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Style of popular music that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s
and quickly emerged as the country's dominant music. By the 1970s it had
become an international style that was particularly popular in Britain, the
United States, and Africa. It was widely perceived as a voice of the
oppressed.
According to an early definition in The Dictionary of Jamaican English
(1980), reggae is based on ska, an earlier form of Jamaican popular music,
and employs a heavy four-beat rhythm driven by drums, bass guitar, electric
guitar, and the "scraper," a corrugated stick that is rubbed by a plain
stick. (The drum and bass became the foundation of a new instrumental
music, dub.) The dictionary further states that the chunking sound of the
rhythm guitar that comes at the end of measures acts as an "accompaniment
to emotional songs often expressing rejection of established 'white-man'
culture." Another term for this distinctive guitar-playing effect, skengay,
is identified with the sound of gunshots ricocheting in the streets of
Kingston's ghettoes; tellingly, skeng is defined as "gun" or "ratchet
knife." Thus reggae expressed the sounds and pressures of ghetto life. It
was the music of the emergent "rude boy" (would-be gangster) culture.
In the mid-1960s, under the direction of producers such as Duke Reid
and Coxsone Dodd, Jamaican musicians dramatically slowed the tempo of ska,
whose energetic rhythms reflected the optimism that had heralded Jamaica's
independence from Britain in 1962. The musical style that resulted, rock
steady, was short-lived but brought fame to such performers as the Heptones
and Alton Ellis.
Reggae evolved from these roots and bore the weight of increasingly
politicized lyrics that addressed social and economic injustice. Among
those who pioneered the new reggae sound, with its faster beat driven by
the bass, were Toots and the Maytals, who had their first major hit with
"54-46 (That's My Number)" (1968), and the Wailers-Bunny Wailer, Peter
Tosh, and reggae's biggest star, Bob Marley-who recorded hits at Dodd's
Studio One and later worked with producer Lee ("Scratch") Perry. Another
reggae superstar, Jimmy Cliff, gained international fame as the star of the
movie The Harder They Come (1972). A major cultural force in the worldwide
spread of reggae, this Jamaican-made film documented how the music became a
voice for the poor and dispossessed. Its soundtrack was a celebration of
the defiant human spirit that refuses to be suppressed.
During this period of reggae's development, a connection grew
between the music and the Rastafarian movement, which encourages the
relocation of the African diaspora to Africa, deifies the Ethiopian emperor
Haile Selassie I (whose precoronation name was Ras [Prince] Tafari), and
endorses the sacramental use of ganja (marijuana). Rastafari
(Rastafarianism) advocates equal rights and justice and draws on the
mystical consciousness of kumina, an earlier Jamaican religious tradit |