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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though, and by the late 1960s it had been superseded by the tighter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
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