There's reggae music and than there's reggae music. You see, there's the safe reggae music that's produced for mass consumption you hear on the radio and then there's the other 90% of the music which most of us don't hear in North America. If you live in London, England, or another community with a large Jamaican immigrant population, you stand a chance of hearing more than most. However, by and large, what most of us hear is a watered down version of something a lot more intense than what is normally allowed to be played on mainstream radio.
While Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Dennis Brown, and to a lesser extent Peter Tosh, gained a certain amount of name recognition in North America, they only represented the tip of the iceberg as far as the amount and variety of music being made. Even those named above had difficulties receiving air time on mainstream stations, mainly because of lyrics advocating marijuana use, but also because of the strong social/political and religious messages contained in their songs. It's no coincidence that reggae's upsurge in popularity coincided with punk in both North America and England as both contained strong anti-establishment messages advocating change and questioning authority. So if reggae bands weren't running afoul of America's "Just Say No" campaign, the black nationalist content or Rastafarian messages in their songs prevented them from being palatable to mainstream radio.
Now if it was difficult to hear regular reggae music on the radio, the chances of hearing any of its offshoots was next to impossible. While in North America the idea of somebody traveling around with turntables and a sound system and performing is a relatively new idea, the practice dates back to at least the early 1960s in Jamaica. In fact many of the studios which produced the first local Jamaican bands had their roots in these sound systems. While live bands began to supplant recorded music and the sound systems, there were also those who started to incorporate both elements and they were the genesis for what would become known as "dub" reggae. Dubbing is short form for a recording technique known as overdubbing which simply means taking a pre-existing piece of recorded music and either recording or performing new elements over top of it or creating new mixes utilizing the existing tracks and effects to create different versions of an existing song.
Article comments