Close your eyes practically anywhere in Jamaica and you'll hear
music. Radios blare on the street, buses pump out non-stop
dancehall and every Saturday night the bass of countless
sound-system parties wafts through the air. Music is a serious
business here, generating an average of a hundred record releases
per week and influencing every aspect of Jamaican culture from
dress to speech to attitude. Reggae and DJ-based dancehall
dominate, but Jamaicans are catholic in their musical tastes: soul,
hip-hop, jazz, rock 'n'roll, gospel and the ubiquitous country and
western are popular.
Jamaica's music scene first came to international attention with
ska , the staccato, guitar-and-trumpet-led sound heard in
Millie Small's smash hit My Boy Lollipop and Desmond Dekker
and the Aces' 007 (Shanty Town) . By the mid 1960s, ska had
given way to the slowed-down and more melodic rocksteady
sound. Rocksteady didn't carry the swing for very long, though, and
by the late 1960s it had been superseded by the tighter guitars,
heavier bass and sinuous rhythm of reggae. Bob Marley's
lyrics, drawn from the tenets of Rastafari, emphasized
repatriation, black history, black pride and self-determination.
Reggae became full-fledged protest music - anathema to the
establishment, which banned it wherever possible.
The 1970s stand out as the classic period of roots reggae. But
while Burning Spear was singing Marcus Garvey and
Slavery Days, the era also offered a sweeter side: the
angelic crooning of more mainstream artists like Dennis
Brown or Gregory Isaccs found an eager audience, their
style becoming known as lovers' rock . As the 1970s wore on,
studio technology became more sophisticated and producers began
manipulating their equipment to produce dub - some of the
most arresting and penetrating music ever to emerge from Jamaica.
With a remarkable level of inventiveness and often limited means,
dub pioneers King Tubby, Prince Jammy and Scientist
brought reggae back to basics, stripping down songs so that only
bass, drums and inflections of tone remained. Snippets of the
original vocals were then mixed in alongside sound effects (dog
barks, gunshots). Before long, scores of DJs clamoured to
produce dub voice-overs. The craft was mastered by U-Roy ,
who released talk-based singles to great success throughout the
1970s.
As the violent elections of 1976 and 1980 saw the pressure in
Kingston building up, the sound systems multiplied and the DJs
"chatted" on the mike about the times, analysing the position of
the ghetto youth in Jamaica. But reggae struggled to find direction
and purpose after the death in 1981 of Bob Marley; his legacy of
cultural consciousness began to seem less relevant to the ghetto
world of cocaine-running and political warfare.
Meanwhile the lewd approach and overtly sexual lyrics - or
"slackness" - of DJs such as Yellowman became hugely popular,
leading to the rise of ragga (from "ragamuffin", meaning a
rough-and-ready ghetto-dweller), a two-chord barrage of raw drum
and bass and shouted patois lyrics. Also known as dancehall
, it is now the most popular musical form in contemporary Jamaica;
names to look for include Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Lady Saw,
Elephant Man and Spragga Benz.
Dancehall, though, isn't to everyone's taste, and the battle
between cultural and slackness artists continues. The culturally
conscious lyrics and staunch Rastafarian stance of the late Garnet
Silk, who burst on the scene in the mid-1990s, led the way for
artists such as Capleton, Sizzla and Luciano, while singers such as
Beres Hammond and Sanchez continue to release wonderful reggae
tunes