Blue Beat for a Grey Day

Grey. Overcast. Foggy. Drizzly. Misty. Rainy.
I am describing today's weather in Dubuque, but I could just as easily be describing a day in London in the mid-1960s.
Because my mind often works in rather tenuous associations, I decided to listen to Trojan's "Mod Reggae" box set as I walked to an assignment for work this morning.
Mods were a disaffected, white-youth subculture in early 1960s Britain who adored soul music and reggae.
In his "Reggae and Caribbean Music: Third Ear, the Essential Listening Companion," Dave Thompson quotes a journalist (inventively?) called Johnny Copasetic, who in 1972 wrote that blue beat (early slang for reggae, stemming from a UK record label name) was so popular with Mods because the music defied convention:
"The records were issued in excessive numbers and were often badly made," Copasetic wrote. "The music was pretty wildly unacceptable. The heavy offbeat made it sound like a parody or the crudest rock and roll, the words were often unintelligible. To the populace as a whole, it was rather revolting."
Johnny Copasetic might be on to something (besides the GREATEST PSEUDONYM EVER).
Perhaps I love reggae so much because it sits outside the mainstream (and "mainstream," in my house, means cookie-cutter contemporary country).