Many Jamaican rhythms have enjoyed worldwide recognition –from mento and rock steady, which predated reggae, to the more recent uprising of dub, to the numerous waves and reincarnations of ska, from the ‘60s Skatallites to Brittish 2 tone, to ska punk, all the way to South America. The borders between these styles can be blurry and their definitions tend to mutate with time. In the introduction to the book Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from ska to dub, editor Chris Potash states: “Today, ska is a tag used to describe such a range of pop music sounds that it’s about as exact as reggae” (xxiv). In spite, or perhaps because, of their mutable nature, these Jamaican rhythms have had lasting ripple musical effects all over the world.
JAMAICAN REGGAE
Reggae in particular, is a fascinating cultural and religious phenomenon with myriad social and political implications – race not being the least of them. Especially during its period of highest popularity, from the late ‘60s through the ‘80s, it was considered black music, especially by the Jamaican ruling class. And yet, particularly outside of Jamaica, it was predominately white middle class people who embraced it, purchased the records, and crowded concerts. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Bob Marley, reggae’s biggest star, said: “Yeah, man. It’s a black people’s music. But I prefer all people to like our music” (xx).
One of the reasons why reggae was considered black music is because of its clear African musical roots. This is evident not only in its drums and rhythms, but in its spirituality. The spirituality that drove reggae in its inception was not, however, any of the traditional African religions. It was the bible-based Rastafarianism, which presented black Africans as the chosen people and encouraged their return to the homeland, seeing Ethiopia as Zion. As Kenneth Bilby remarks in his article From “Jamaica”:
“Reggae’s lasting qualities parallel those of African-influenced traditional and folk forms in that like them, reggae includes a great deal of emotionalism, spiritual vitality and gnomic function. For instance, nowhere else in the world is the popular music a basically religious music. And nowhere else is the popular music an integral part of the people’s way of life as is reggae in Jamaica” (11-12).
This is also particularly interesting from a cultural perspective, because it means that Rastafarians all over the world, particularly present in the Jamaican Diaspora across the Americas, consider reggae music their own. Thus, reggae becomes truly a transnational music, not just because of its international popularity, but because, as Bilby states, it becomes more about a spiritual than a national identity (13).
Although there is a clear parallel between reggae and other Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices based on dance and music, such as Candomble, Santería, and Voudun; the music from those religions has not become popular worldwide. Not even in their own countries have they transcended the particular subcultures to which they belong to and crossed into the mainstream. In that, reggae is undoubtedly unique. As Isaac Fergusson points out in his article “So Much Things to Say”: The Journey of Bob Marley, Rastafarian musicians saw music as the medium through which they spread their message to the entire world.
Artists like Bob Marley and the Wailers were immensely successful at this. In that same article, Fergusson quotes Jamaica’s ex-prime Minister Michael Manley commenting on this achievement: “Marley took what was a subculture in Jamaica and elevated it to a dominant culture. He took a folk art and he elevated it into a universal language of communication” (55). Fergusson also points out that the universality of the Rastafarian message, pro-black but not racist, was pivotal in allowing reggae as a music genre to transcend barriers of race, color, class, and, I would add, nationality or even ethnicity (55). It still remains clear, however, as Lester Bangs points out in his article How to Learn to Love Reggae, that the varieties of musical genres that have emerged from Jamaican rhythms are more or less accepted by outsiders depending on their “level of tolerance for the musical other … from styles close to American soul to very African drums” (76).
Because it is such an African-identified rhythm, particularly with its connection to Rastafarian spirituality and repatriation ideals, reggae was at first a marginalized music genre in Jamaica. Upper class Jamaicans disapproved of it and associated it with a criminal urban lower class, dangerous behavior, and violence. In her article Reggae, Rastafarianism, and Cultural Identity, Verena Reckord states that Bob Marley did not expect reggae to become popular internationally, because in the beginnings so many were trying to hold back the genre’s popularity. She also points out that the success of reggae and its stars is a “self-perpetuating Garveyist prophecy” that has “encouraged artists like Brazil’s Gilberto Gil, Zimbabwe’s Thomas Mapfumo, and Gil Scott-Heron to explore their African roots” (xxviii). Thus we see that the acceptance and growth of reggae had a subversive effect, not only with black musicians in Jamaica, but around the world.
