Don't Get Reggae Music? Don't Listen!

Commentary by Mitch Santell, Producer/Co-founder Big Reggae Mix

By nature, I'm a mellow guy, but when I read an article from a writer who dumps on Reggae, it pisses me off.

Here at Big Reggae Mix, we have tracked 100's of Reggae bands and individual artists since our launch over four years ago.

It is my observation that in today's music business, some of the hardest working bands around today are all in Reggae. These bands do everything from writing their music, press their albums, booking themselves into as many Reggae Festivals as they can and pushing their sound. I'm not like-minded with these comments, so I think I need to take a walk.

The critical element for me in Reggae is it's a direct link to the  Cannabis Legalization Movement.  Marijuana smokers were all turned in to criminals in the 1970's. Imagine going to jail for ten full years because you were smoking a joint?​

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But reggae? Oh, it’s deader than Bob Marley. You get the occasional single from one of Marley’s sons, but that could just as easily play on the pop/rock radio stations. In fact, they do. But before that… what? Maxi Priest? UB40? As much as I like the early work of both of those artists, their success was founded mostly on the commercial, rather than the rebel, tip. And the only radio exposure they receive now, if any, is on urban classics and college stations. It’s safe to say that the only real survivor of reggae’s heyday are dreadlocks, which now ironically signify wealth and celebrity, rather than the hairstyle of the oppressed.

Many (most?) people probably can’t recall the position of strength that reggae was in during the early to mid-70s. It was being championed and covered by mainstream artists such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones for its unique musical structure — a combination of gospel, jazz, R&B and soul. Its very real outlaw reputation didn’t hurt; many of today’s rappers would curl into the fetal position or head for the mean streets of Beverly Hills if dropped into that era’s slums and shantytowns. The 1972 film The Harder The Come influenced a generation of legitimate bad men, wanna-be gunmen, and singers much the same way Scarface would a decade later. Of course, the soundtrack of the former is legendary and still remains one of the essential single-album documents of the genre.

Reggae, like rock, was birthed from a more folksy tradition, in this case mento and calypso. That gentle, largely acoustic music would give way to ska — a more upbeat, dance-oriented music of the 1950s — in a striking metamorphosis similar to how country, blues, folk and “race” music would deliver rock & roll to the youth culture of America and, eventually, the world. Ska was characterized by its walking bass line and rhythms concentrated on the upbeat. It also brought to bear a much faster tempo which demanded dancing. But trends — and teenagers — often have a short attention span and a desire for something new, and music mythology also points to the very hot temperatures in the Caribbean in the mid-1960s as a dominant factor in the evolution of Jamaican music. The sweltering heat produced a slower tempo for both the musicians, and patrons of dancehall and yard dances, the story goes, and thus rocksteady. Perhaps my favorite era of Jamaican music, rocksteady would sadly be a very short, albeit highly influential, “blip” on Jamaican music’s radar, eventually ceding to what we would know as reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s.

As Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism and black consciousness started to spread in Jamaica, the music again shifted. Nyabinghi drumming and chants started to work their way into Jamaican music, along with a professed love for the sacred herb of marijuana, a desire for repatriation to Africa and the acceptance of Haile Selassie as the second coming of God on earth. To most Jamaicans, Rastas were the bottom rung of the social ladder, confined to the countryside and ghettos of Kingston. However, their revolutionary beliefs soon infiltrated musicians and the music scene, and the golden age of “roots reggae” was soon underway. A young Bob Marley, along with bandmates Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, embraced the movement, growing their locks out, and eventually putting an acceptable — and commercial — face on Jamaica’s ghetto music to Western pop culture.

There were exceptions, of course; Bob Marley and The Wailers, Third World, and The Gladiators were self-contained bands. Marley, of course, would become the biggest reggae star in history, and a cottage industry after his premature death at age 36 of cancer. However, it is worth pointing out that black America never really embraced Bob Marley, or reggae music in general, a fact that, according to Ziggy Marley, the reggae king “had (an) issue with, because he wanted African-Americans to hear his message.” Many might argue that the death of reggae began with the death of its superstar, and it’s true that it would never reach the heights, nor produce as magnetic a presence as Bob Marley. But other things that would change both the music and culture of Jamaica were already underfoot.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2R0ahuz​

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