Imagining reggae
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I seldom dream, but last night a line got stuck in my brain: "dub it up", repeated over and over, with a crisp reggae beat. I couldn't figure it out, and was annoyed that I didn't know what it meant.
I don't think that I had ever heard it before in my waking life.
The first thing I did after washing up in the morning was google it. Turns out there was a record called "Let's dub it up" by a male British artist named Dee Sharp (b. 1956 in London; to be distinguished from the more famous American female singer Dee Dee Sharp [b. Philadelphia 1945]). I listened to the Dee Sharp song here (Fashion records 1980), and was astonished to find that it had the same melody and beat as the repeated line in my dream, so I must have heard it at some time in my life, whether I was aware of it or not.
What is weirder still is that, since it was early in the morning, WXPN "Star's End" was still on. When I switched on the radio, I heard the same succession of notes being played as ambient music — over and over and over again. It was driving me nuts, so I quickly turned off the radio.
BTW, I think that "dub it up" is a slang expression for "win".
Selected readings
- "The etiology of a self-inflicted earworm" (7/11/23)
- "Serious earworm infection" (7/16/17)
- "Earworms and white bears" (9/1/13)
- "Musical maggots" (9/5/13)"
- "Earworm of the week: Me and Bobby McGee" (9/13//21)
- "The ultimate earworms" (9/7/13)
- "Morphophonetic aesthetics" (4/8/11) — discusses lexical earworm infections
Laura Morland said,
May 25, 2025 @ 6:40 am
Fascinating! And you hit pay dirt. (Unlike my experiences of dreaming of a unknown word, only to wake up, look it up, and discover that it does not exist.)
If you count any neurologists among your friends, I'd share this experience with him or her. An anecdote for the books!
Philip Taylor said,
May 25, 2025 @ 7:05 am
I didn't dream last night (well, I did, but my dreams are not relevant to this thread) but a two-word phrase came into my mind which I could not dismiss — "Aliquot parts". I knew the phrase well, but also knew that it was years (nay, decades) since I had last seen it in print, and I really did not know what the phrase meant. So today I first ran Google Ngrams, to find that its usage peaked in 1815 and diminished asymptotically thereafter, and then looked up its meaning, to find that today we would simply speak of the "factors" of an integer rather than the integer's "aliquot parts". And of course in so doing I learned that there are "Aliquant parts", of which I had never previously heard.
Sniffnoy said,
May 25, 2025 @ 12:07 pm
I haven't heard "dub it up" used to mean "win", but "dub" is used to mean "win" in the noun sense (I haven't heard it in the verb sense). It comes from wins and losses being recorded as Ws and Ls. So "a W" means a win and "an L" means a loss (both of these are fairly common), and then "W" is sometimes further abbreviated to "dub".
JPL said,
May 25, 2025 @ 3:46 pm
The term 'dub' comes from the Jamaican reggae music recording culture. I remember back in the seventies many Jamaican reggae records had on their B-side a "dub version". This was basically a remix of the A-side without the vocal track or only the riddim track (drum and bass). "Dub it up", I suspect, could be an expression used in a live context of performance of a song to announce to the band that the vocal and melody should lay out and continue with only the rhythm parts. (It's not an expression for "win".) The dub versions caught on with listeners, and now "dub music" is apparently a big deal, a definite style or sub-genre of music.
Brandon S said,
May 25, 2025 @ 4:36 pm
Dub is a subgenre of reggae. I think that is the context of how it is used in the song title. The way “rock it” or “jazz it up” are used seem analogous to me.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 25, 2025 @ 9:21 pm
Apparently "Rub-A-Dub" names a Reggae-Dancehall genre and the associated close "rubbing" partner dancing style. Thus "rub it up / dub it up" in the song. So neither dub 'copy' from double nor dub 'win (n.)' from double-u. Ultimate origins of reduplicative-ish rub-a-dub being a separate (but seemingly kinda related) question.
