Welcome back to city sounds, our journey around the world looking at the music scenes of different cities as we move through the alphabet. Each week we check out some of the most famous artists and sounds that have come to define whichever city we are in as well as listening to some of the exciting up and coming artists to be making music in that city today. This week we’re on the Letter K and we’ve landed in a place that is probably one of the most musically significant destinations in the world - Kingston, Jamaica.
Kingston is the capital city of Jamaica and home to 1.2 million people. When you think about music and Jamaica, your first thoughts are probably going to turn to laid-back rhythms of reggae and the music of Jamaica’s most famous son Bob Marley. And that would be fair enough but while Reggae is without a doubt one of Jamaica’s biggest contributions to music history, did you know that without Jamaican music we probably would have never heard the sounds of genres such as ska, dub music, dancehall, dubstep, jungle, reggaeton, and even hip hop?
That’s right Jamaica has been hugely influential in the creation of multiple popular music genres and today we’re going to trace the development of Jamaican music through ska, reggae, dub and dancehall to see how each of these genres owes something to the one that came before it while introducing something new and going on to inspire musicians and whole new genres around the world.
Up until the early 1960s Jamaica was a colony of the British empire and popular music in the country consisted mostly of American R&B as well as Jamaican recorded copy-cat R&B and a traditional folk genre of music known as mento. In 1962 though Jamaica gained independence from the UK and this opened the floodgates for a surge in originality and innovation in music styles.
The first original form of music to come out of Jamaica is a type of music called Ska which was created when musicians began to blend the sounds of popular R&B of the time with traditional Jamaican sounds such as Rastafarian Nyabingi drumming and traditional mento folk music, experimenting with the rhythmic approaches to performing and developing a characteristic upstroke on the offbeat played by a guitar.
In the early 1960s for the likes of count Ossie, a Rastafarian drummer and band leader to be so widely accepted into popular culture with this new sound of ska was a watershed moment. A new jamaican national identity was being formed in the wake of independence and this was just the beginning.
Ska went on to cross the atlantic and gain huge popularity in the UK and as you might know, bands like the specials and Madness owe their sound to this purely Jamaican invention.
In the later 1960s the sound of ska went through a series of changes that saw the groove and tempo slowing down, the emphasis on that upstroke on the guitar becoming more pronounced and the beginnings of what would go on to become reggae appeared.
In 1973 a group called the wailers fronted by the charismatic and impressive rastafarian frontman bob marley took the world by storm with their powerful brand of reggae music featuring nyabingi drumming, that classic upstroke on the offbeat and lyrics that called for emancipation from oppression, peace and unity.
To understand how Jamaican music culture has worked over the years it’s important to understand the idea of sound system culture - a uniquely jamaican phenomenon which in a large part has been responsible for shaping the blueprints of modern clubbing culture.
In Jamaican soundsystem culture, rival crews would build huge soundsystems and play the latest ska and reggae tunes to compete for dancer’s attention and loyalty at huge open air dances around Kingston. The crews would work in teams with each member performing a specific task: the engineer tweaking sound, the selector or DJ choosing which song to play next and the MC talking rhythmically or ‘toasting’ as it was called over the top of the music, hyping up the crowd and building the energy of the party.
Sound system parties where were new music was tested and introduced to the public in Jamaica. As the culture developed, producers started making music that was increasingly functional for the soundsystem crews to work the crowds. Music with less vocals and extended instrumental sections for the MC to toast over, and heavier bass to move the crowds along with disorienting effects like reverb and delay seemed to go down well. This was the birth of Dub Music.
Soundsystem toasting is in fact the root of what we now know as modern rap, in fact when a jamaican Dj called cool herc moved to new york in the 1970s and took soundsystem and toasting culture with him, we saw the birth of MCing and what went on to become Hip Hop.
But first there was dub music, a stripped back form of reggae that enphasised the rhythms and bass and used spacial effects like reverb and delay to emphasize groove. When it comes to the creation of dub music producers like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry lead the way with implementing these new studio techniques that these days are common place in modern music but which at the time were complete innovations.
In the 1980s, digital recording meant that the DNA of jamaica’s music was going to change again. Following on from the sounds of reggae and dub that had ignited dances in the 1960s and 70s, in the 80s a newer form of music that, like dub, focussed on the rhythmic and instrumental elements of the track but this time relied on digital instrumentation like synthesizers and drum machines to do the work.
'Under Me Sleng Teng' is an early Dance Hall rhythm that paved the way for a genre that has become huge in modern pop and electronic music. Dancehall has since been repurposed and moulded into new hybrid genres like reggaeton.
In recent times the production duo Equiknoxx have shot to fame for their modern sparse take on dancehall that strips back the music to its rhythmic essence and introduces strange samples and digital effects. This music might sound alien but its a direct descendant of the sounds we’ ve hard steadily evolving through the filter of jamaican dancehall culture. As always its impossible to sum up such a rich musical history in half an hour but I hope this look at the music scene of kingston has given you at least a vague idea of the evolution of popular music in jamaica from ska through reggae and dub into modern dancehall.