Reggae

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Reggae

Reggae is a late twentieth-century black musical phenomenon that draws deeply from Afro-Jamaican religious, dance, and musical practices while positing a distinctive series of meanings and representations about slavery, colonialism, history, and Africa. These meanings have been largely influenced by the theology, cultural practices, and language of Rastafari. In the late 1960s Larry Marshall's Nanny Goat with its organ shuffle was one of the signals of the birth of a new musical sound. This sound was crafted in the studios of producers such as Coxsone Dodd and Arthur "Duke" Reid. The musicians who comprised the various studio bands along with the singers who experimented with musical forms lived in districts of Jones Town, Trench Town, or Denham Town, located in the western end of Jamaica's capital city and populated by thousands of migrants bringing religious and other cultural traditions from rural Jamaica. These musicians were inspired by two musical currents: indigenous ska and African-American rhythm and blues.

Ska was an early 1960s urban musical synthesis that transformed twentieth-century Jamaican popular musical culture. It replaced mento, a musical form that was born of the cultural encounter between African musical traditions and the melodies of European instruments. This encounter produced instruments such as the rhumba scraper. Many claim that the first popular indigenous Jamaican music record was the Folkes Brothers' Oh Carolina. With the nyabinghi -style repeater drumming of Count Ossie holding the entire spine of the track together, the song became an exemplar of the different ingredients that eventually merged to create reggae. When Derrick Morgan sang "Forward March" in honor of Jamaican independence, he did so to the hard driving, horn blowing, and rhythm section of the studio band. Ska was big band music influenced by jazz and swing. But ska sped up the second

beat while slowing down the fourth, so that the music seemed off beat with loose skips to it that would then be reconciled in the male dances of the "legs" and "splits." The ska musical pantheon of horn, drum, bass, and piano players includes Tommy Cook, Roland Alphonso, Dizzy Moore, Rico Rodriguez, Lloyd Knibbs, Lloyd Brevett, Jackie Mitoo, and perhaps the most accomplished of them all, Don Drummond. This group eventually came together as the Skatalites, and their musical skills remain a rich archive of Jamaican music.

There is no popular Jamaican music without the dance steps. For Jamaican popular music the dance steps were often created in the dances in which the ubiquitous sound system provided thousands of watts. With names in the 1970s such as Black Harmony, Black Scorpio, Black Roots, Gemini, Jack Ruby, and perhaps the most dynamic of them all, King Tubby's Hi Fi, the sound system dances became sites in which audience, dancers, and music were integrated into a tight fit. When the audience members are primarily urban dwellers alienated from official society, then the relationship between the music, musicians, and audience often becomes a practice of countersignification. This is clearly illustrated by the morphing of ska into the musical form of rock steady. In the transition the music slowed down, the loose skip was transformed into a tighter bass, and the fast-paced ska dance movements became languid movements of the shoulders and hands operating in different time to the pelvic motions. The combined effect of the dance and music was a sense of dread, of bodies about to explode: The figure that best represented this was the "rude bwoy." The rude bwoy was unemployed, had lost faith in the dream of political independence, and chafed under the postcolonial dispensation of class and color. Their behavior was a direct confrontation with the conceptions of working-class black respectability and official ideas about how the new Jamaican citizen should comport himself. The era of the rude bwoys produced singers and groups such as The Wailers, Heptones, Ethiopians, Jimmy Cliff, Alton Ellis, Delroy Wilson, and Ken Boothe, as well as producer Prince Buster. Two songs were exemplars of this period: Prince Buster's "Judge Dread" and The Wailers' appeal to the rude bwoys to "Simmer Down." The immediate roots of reggae are therefore to be found in the urban popular Jamaican culture of the dispossessed that developed in the island's postindependence period.