DANCEHALL
Perhaps one of the largest worldwide influences of Jamaican music comes from the 1960s practice of Jamaican DJs who, at sound systems, talked over the rhythms of popular songs, stripped from the vocals into pure beats. It is said that this practice, known as toasting, was taken to New York, where it became rap (Lelland 187). Rapping spread from there to cross-fertilize numerous music styles the world over. Back in Jamaica dancehall became the rage in the 1970s and ‘80s, particularly ragamuffin style, in which lyrics were rapped over electronic beats, often created through sampling.
Dancehall is the faster and barer descendant of reggae, with often violent ragga-rapped lyrics, of famous performers, such as Yellow Man, Shabba Ranks, Ninjaman, Mad cobra, and Buju Banton. The dancehall movement was centered around urban daily life struggles. In his article When Rap Meets Reggae, John Lelland quotes a dancehall artist saying the style was “all about the hard core: survival, facts of life” (187). Lelland, writing in 1992, calls dancehall “the vernacular, often sexually nasty sound of Jamaican dance clubs … that has become harder, simpler … and more conspicuously market wise.” He also states that dancehall “all but eclipsed the more spiritual ‘cool reggae’ of Marley … as kids became less Afrocentric and more New York-centric” (187).
Dancehall, ragga, and rap, in countless fused and refused styles, quickly spread around the world in the last decades of the 20th Century. As Louis Chude-Sokei states in his article, Postnationalist Geographies: Rasta, Ragga, and Reinventing Africa, in Jamaica and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora “the narratives of dancehall investigate the … street-level intricacies of a postcolonial underclass navigating a global network of immigrant communities” (218). A similar reality was rapped about by youngsters in Latin America and other Third World countries, as well as by the inner city minority youth in developed nations.
Although there has always been a more or less strong presence of socially conscious rappers, reggae, and hip hop artists, particularly in the Jamaica of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the dancehall lyrics focused on gun talk, gangs, crime, “ghetto morality”, and “graphic depictions of murder” or “very explicit and pornographic details of the bedroom” (218). Chude-Sokei argues that although “outsiders tend to find these narratives rude, crude, scatological,” the truth is they only reflect a lived reality. I would have to argue that music, like any other art form, not only defends but influences and, in this case, condones and perpetuates a particular reality. When it came to ‘90s dancehall lyrics, gun violence, physical and sexual aggression, and homophobia, raged rampant.
Nonetheless, Chude-Sokei presents very interesting thoughts about how it came to be that Jamaican youth and their popular music strayed away from the ideals popularized by roots reggae. He points out that the Rastafarian principles early reggae musicians preached about were drastically out of touch with Jamaican youth’s quotidian experiences. The emerging music reflected rebellion as Rastafarianism began to lose momentum. Chude-Sokei argues that for the youth of the time, Africa was less important – in fact it got “on the way of contemporary Third World ghetto life.” He quotes a British rudie that told him: “Africa nah go mek me bullet proof.” This reality spread from “gun-loud poverty Kingston” to South London to “that place Raymond Williams located as the center of the modern exile – New York City” (219). Thus it appealed to youth not only in Africa and Latinoamerica, but in what feminist scholars have termed “the Third World within the First World.” I can’t help but wonder, could raw exposure of oppressive lifestyles, even as it seems to exalt them, also be a form of protest?
In his article, Chude-Sokei skillfully depicts his perception of the sound-scape of cultural identity created by the dancehall reality about which inner city youth the world over rapped:
“Here we can witness an attempt to connect the various points of black/Afro-Caribbean disembarkation into one transnational, commodity-based space. One postnationalist city of blackness – but with many, many, suburbs. Maybe this is the only Zion possible: a place where the subversion and redefinition of First World Technology and the loosening bands of racial/nationalist ideologies allow dancehall to create a new ‘Africa’ within the postmodern networks of multinational capital; a virtual ‘black’ community informed by the very arbitrariness of the racial signifier itself. And, like the Rastafari before them, they use sound to invent this space of black belonging. Sound which conveys cultural and historical meanings encoded in beats, grooves, and samples: digitalized culture production” (221).
