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Reggae: from ska to roots and dub

Reggae emerged in Jamaica at the end of the 1960s out of ska and rocksteady, and became the most widely recognised music the Caribbean has produced.

Ska, rocksteady, reggae

Reggae is the third stage of a rapid evolution. In the late 1950s Jamaican musicians began reworking American rhythm and blues, pushing the accent onto the offbeat and adding a brass-led drive. That was ska — fast, cheerful, and the soundtrack to Jamaican independence.

Around the middle of the 1960s the tempo dropped sharply. Rocksteady slowed everything down, brought the bass forward, and gave singers room to phrase. It lasted only a couple of years but produced an extraordinary body of vocal-group recordings.

By the end of the decade the rhythm had shifted again, the guitar and keyboard settling into the choppy offbeat skank that defines reggae, and the bass becoming the lead melodic instrument. The whole progression — ska to rocksteady to reggae — took barely a decade.

Sound systems and the studios

None of this happened in a vacuum. Jamaican music was driven by sound systems: mobile rigs run by operators competing in open-air dances for the loudest rig and the records nobody else had.

That competition pushed operators into producing their own exclusive recordings, which is how Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle became the defining labels of the era. Studio One in particular functioned as a conservatory, developing an enormous share of the island's talent.

The rhythms cut in those studios are still in use. A large part of the Jamaican catalogue consists of new songs voiced over instrumentals first recorded sixty years ago.

Roots reggae and Rastafari

The 1970s brought roots reggae, which turned the music toward spirituality, repatriation and political critique, drawing heavily on Rastafari. The Wailers — Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer — are the best known, but the era is deep: Burning Spear, Culture, the Abyssinians, Israel Vibration and many more.

This is the reggae that travelled furthest. Marley's international success made the music legible worldwide and turned a Jamaican genre into a global one, with consequences that were not entirely comfortable at home — the international audience developed a fixed idea of what reggae should sound like just as Jamaica was moving on to dancehall.

Dub

Dub deserves its own heading because its influence exceeds its audience. Engineers — King Tubby, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Scientist and others — took existing multitrack recordings, stripped out the vocals, and rebuilt the mix live at the desk, drenching fragments in reverb and delay and dropping instruments in and out.

In doing so they invented the remix, treated the mixing desk as an instrument, and established the idea that a recording is raw material rather than a finished object. Almost every form of electronic dance music since owes something to what happened in those Kingston studios.

Dub also produced the B-side version, which gave deejays instrumentals to toast over — and that, in turn, produced dancehall.

One Love and the weight of the international market

Bob Marley's global success did something complicated to reggae. It made the music internationally legible and gave Jamaica a cultural footprint out of all proportion to its size — but it also fixed a particular idea of what reggae is in the minds of a worldwide audience.

That fixed idea is roughly the roots reggae of the mid-1970s: message-driven, spiritually inflected, mid-tempo. It is a real and great period of the music. It is also forty years behind what Jamaica has been doing since, and the gap between what the international audience expects and what the island actually produces has been a live tension ever since.

One practical consequence is that international reggae stations and Jamaican stations sound quite different. The former lean on a canon; the latter play what is current. Both are worth hearing, but they are not the same music.

How to listen

Reggae on Caribbean radio splits into distinct programming. Some stations are devoted to it entirely, and Jamaica's IRIE FM was the first anywhere to take that approach. Elsewhere it shares the dial with dancehall, soca and gospel.

The distinction worth knowing is between vintage and current. Roots and rocksteady programmes lean on the classic catalogue; contemporary reggae, which is very much alive, sits closer to dancehall in its production. Both are widely played.

Reggae is also the most exported Caribbean genre, heard on stations across the Eastern Caribbean, Guyana, Belize and Bermuda. The stations below carry it live.

Reggae stations you can hear right now (27)

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