Reggae is unique. No other style has made so much out of its original musical resources to present itself in so many different guises with only a couple of structural changes in over 40 years. No other style has so accurately reflected the people that create and consume it. Jamaican music’s relationship with its people is such that it is not ...
Ska represents the birth of modern popular Jamaican music, and it does so with the accent on ‘Jamaican’. While this raucous, uptempo, good-times music may have had its roots in American big-band jazz and R&B, it was conceived as a celebration of Jamaican independence. Ska is the link between the virtuoso playing of Kingston’s sophisticated nightclub musicians ...
Seldom has a style of music been named with greater accuracy than rock steady. Like so many other Jamaican genres, it took its name from a dance, in which participants planted their feet and ‘rocked steady’. When rock steady began to dominate the dancehalls in the mid-1960s, it was the antithesis to ska’s rollicking, big-band, jazz-based ...
Roots reggae is probably the best-known genre of Jamaican music. Thanks to artists such as Bob Marley and Burning Spear, it achieved genuine worldwide success. Through these artists and their carefully articulated political dissent, social commentaries and praises to Jah Rastafari, it has been accepted across the world as one of the most potent protest musics. Roots reggae ...
In Jamaica, nothing gets thrown away. Oil drums, floorboards … more or less everything has to be used again at least once, including music. Why throw a tune away just because it’s been a hit, when the same rhythm can be redressed with new lyrics or radically altered instrumentation to liven up the dancehalls again ? And ...
Britain has had a thriving reggae scene for as long as there’s been reggae. There were sound systems in London in the 1950s, importing the same American R&B records as their Kingstonian counterparts, and ska was recorded in the UK from the early 1960s. But while the British sound systems were a carbon copy of Jamaican rigs, the ...
Jamaican music has never been that far away from mainstream British music since Millie Small stormed the charts in 1964 with the galloping ska of ‘My Boy Lollipop’, but it was not until the end of that decade that reggae became a bona fide part of pop. Heralded by Desmond Dekker’s incredible success in 1969 with ‘It Mek’ and ‘The Israelites’, ...
Ragga (short for ‘ragamuffin’) is the term for later-model dancehall reggae adopted by the sound system crowds to highlight their existence somewhere outside polite Jamaican society. Ragga is the all-digital style that came about in the mid-1980s, which took computerization to such a degree that, for the first time, reggae rhythms were made with no bass line. Ragga ...
Dancehall reggae is a vivid example of how the music perpetually reinvents itself to refresh its rebel spirit and to keep itself relevant to its primary audience: downtown Kingston (both spiritually as well as geographically). it began to appear on the sound systems at the beginning of the 1980s, when roots reggae had reached a world stage through the likes ...
The Bobo Ashanti is Rasta for the twenty-first century: more militant and less tolerant. With their ideological attacks on Rome, social demotion of women and condemnation of homosexuality, deejays like Capleton and Anthony B may seem world’s apart from the hippy-ish notions of dreadlocks that was Bob Marley’s legacy. There’s actually not much difference. Unlike roots reggae, which ...
For most of reggae’s life the terms ‘American reggae’ or ‘reggae in America’, have remained oxymorons. A number of possible reasons have been proposed, ranging from the plausible to the patently absurd, as to why reggae has never enjoyed the same success in the US that it found in the UK, in terms of proportionate record sales and ...
If there was one thing that summed up Jamaican music – its uniqueness, its ability to adapt from elsewhere, its inventiveness, its influence abroad, its sound system roots and its continuing closeness to its audience – it would be the deejay. Born on the sound systems in the 1950s, the deejay’s job was to vibe up ...
Country music today retains little of the regional identity that characterized it in its early days. There are pockets of resistance to this homogeneity and to the hegemony of Nashville – a honky-tonk dance circuit and a fiercely independent singer-songwriter tradition in Texas, for example – but overall the scene is one of major stars playing huge venues. The middle ...
Almost no Texan musicians have ever herded cattle, but most like to think of themselves as cowboys nonetheless. They imagine themselves pulling out an acoustic guitar after dinner and singing a song about the adventures and frustrations they have known. And not just any old song – it has to be one they wrote and it has to be more ...
The drum kit is a collection of drums and cymbals played in all styles of rock, pop, jazz and blues. It is also widely used in urban music across the world, such as Afrobeat and reggae. Drum-Kit Construction A typical drum kit comprises a bass drum and hi-hat cymbal played with foot pedals, a snare drum, ...
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