Jamaica Music : Reggae

          Reggae music was a big part of Jamaican culture. Many artists practiced the style of reggae and some of the artists like Bob Marley influenced and showed people internationally all about this music. It originated around the time that Jamaica was being attacked by European countries like Spain and native people being taken into slavery. Bob Marley was born after the time of slave trading but whites still effected the native people and this is how he got his inspiration for his music. 

        The music of Jamaica began five centuries ago, when Columbus colonized the land of the Arawak Indians. This dates the start of oppression by first the Spanish and then the English in this area of the Caribbean. Blacks were brought in as slaves by the English, and although Jamaica has had it's independence since 1963, the tension of authority and control still reigns. Jamaica is a story of injustice, international influence, ineffective governing, and unequal distribution of wealth; all of these elements provide a solid base for the theme of oppression and the need for a revolution and redemption in Jamaican music. Reggae in particular reflects these injustices, and the feelings, needs and desires to change the lifestyle that Jamaicans have historically lived. Reggae music has two meanings. It’s generic name for all Jamaican popular music since 1960, West Indian style of music with a strongly accented subsidiary beat. Reggae can also refer to the particular beat that was extremely popular in Jamaica from around 1969 to 1983. Jamaican music can be divided into four areas that carry their own distinctive beat. (ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall) Each of these types of music had their own. The names and styles of reggae have changed over the years but the traditions and intentions of the music has not. Reggae music has grown and developed from the people and the experience of Jamaican like. The amazing thing about this style of music is that it stretches the globe with it’s popularity and is the only music not of European and American origin that is listened to in every country on earth. In modern time it is the first third world nation that is sharing its culture to such a diverse culture. I am fascinated at the fact that such a small, impoverished country could have created a music style that is so popular around the globe, without the aid of corporate hype or planning committees. The names and styles of reggae have changed over the years but the traditions and intentions of the music has not. Reggae music has grown and developed from the people and the experience of Jamaican like. The amazing thing about this style of music is that it stretches the globe with its popularity and is the only music not of European and American origin that is listened to in every country on earth. In modern time it is the first third world nation that is sharing its culture to such a diverse culture. I am fascinated at the fact that such a small, impoverished country could have created a music style that is so popular around the globe, without the aid of corporate hype or planning committees. Many music historians agree that the word reggae first appeared in 1968 by Toots and the Maytals. At the time, "reggae" was simply the latest in a series of dance crazes to hit Jamaica, a slower, more beat heavy, bass dominated rhythm than ska and rock-steady. The styles that had swept the nation before reggae had come into its own. More than three decades have passed, and reggae music is becoming increasingly more popular. Toots once explained to writers Stephen Davis and Peter Simon in their book Reggae Bloodlines what the meaning of Reggae is. He said that, "just mean coming’ from the people…. coming’ from the majority. When you say reggae, you mean regular, majority."

     Bob Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at the premature age of thirty-six. By then he was well known to college kids worldwide, but few could have foreseen the celebrity he has attained since. Born in Jamaica, he is the only third-world performer to be elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1999, the BBC named his “One Love” the “Song of the Millennium”; the same year Time declared his 1977 Exodus the “Best Album of the Twentieth Century.” Voted the third-greatest songwriter of all time in a 2001 BBC poll (behind Bob Dylan and John Lennon), Marley has sold an estimated 50 million records worldwide. On the 2007 Forbes list of “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities,” he ranked twelfth, with his estate earning an estimated $4 million. His posthumous greatest-hits collection, Legend (1984), is among the top-selling compilations of all time. Twenty-seven years after his death, there is perhaps no country where his songs—wry ballads and martial anthems, with soothing or stirring melodies—aren’t familiar. The songs tell a familiar story of black slaves, mainly West Africans brought to work Jamaica’s fields of indigo and sugar cane, combining their own diverse cultures with those they found and making something new. Like many of his contemporaries—young country people who migrated to the city seeking work, only to end up in its swelling slums—Marley absorbed the political and musical currents that flowed through Jamaica and its capital, Kingston, in the years before and after its independence in 1962. Among the sounds were spirituals sung in clapboard churches and folk songs toiled and danced to in fields and shacks; newer rhythms from neighbouring islands—mambo from Cuba, calypso from Trinidad; and increasingly, with the advent of the transistor radio and the spread of “sound systems” (turntables and enormous loudspeakers that made musical block parties possible), American doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues. In a city full of artists and entrepreneurs seeking to forge a new national culture, Marley and his peers—like many others in the third world at the time—adapted these sounds to their lives on the margins. From the early 1960s, Marley became part of the rapid evolution of Jamaican popular music: mento, the calypso-inflected dance style dominant in the 1950s, gave way by the decade’s end to the kinetic hop called ska, and then, in the mid-1960s, to the languid shuffle called rocksteady; finally, a few years later, came the driving, spacious sound of reggae—the style Marley brought to a worldwide audience. 

    

To conclude the reggae music was a big part of Jamaica and Bob Marley was a key influence of this music. The reggae music was founded at the time of Spain trading native Jamaicans around Europe and was the music of the people. Reggae music was about the wrongs that have been done to Jamaican people. Bob Marley was effected by these wrongs and used his musical talent to influenced people on an international scale about these wrongs and the style of reggae itself before he passed away.