JPL said,
May 26, 2025 @ 12:47 am
Here's an example of Bob Marley using the phrase "in a rub a dub style". (Not the only case; others have used it, I can't remember the most prominent one, i.e., I can remember the tune, I just can't remember who did it.) The dub version starts at about 2:47 in the video. It's typical for there to be snatches of vocal or rhythm guitar, esp reverb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnPjgKhVaWg
Here's another one from Sugar Minott; the dub version starts at about 3:17.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOWaeXlWzA&list=PL0seif7Bs4qXqdSKQRcuVGQWcQ_tmLSqf&index=29
Yves Rehbein said,
May 26, 2025 @ 2:50 am
Dub is attributed to Scratch Lee Perry, who made heavy use of feedback, reverb and delay effects to remix songs. I'd have thunk that rubber dub came later (with distance assimilation of reg- to rhyme with dub?) and to double makes sense as a mixin technique, too (note dub in overlay audio for movies, lip-sync in German, but a narrator over the original audio is also possible). As a stereo effect it's sometimes called ping-pong delay.
Moreover, EP's are called "dubplates", usually whitelabel, and MC's toast ovet these riddims, that is to say they dub (I guess).
J.W. Brewer said,
May 26, 2025 @ 2:37 pm
Quoth wikipedia: "It is possible that the existing use of the word dub for other meanings in Jamaica around the time of the music's origin may have helped to cement its use in the musical context. The most frequent meanings referred to either a form of erotic dance or sexual intercourse." I recall hearing that (i.e. that "dub" also had a sexual sense in Jamaican slang) back 40-45 years ago when I first became aware of dub as a musical style.
Agree that "win" is an unrelated sense.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 26, 2025 @ 6:31 pm
FWIW, Internets claim that Reggae itself was the name of a dance style first (cf. song Do the Reggay; (from ragamuffin [dance] on some tellings.) So reglur word > name of dance > name of music associated with / accompanying / enabling the dance shared with Rubadub. Still DK if dub meaning remix/copy/etc. is related or separate — easier to understand is the latter.
JPL said,
May 26, 2025 @ 10:21 pm
My impression back then from the way 'dub' was used was that it referred to the process of changing the audio of a recording, as in "remixing". So that would be the original sense (the dub "version"), and any other sense (e.g., sexual or dance style) would have been derived or a later development. The live re-creation of that sound would be the "style" that a song could be done in.
RfP said,
May 27, 2025 @ 2:36 pm
From the American Heritage Dictionary (Merriam-Webster essentially agrees with this):
Yves Rehbein said,
May 28, 2025 @ 6:47 pm
I was worried I got something wrong and yesterday I had to read Anreiter about pre-Roman substratum of the Alps in Festschrift Klingenschmitt, cf. *dupVla, toponymic deep, steep valley, from *dʰu-p- "deep"; as for deep, cf. *dʰewb- (IEW; AHD; WT).
It would make sense for echo[*].
It could even be related to funk (Latin f from initial *dʰ). My point being, over dub, to dub over, reminded me of Dutch boven ("above"), that would leave °du to be explained, normally derived from Romance duo, duplus initial *d.
[*] You might rightly doubt (!) my analysis. E.g. German Hall "echo" seems to come from older hellan and would be unrelated to Hall ("chamber") contrary to my intuition. Scottish mac-talla ("echo"), talla ("hall, rock") is ultimately unclear to me; Mandari huíshēng 回聲 as well ("echo"; 回 originally a spiral [WT]), and shēn 深 ("deep", 穴 "hole; cave" in the upper component). Sanskrit pratidhvani ("echo"), dhvaní ("sound", "echo"), *dʰwen- ("to make a noise": English din) is fairly close to **dʰew-, but I would consider it uncertain (thunder and stun have been compared with s-mobile, if I remember correctly), while Assamese do ("deep") from Prakrit daha, Sanskrit (daha), from Sanskrit draha is not clear to me.
Also, I misspoke with respect tl dubplates smaller than EP – that's just … P?