown because it was 'commercial' - meaning simply that it was so indisputably good that normal people liked it and bought it!