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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 rock steady sound. Rock steady 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had been superseded by the tighter guitars, heavier bass and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 Rastafarian, 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.
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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 clamored 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, analyzing 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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Jamaica
Travel Guide
Montego Bay, Kingston, Ocho Rios, Negril, Blue Mountains, Portland
Jamaica map
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Caribbean Travel Guide
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