Style of popular music
that originated in Jamaica
in the late 1960s and quickly emerged as the country's dominant music.
By the 1970s it had become an international style that was particularly popular
in Britain, the United States, and Africa.
It was widely perceived as a voice of the oppressed.
According to an early definition in The
Dictionary of Jamaican English (1980), reggae is based on ska, an earlier form of Jamaican popular music, and
employs a heavy four-beat rhythm driven by drums, bass guitar, electric guitar,
and the "scraper," a corrugated stick that is rubbed by a plain stick. (The
drum and bass became the foundation of a new instrumental music, dub.) The
dictionary further states that the chunking sound of the rhythm guitar that
comes at the end of measures acts as an "accompaniment to emotional songs often
expressing rejection of established 'white-man' culture." Another term for this
distinctive guitar-playing effect, skengay, is identified with the sound
of gunshots ricocheting in the streets of Kingston's
ghettoes; tellingly, skeng is defined as "gun" or "ratchet knife." Thus reggae
expressed the sounds and pressures of ghetto life. It was the music of the
emergent "rude boy" (would-be gangster) culture.
In the mid-1960s, under the direction of
producers such as Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, Jamaican musicians dramatically
slowed the tempo of ska, whose energetic rhythms reflected the optimism that
had heralded Jamaica's
independence from Britain
in 1962. The musical style that resulted, rock steady, was short-lived but
brought fame to such performers as the Heptones and Alton Ellis.
Reggae evolved from these roots and bore
the weight of increasingly politicized lyrics that addressed social and
economic injustice. Among those who pioneered the new reggae sound, with
its faster beat driven by the bass, were Toots and the Maytals, who had their
first major hit with "54-46 (That's My Number)" (1968), and the Wailers-Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and reggae's
biggest star, Bob Marley-who recorded hits at Dodd's Studio
One and later worked with producer Lee ("Scratch") Perry. Another reggae
superstar, Jimmy Cliff, gained international fame as the star of the movie The Harder They Come (1972). A major cultural force
in the worldwide spread of reggae, this Jamaican-made film documented
how the music became a voice for the poor and dispossessed. Its soundtrack was
a celebration of the defiant human spirit that refuses to be suppressed.
During this period of reggae's
development, a connection grew between the music and the Rastafarian
movement, which encourages the relocation of the African diaspora to Africa, deifies the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I
(whose precoronation name was Ras [Prince] Tafari), and endorses the
sacramental use of ganja (marijuana).
Rastafari (Rastafarianism) advocates equal rights and justice and draws on the
mystical consciousness of kumina, an earlier Jamaican religious
tradition that ritualized communication with ancestors. Besides Marley and the
Wailers, groups who popularized the fusion of Rastafari and reggae were
Big Youth, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear (principally Winston Rodney), and
Culture. "Lover's rock," a style of reggae that celebrated erotic love,
became popular through the works of artists such as Dennis Brown, Gregory
Issacs, and Britain's
Maxi Priest.
In the 1970s reggae, like ska
before it, spread to the United
Kingdom, where a mixture of Jamaican
immigrants and native-born Britons forged a reggae movement that
produced artists such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, UB40, and performance poet Linton
Kwesi Johnson. Reggae was embraced in the United States largely through the
work of Marley-both directly and indirectly (as a result of Eric Clapton's
popular cover version of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" in 1974). Marley's
career illustrates the way reggae was repackaged to suit a rock market
whose patrons had used marijuana and were curious about the music that
sanctified it. Fusion with other genres was an inevitable consequence of the
music's globalization and incorporation into the multinational entertainment
industry.
The dancehall deejays of the 1980s and '90s who refined the practice
of "toasting" (rapping over instrumental tracks) were heirs to reggae's
politicization of music. These deejays influenced the emergence of hip-hop music in the United States and extended the
market for reggae into the African-American
community. At the end of the 20th century, reggae remained one of the
weapons of choice for the urban poor, whose "lyrical gun," in the words of
performer Shabba Ranks, earned them a measure of respectability.