I find it important to point out that the discourse presented by these dancehall narratives was particularly aggressive towards women. It was charged with explicit depictions of sexuality and testaments to male domination. The mostly male rappers were most certainly concerned with the female body, often perceived as dangerously alluring or even threatening. Chude-Sokei argues that Jamaican dancehall youth saw the black female body as “an aggressive and predatory figure to be guarded against and in some cases catered to” (222). The music, he says, articulated a world “devoid of sentimentality or intimacy.” He presents poignant examples of dancehall lyrics of the time:
“titles raging from ‘Want a Virgin’ and ‘Love Punaany Bad’ (Punaany it is so nice/Punaany it is so slick/Come put your lips on a twelve inch d**k), and …. horrific celebrations of male sexual aggression (‘Me ram it and jam it till the girl start to vomit’)” (223).
Chude-Sokei argues that to “Western liberal feminists … these lyrics … seem very sexist and objectifying of women” because they are “boldly heterosexual and disdainful of bourgeois sentimentality.” However, he argues, it is a form of power, which he describes as a rare and prized commodity in postcolonial reality. He further states that “it allows [women] the freedom and security to navigate in and around a world of beauty, violence, and economic privation” (222). In fact, he states that women purchased most albums and thus set pace for the market, and even that women who picked up the mike only sustained the discourse by demanding that their men “ride and provide” (223).
I don’t deny that sexual attraction can be yielded as a form of power – and the dancehall discourse of obsession with controlling the female body certainly reeks of fear. However, the truth is that a widespread mentality of not mire admiration but outright possession of women’s bodies and sexualities (not to mention the simplification of whole women to mere bodies and sexualities) is no fertile land from which to harvest the ability, much less the freedom, to navigate the world with any semblance of safety, security, or integrity. Why should women settle for such demeaning illusions of power?
REGGAE IN HISPANOAMERICA
Of course, the spread of reggae and its popularity beyond Jamaican borders, quickly created a number of reinterpretations and fusions that pushed the boundaries of what was considered reggae. I grew up in Panama, where there is a strong Afro-Caribbean presence. The country is now home to the descendants of numerous Jamaicans who migrated to the country, particularly during the construction of the Panama Canal. Not surprisingly, in the 1990s one of the popular rhythms on the streets in Panama was homegrown reggae. We called it plena (not the Puerto Rican rhythm) or regué (written phonetically in Spanish, as the accent was placed on the last, not the first syllable). I have now come to understand it was actually an offshoot of what Jamaicans called dancehall. The reggae and rap being performed by Panamanian artists like Nando Boom and Chico Man, and to a certain extent even Puerto Rican hip hop rapper Vico C, was unique because its lyrics were in Spanish. Thus, it has also come to be known as Spanish reggae or Spanish dancehall. One Panamanian musician in particular, El General, became internationally famous with a distinctive calypso influenced style of rapped reggae, and international hit songs, such as Te Ves Buena and Muevelo.
Just a few years earlier, much further South in Argentina, reggae had mutated into another similar Latin version, sometimes denominated reggae rock. It dates as far back as the ‘80s and ‘90s bands Sumo and Todos Tus Muertos, but became particularly famous with the success of Los Pericos, who sold record albums and placed international hits like Me Late and Parate y Mira throughout the 1990s and into the 21st Century.
Another Argentinean band that reached international success is Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, interpreters of such international hits as Matador and Mal Bicho. Although they are known for mixing rock with other rhythms, such as reggae, cumbia, punk, samba, and salsa, they are perhaps best identified for their fusion with ska. Cadillacs, however pivotal, is only one of the many bands that have starred in the Latin ska phenomenon, with internationally renowned bands such as Venezuelan Desorden Público, Maldita Vecindad from Mexico. Although ska was rather quickly replaced in its native Jamaica by many rhythms that followed it in sequence, it clearly found fertile soil, not just in the U.S. and Europe, but also in Spanish speaking Latinoamerica.
There are a few more internationally successful Latin reggae and roots reggae bands that deserve to be mentioned here. One of them is Puerto Rican Cultura Profética, whose first album was recorded in Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studios and whose social and political protest lyrics continue reggae’s legacy, adding a 21st Century environmental consciousness spin. There is also the Chilean band Gondwana, as well as Argentinean band Los Cafres, just t mention a few.
