Dub plates are a characteristic of the jungle/"drum and bass" scene, but there are two things to observe about that.
One is that white-label releases are common in all styles of music, just like galley proof copies in book publishing. They're done to stimulate early demand when the commercial release comes out, to "user test" them and help determine marketing, and so on. They're also used to enforce a kind of inner circle effect among top-level DJs in any musical style -- think about how many "dub plates" the famous house and techno DJs use, except they're simply called white-labels. So I'm not sure that the dub plate thing is all that different for drum & bass. What does differ is the cultural context. Remember that DJing as we know it has deep roots in the Jamaican sound systems of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Back then, new record releases, mostly from the US, were highly prized and even fought over. DJs and sound system promoters turned into producers, Lee Perry being the best example. They would take the commercial release and remake it, extending the mix and making other changes. Local records got the same treatment, with alternate takes being issued as one-offs, often with a vocal track on one side (the "dub") and one without the vocals on the B side (the "version"). That was in part so MCs could "chat" over the record -- the style perfected by U Roy. "Dub" eventually came to mean the reduced-mix style of taking a track and *subtracting* elements from it selectively -- vocals and instruments -- and adding echo, delay, flange and other effects. All of this history was inherited in the Caribbean diaspora in London, which in turn was the fertile ground for the development of jungle in the early 1990s. So the "dub plate" phenomenon has a lot to do with the dynamics of the DJ and sound system competitive scene that goes back four decades. So it tends to be a more noticeable element of the jungle/d&b scene even though, as I said, it's basically a white-label situation like everyone else does too. in my unhumble opinion of course Once again, I highly recommend Dick Hebdige's remarkable little book "Cut 'n Mix" as the definitive guide to the history here. phred
