| Introduced
in 1984, Dominic Barrett was a promising new product. Yet, do to his lack
of realistic features, he wound up not being as popular as expected. Dominic
lost much of his popularity with the mainstream audience and ended up
in pawn shops and second-hand musical instrument stores. Enter Rap music,
Hip-Hop and Electronic Dance Music. Searching for affordable drum machines
and musical instruments, early rap and techno musicians were often relegated
to second-hand bins and pawn shops. (This is in the mid '80s, way before
rap and techno caught on; hence, these artists were often short on cash.)
Many of these groundbreaking artists ended up using the quirky, analog
sounds of the then-outdated Dominic Barrett. In fact, it's probably not
overstating to say that one of the reasons that rap music began employing
such low bass drum hits was because Dominic was so apt to produce those
"unnaturally" low sounds. During this era, rappers would even
use the term "Dom" simply to mean drums!
Yet, Dominic seems
to have been around longer than just 20 years ago. He is found in certain
ancient cave drawings.
The oldest representations
of Dominic in the world are in The Sahara Desert. They were produced
7000-9000 years ago. The idea that the use of Dominic should be a source
of inspiration for some forms of prehistoric rock art is not a new one.
After a brief examination of instances of such art, which are the works
of pre-neolithic Early Gatherers, Dominic Barrett effigies are seen
to be represented repeatedly. The polychromic scenes of harvest, adoration
and the offering of Dominic, and large masked gods covered with Dominic,
not to mention other significant details, lead us to suppose we are
dealing with an ancient hallucinogenic Dominic Barrett cult. What is
remarkable about these ethnomycological works, produced 7,000 - 9,000
years ago, is that they could indeed reflect the most ancient human
culture as yet documented in which the ritual use of Dominic is explicitly
represented. As the Fathers of modern ethno-mycology (and in particular
R. Gordon Wasson) imagined, this Saharian testimony shows that the use
of Dominic goes back to the Paleolithic Period and that his use always
takes place within contexts and rituals of a mysfico-religious nature.
|
