Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture

Unlocked - for a number of personal reasons, we've been unable to record the episode on Bob Marley and the Wailers. In its stead, we've taken this opportunity to unlocked both parts of our interview with Daphne A. Brooks, previously only available to patrons. Become a patron from £3pcm to access much more of this material. We'll be back to pick up with Afro-Psychedelia very soon. In this episode w...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. This is the audio from our recent patrons-only 'Live Conversations' between ourselves and our patrons, which took place over Zoom in March of this year. Tim, Jeremy and our guests discussed the role of the intern...

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy focus on the early life and work of Bob Marley & The Wailers. They explore the role Marley and the group played in bringing Reggae to the world, with the singer becoming a singular and ubiquitous figure in culture in the process. Beginning with their first Ska singles from the mid-'60s, we hear how the original 1965 recording of One Love articulated a nasc...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode, Jeremy and Tim begin a multi-part exploration of what we're calling Heavy Dub Theory: a deep dive on the aesthetic, musicological and theoretical understandings of dub. We start with...

In this week's episode Jeremy and Tim move through the late 20th century to trace dub's echoing influence on Disco, Post-Punk, early House and the music of the British Rave scene. Dub's aesthetics of space, minimalism, and bass-centric production are revealed on the New York dancefloor through the early remix experiments of Walter Gibbons and the studio work of Francois K, as well as in the punk c...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only bonus episode, Jeremy and Tim have a conversation about what music has been on their turntables recently. In a genre-busting and wide-ranging discussion we consider potential connections betw...

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy dive headlong into Dub. They discuss the changing meaning of the term, the difficulties in charting the history of the music, and explore the work of two of the pioneers of the sound, Lee 'Scratch' Perry and King Tubby. Jeremy and Tim discuss the sonic properties of dub, including the innovative use of reverb and delay, as well as the distinctive vocal practic...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. Continuing our ongoing patrons-only reading series, Tim picks up where he left off in his 2004 book 'Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979'. I'm sure you'll all have heard him re...

In this week's episode Jeremy and Tim focus on the birth of Reggae in Jamaica. Beginning with the island's first popular music, Ska, we hear how the music of Alton Ellis and Desmond Decker transformed into Rocksteady, with it's slower pulse, rootsy feel and serious lyrical turn. Set against the backdrop of Kingston's high crime rate and Rudeboy culture, Tim and Jeremy recount how this music took o...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. This is the audio from our recent patrons-only 'Live Conversations' between ourselves and our patrons, which took place over Zoom in January of this year. Tim, Jeremy and our guests discussed the relationship bet...

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy turn their attention to the island of Jamaica. They recount a history of Jamaica as a British Colony and the liberation struggles that grew up in the face of Imperial rule, including the work of Marcus Garvey, the Back to Africa movement, and the eventual socialist prime minister Michael Manley. We hear about the emergence of Rastafarianism in the early Twenti...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this week's patrons-only episode we conclude our two-part interview with Black Feminist scholar and music critic Daphne A. Brooks. Following from our previous show, Daphne disucsses some of the contemporary fi...

In this week's episode Jeremy and Tim complete their three-part study of African music by looking at the flows of musical influence across the Black Atlantic. They explore how diasporic sounds reflected back on music being made in African nations, including the heavy Latin rhythms found in the Malian Super Rail Band and the fingerprint of Duke Ellington on the Ethiopian Jazz of Mulatu Astatke. Tim...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this week's patrons-only episode we are happy to present the part 1 of our very first interview on LITM. Jeremy and Tim were happy to welcome the Black Feminist scholar and music critic Daphne A. Brooks to the...

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy continue with the second part of their mini-series on the music of '60s and '70s Africa. They start with an exposition on the ideas put forward in Paul Gilroy's seminal book The Black Atlantic. With reference to a variety of historical theorisations of the experience of Black people since the period of slavery, we hear how Gilroy offered a diasporic understand...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this week's patrons-only episode, Jeremy and Tim finish their mini-series on Afrofuturism. As it's LITM, the guys finally dig into the contested role of Disco to Afrofuturism, taking in the futuristic innovati...

In this week's episode Jeremy and Tim expand their series on Afro-Psychedelia with a multi-show exploration of the music of Africa, beginning today in the 1960s. They discuss the contested and shifting conceptualisations of Africa through history, the emergence of Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism, Paul Gilroy's seminal book The Black Atlantic, and the production of the specific relationship betwee...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this week's patrons-only episode, Tim and Jeremy continue their mini-series on the aesthetic and political content of Afrofuturism. Beginning with Kodwo Eshun's 1998 book More Brilliant Than The Sun, Tim and J...

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy describe the genres of psychedelic jazz and fusion. Drawing on rock, modal and free jazz and funk, as well as a wider pool of international musics, we hear how artists like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Weather Report created - through processes of fusion and fission - a new sound. Tim and Jeremy consider the impact hearing the Grateful Dead had on Miles, th...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In the first few episodes of our new series on Afro-Psychedelia we've mentioned the concept of Afrofuturism a few times, so we wanted to take a moment to record this supplementary patrons-only two-parter outlinin...

In the second episode of our third series, Tim and Jeremy describe a psychedelic aesthetic appearing in the transformative and rapturous musics of the American Black church, Rastafarian Jamaica and Nigeria, with reference to Gospel, Juju, Reggae and Funk. They counterpoint this with a strain of musical antipathy with roots in Plato and iterating in radical Protestant tendencies throughout history,...

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only bonus episode, Jeremy and Tim have a conversation about what music has been on their turntables recently.   In line with the themes of our new series, Tim and Jeremy have been on an Afro...

Love is the Message returns with series 3! In our last cluster of episodes, Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert took a deep look at the musical, social and political currents flowing through New York City from the late '60s to around 1975. This time, they're turning their attention outwards, expanding their analysis of this crucial period of time to include South America, the Caribbean, West Africa an...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only LITM Extra episode. To hear the whole thing, as well as conversations between Tim and Jeremy about what they've been listening to, intermittent lectures, listeners' questions and more, visit www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to become a patron from £3 a month. Continuing our ongoing patrons-only reading series, Tim picks up where he left off in his 2004 book 'Lo...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the whole thing, along with accessing lots more LITM Extra content, go to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to become a patron from £3 per month. In this patrons-only episode of LITM Extra, Tim and Jeremy take questions from you, the listeners. They talk about the portrayal of disco as synthetic music, the misplaced protest of rock musicians and...