Reggae and dancehall purists will argue all day and all night about different ‘riddims’ with you but I won’t spend much time on the subject today. Essentially a ‘riddim’, or rhythm in non patois, is the beat to which a particular track is set to. What used to be associated with the bassline and drum beat - back in the day of Sly & Robbies ‘Bam Bam’ riddim - has now been more widely used to refer to the entire backing track. As to the number of riddims out there today I could not even hazard a guess but I did find a database with 886 and counting over at Reggae Riddims.
Moving on though I wanted to just give you that intro before I announced one riddim that I am really into right now, it’s called the Rub A Dub riddim. I dug up a few tracks by some of my favourite reggae artists that use the Rub A Dub riddim and here are three of the best examples.