Meanwhile in Panama during the ‘90s and into the 2000s, the reggae-rapped-in-Spanish genre continued to flourish with a second and third generations of artists, such as a Aldo Ranks, Papa Chan, Ness, Kafu Banton, Danger Man, Wassabanga, DJ Black, and Jam & Suppose. Their music was still characterized by violent lyrics, but it was soon followed by the beginnings of what is today known as romantic style, with artists such as Tommy Real and El Roockie.
Meanwhile, a slightly more hip-hop influenced genre continued to develop in Puerto Rico, known as underground, with artist like Ivy Queen and DJ Playero (in fact, I have been told that the genre as a whole was known as “playero” in Honduras at the time). By the late ‘90s Panamanian musicians, such as El Chombo, Lorna, Los Cracker Jacks, and La Factoría, produced the first large scale international hits, such as the singles Papi Chulo and El Gato Volador, and the Los Cuentos de la Cripta albums. By the mid 1990s a new genre, called reggaeton had emerged in Puerto Rico. It mixed their reggae-hip-hop “underground” and Panamanian Spanish-reggae “plena” utilizing a particular beat known as Dem Bow. The beat comes from a 1991 dancehall song by Shabba Ranks, but was popularized in Puerto Rico by Panamanian artists, such as Nando Boom, who utilized it after El General recorded a Spanish version of Shabba Ranks song, called Son Bow.
Reggaeton became an international hit through all of Latin America and the U.S after the success of N.O.R.E.’s single Oye Mi Canto quickly followed by Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina in 2004. As far as discussion of pan-Latin identity in the U.S., Oye Mi Canto, is a tangible example (or tactful marketing scheme, depending on interpretation) of a growing identification between Latinos of different nationalities. The song calls out women to women from numerous Latinoamerican nations with a list of gentile nouns. Honoring long lived stereotypes of Latinos obsessions with the curvy female body, the song’s popular music video showcased a line of Latinoamerican flags, each with a bikini clad woman standing next to it.
In 2005, the reggaeton phenomenon continued to grow as Shakira recorded a reggaeton remix version of her hit song La Tortura. Soon afterwards, other Puerto Rican reggaeton artists placed numerous international hit songs; including, Tego Calderón, Don Omar, Wisin y Yandel, Tito El Bambino, Héctor El Father, and Nina Sky. Meanwhile Panamanian artists continued to lead with what became “romantic style” reggaeton with artists such as Makano and Flex. For another interesting side line, when considering cross-cultural racial issues, I will mention that Flex is known as Niga in Panama, but changed his stage name once his international career was launched – arguably to avoid controversy in the U.S. over the use of the term, particularly considering he is not black.
GLOBAL DUB AND BEYOND
Dub is the most recent Jamaican style to have conquered the world. It started when producers began working with reggae or dancehall tracks, taking out the vocal track, and laying over (or dubbing) pieces of lyrics, original or otherwise. Soon, producers where manipulating all the tracks in a song, deconstructing it and reconstructing it in remixes often characterized by constant reverberation and unexpected changes. Chris Potash calls it “the result of producers playing their mixing tables like instruments” and quotes Luke Ehrilich commenting that “ if reggae is Africa in the New World, then dub must be Africa on the moon” (xxv). In his article Instrument of Expression, Greg Kot points that dub “is the spice that flavors” the most significant musical innovations and movements of the 1990s, from techno to trance, from trip-hop to alternative rock (149). Dub, he states, “evokes an alternative world, a suspension of time, a complete reconfiguration of musical space” (150).
The global scale phenomena Jamaican popular rhythms and innovations have been initiating for decades now, are particularly good examples of what Kenneth Billby labels “the tension between local identity and globalizing trends.” From Indian bhangramuffin, to British drum & bass, to Latin reggaeton, non-Jamaicans have appropriated Jamaican music and trends, and remade them into music forms that represent and reaffirm their own (sub)cultural identities. In the case of Latin-America, reggae and the styles it influenced, are up there with Salsa, merengue, and cumbia, when it comes to widespread popularity. Furthermore, like bachata, banda, samba and tango, reggae has come a long way from its marginalized origins. In this case, its was not a marginalization caused by a rural vs urban antagonism; but due to social class and racial struggles, with a unique plot of religious oppression to universal dissemination. Whether it be with its spiritual fervor, with its raw depiction of urban working class life, or reaching out to a 21st Century electronic generation, reggae has been and will remain an integral part, not just of Jamaican culture, but of pan-Latin identity.
