Carnival Time

Yesterday I went to my first Notting Hill Carnival. We got there quite late on and thought we'd missed it all but a little walking proved we were mistaken.



There was a lot of people, a lot of noise, a lot of interesting smells, a lot of floats and a LOT of bass. They have some serious sound systems there. I'd read and heard about Jamaican sound systems but experiencing it first hand was great. As a side note that Sound system culture is often cited as the beginning of Hip Hop (and as a result Jungle, Garage, Grime etc), when it was brought to New York by Jamaican immigrants (most notably DJ Kool Herc)

We saw the guy below performing just before we left. Everyone there was really into it and seemed to know the words. It was cool, really positive, religious rap, but if you took the religion away you just had a positive message. The bass was booming but my phone doesn't pick that up at all!



Glad I resisted laziness and went.