In reggae the drum and bass become pronounced. The singer is given scope, the horns surround the bridge segments of the music, and the dancer skips and moves with feet that are now free from the chains of racial slavery while the body moves in memory of the Middle Passage. There are many streams of reggae, but one of the most popular streams is sometimes called roots rock reggae. This music relies heavily upon the message it delivers. From Marley's Trench Town Rock to the Abyssinians' classic Satta Massagana to Gregory Isaacs's Roughneck, reggae music operates in the languages of black struggle and redemption. This is the music of groups and singers with names such as Burning Spear, Black Uhuru, and Culture. The emergence of reggae also saw the development of creative producers who were musical techno-innovators creating new sounds within the general "riddim" structure of the music. Here Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studio was the most important site. Roots reggae's musical vocabulary explores the New World black experience through the themes of exile, redemption, and imagery of Africa and slavery. These themes are shaped by Rastafari and therefore are often expressed in the language of black prophecy. As reggae became internationally popular, it carried with it the freight of Rastafari. In the contemporary period, reggae has remained the preferred musical idiom of what is sometimes called "conscious" or "culture" music as distinct from dance hall.

If the internal Jamaican migration eventually led to reggae as a musical and cultural practice, then external migration allowed the music to develop another distinct genre. Here the story is about the passage from Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" to the drum and bass (sometimes called jungle music) of artists like LTJ Bukem. Jamaican music arrived in the United Kingdom on board the Empire Windrush in 1948 as part of the cultural makeup of the newly arrived West Indians. Initially it was the cloak of home comfort, something in which the new arrivals could wrap themselves in the strange gray land of the former colonial power.

However, as these new communities put down roots and second-generation West Indians began searching for an identity that located them in the United Kingdom—while retaining the connections to the Caribbean—the music changed, and black British identity became a locus for a radical transformation and representation of the self. The first wave of this change occurred in the 1970s with the development of "lovers rock," ostensibly as the antithesis to the more bass-heavy Rasta-influenced roots and culture forms that dominated the reggae scene in the 1970s. In lovers rock the baselines were unmistakably reggae but with an added emphasis on melodic composition and lyrics that dealt almost exclusively with matters of the heart. This reflected a mainstream pop music influence as well as that of soul music. Powered by labels such as Lovers Rock, Arawak, Santic, and Hawkeye and featuring artists such as Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson, lovers rock enjoyed some mainstream success before petering out in the 1980s when the fun pop sensibilities that it embraced were rejected for a harder, bass heavy sound.

This is not to say that Rastafari and roots reggae became lost in translation. More traditional forms were being produced by the likes of Steel Pulse and the dub poet Linton Kewsi Johnson, bubbling under the more commercially accessible lovers rock and satisfying the desire for musical content that directly expressed the problems faced by young blacks. Police brutality, employment difficulties, and other social inequalities were all covered, maintaining the social commentary/criticism that had long been part of reggae, as well as keeping open and vibrant the direct link to Jamaica. In the 1980s, when the conservative political ideology of Thatcherism took hold and young black men in particular found it increasingly difficult to obtain jobs, lovers rock began to lose its appeal and was eventually replaced by "drum and bass." This musical form developed out of the network of sound systems modeled on the sound systems of Jamaica, complete with selectors and box boys. The best known of these was Soul II Soul. Drum and bass practitioners like Goldie, LTJ, and Roni Size started life as mixers on sound systems across the country in such places as Bristol before branching out into music production. With its elongated basslines and irregular, fast-paced drum patterns voiced by the MCs, drum and bass quickly became the voice of disaffected young blacks.

Though its style was more reminiscent of the dance-hall style that dominates sound systems in twenty-first-century Jamaica, the influences did not stop there. Hiphop shares some similarities in production techniques. More recently, jazz sensibilities that allowed improvisation have shaped a new musical style dubbed "intelligent drum and bass." A key individual in this move is LTJ Bukem and his Good Looking/Looking Good record label. A good example of this new form is the title track of Bukem's 2000

release, "Journey Inwards," in which the shimmering sounds of a keyboard caress and envelop the rhythm created by an upright bass.

But reggae has not only followed a Jamaican diaspora. It has become one of the most popular international musical forms, with artists deploying its rhythmical syntax in Africa, Europe, and beyond. The CD Reggae Over Africa (2000), with tracks of Japanese reggae and major tracks by the South African artist Lucky Dube, illustrates this.

In the end reggae remains a form of black cultural production in which its practitioners speak to conditions of oppression and experiences of Africa and peoples of African descent. Its lyrical and musical power resides in its messages and sounds of redemption.