Old School Reggae In Europe On The Rise

Reflections On How Old Trends Become New Trends by Mitch Santell

So you want to know a little secret about Big Reggae Mix? Over the past 4+ years that we have been streaming this station 24/7 loud and proud, most of our listeners are in Europe, not America. We keep thinking we'll get more listeners in the USA, but it's Europe including most of Germany, England, France, Italy, Belgium and many more that are feeling us on their tablets, PCs and iPhones or Smartphones.

After Europe, we have Asia and all of the Pacific Islands. I'll admit there is a period where we get a lot of people in Alaska as well as California tuning in. Our station has a life of its own. The quality of the content, as well as the passion for all kinds of Reggae artists worldwide, is what fuels this station. Yeah Mon! Jah Bless!

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Why a whole new generation of young Europeans are turning to old-school reggae

Acamera sweeps across the verdant, shimmering beauty of Jamaica before descending on to a raffishly charming wooden house built into the hills. We’re at a music studio where four of the pioneers who gave birth to reggae are congregated to record a new album.

‘It’s tranquil, a real feeling of nature, just birds, trees and the wind,’ says 71-year-old Ken Boothe, whose seductive voice is smooth as rum, just as it was in 1974 when ‘Everything I Own’ stormed the British charts.

Boothe is one of the stars of a beguiling new documentary, Inna De Yard, about the rise and fall of roots reggae, which reached its peak in the late 1970s with Bob Marley’s ‘conscious’ lyric-writing and is now witnessing a revival.

What made the music so distinctive were two key elements: earnest harmonies, especially of the Rastafarian reggae singers, underpinned by the characteristic ‘one drop’ of the rhythm guitar and bass drum. It heralded a simple ‘dirt music’, grounded in the sun-baked earth of Jamaica’s ghettos, such as Trench Town, from where it emerged.

Fundamentally, roots reggae was a music of black liberation, a narrative of freedom from subjugation: either in escaping to mythical Mother Africa or in death, over which the slave master and his colonial successor held no dominion. When, in ‘Talkin’ Blues’, Marley sang ‘cold ground was my bed at night/ and rock was my pillow too’, his compatriots recognised it as real-life biography; his suffering was theirs. Rooted in hope and redemption, these searing, ethereal songs evoked an eternal life beyond this one, its lyrics peppered with reflections on the remembrance of slavery, most soulfully rendered in Peter Tosh’s ‘Stop That Train’. But embedded in these serious themes were wit and optimism. As the Heptones sang in ‘Sufferer’s Time’, the popularity of reggae meant ‘a time fe sufferer’s drive big car/ a time fe sufferer’s live it up’.

After Marley’s death in 1981 that spiritually uplifting old-school reggae was eclipsed by harsher-sounding dancehall stars whose music was characterised by highly sexualised ‘punany’ lyrics. The cultural coup was confirmed by 1990 when Bunny Wailer (one of the three original Wailers) was bottled off stage by a young crowd at the Sting Festival.
Like many of his contemporaries, Wailer seemed thereafter to withdraw from performing. Premature decline also affected Kiddus I, Winston McAnuff and Cedric Myton, who along with Ken Boothe (the godfather of reggae) star in Inna De Yard. All four, in past decades, suffered terrible misfortunes and yet, late in their careers, they find themselves lauded, in a remarkable turnaround. The documentary charts them coming together on the remote outskirts of Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, to record an album in a makeshift studio known locally as music mountain.

Read more here now: ​http://bit.ly/2ZbXiyY

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