Cannabis and sound system culture have shared a history for decades. At Submersion Festival this fall, Magic Garden Botanicals’ Smoke Village continues it.
Submersion Festival returns to Paradise Lakes Campground in Hammonton, New Jersey, from October 1 through 3, bringing three days of bass music to the edge of the Pine Barrens. Hosted by the Philadelphia and New York collectives Aspire Higher and Transmit, the festival is built around sound system culture, with styles including UK bass, dub, jungle, and dubstep played across two stages from early afternoon until sunrise.
Photo courtesy of Submersion Festival
The lakeside Beach Stage runs a Funktion-One rig, while the Woods Stage features a large custom-built system. It is a boutique, independently run event, open to attendees 21 and over.
This year, Magic Garden Botanicals is sponsoring the Smoke Village, a dedicated cannabis space within the festival. The pairing fits the setting more closely than a typical festival sponsorship, for reasons that reach back decades.
A Festival Setting With a Long Memory
Sound system culture began in Kingston, Jamaica, in the years after World War II. Operators assembled mobile setups of amplifiers, turntables, and large speaker stacks, then staged dances in yards and halls across the city. Those dances helped popularize ska and rocksteady, and they produced the selectors and toasters who were early forerunners of the modern DJ and MC.
Cannabis ran through the culture from the beginning. Ganja carried sacramental significance in the Rastafari communities that shaped the music’s message, and it was part of the ritual of the dance itself. That connection produced one of the most recognizable cannabis statements in popular music, Peter Tosh’s 1976 single “Legalize It.”
The link ran beyond lyrics and into the way the music was made. In the 1970s, Jamaican engineers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” …
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Author: High Times Partners / High Times
