Reggae

Jamaica became independent in August 1962, and the music of that summer was ska: American R&B played by Kingston jazz musicians with the accent flipped onto the offbeat. Clement "Coxsone" Dodd opened Studio One on Brentford Road in 1963, the first Black-owned studio on the island, and the house band he assembled became the Skatalites in 1964. "Guns of Navarone" and "Simmer Down" are what they sounded like. That second one was the first hit for a teenage vocal group called the Wailers, who would go on to be Bob Marley's band.

By 1966 the tempo dropped. Rocksteady was slower, sweeter, with the bass out front and vocal groups like the Paragons and the Techniques singing American soul harmonies over it. It lasted about two years. In 1968 the beat changed again, choppier and more driven, and Toots Hibbert of the Maytals wrote a song called "Do the Reggay" that named it. Lee "Scratch" Perry, who had worked for Dodd, put out "People Funny Boy" the same year with a crying baby on it, one of the first records with the new feel and a producer already treating the studio as a toy.

None of this was heard much outside Jamaica and the West Indian neighborhoods of London, where Trojan Records started in 1968. But the machinery was in place: sound systems, versions, producers as auteurs, a bass-first way of hearing. The next decade would send it around the world.

Reggae was a local music at the start of the decade and a world music by the end of it, and one man carried most of the weight. But the mechanism matters more than the star. Chris Blackwell of Island Records, a white Jamaican who had already sold Millie Small and Jimmy Cliff to Britain, signed Bob Marley and the Wailers in 1972 and marketed them like a rock band: an album, not singles; a sleeve shaped like a Zippo lighter; a tour; rock guitar and clavinet overdubbed in London on the Kingston tapes. "Catch a Fire" (April 1973) sold modestly and changed everything about how the world would hear Jamaica.

The film "The Harder They Come" (1972), with Jimmy Cliff as a country boy turned singer turned outlaw, did the same job for the music behind him: the soundtrack put Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop", the Melodians' "Rivers of Babylon" and Cliff's own "Many Rivers to Cross" into American college towns. Toots had named the genre with "Do the Reggay" in 1968; now "Funky Kingston" (1973) showed how much soul was in it.

At home, the seventies were reggae's roots era: slower, heavier, Rastafarian in faith and African in longing. Burning Spear's "Marcus Garvey" (1975) is a history lesson with a bass line. The producers were the real innovators. King Tubby, an electronics repairman, took the instrumental B-side and started dropping the vocal in and out, drenching the drums in reverb and delay, and dub was born, a remix culture years before New York had one. Augustus Pablo's "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" (1976) is dub's touchstone. Lee "Scratch" Perry built a four-track studio behind his house in 1973, called it the Black Ark, and made records that sound like they were recorded underwater in a dream; the Wailers, the Congos and Max Romeo all passed through. Deejays like U-Roy and Big Youth talked over the dubs, and the line from there to the Bronx is direct.

Marley's arc was the decade's. "Natty Dread" (1974) without Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Gunmen in his house on 3 December 1976, two days before a peace concert he played anyway. Exile in London and "Exodus" (June 1977), a whole side of hymns and a whole side of love songs. The One Love Peace Concert in Kingston on 22 April 1978, where he pulled Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leaders of two parties whose gunmen were killing each other, on stage and joined their hands. And a diagnosis in July 1977 he chose not to treat with amputation. By 1979 dancehall was beginning in Kingston, faster and more local again, and Marley had two years left.

Bob Marley released "Uprising" in 1980, closed his last concert with "Redemption Song", and died in Miami on 11 May 1981, aged thirty-six. Roots reggae lost its ambassador, and in Kingston the music was already moving. Dancehall, a stripped-back, DJ-led sound built on riddims for the sound systems, had been rising since the late 1970s. Yellowman, an albino DJ who talked slack and fast, was its first superstar; "Mister Yellowman" (1982) and "Zungguzungguguzungguzeng" made him the most popular Jamaican artist since Marley.

In early 1985 a young singer, Wayne Smith, and a friend, Noel Davey, found a "rock" preset on a Casio MT-40 home keyboard. Producer Lloyd "King Jammy" James slowed it down and built a riddim. "Under Me Sleng Teng" was reggae's first fully digital rhythm track, and within a year every studio in Kingston had thrown out its bass players. Hundreds of versions of "Sleng Teng" exist; the digital era it started still runs.

The same year the Grammys created a reggae category. Black Uhuru's "Anthem", produced by Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare with drum machines and synths at Compass Point, won it, beating Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Steel Pulse and Yellowman. In Britain, UB40 and Steel Pulse kept reggae on pop radio, and by 1989 Shabba Ranks was turning dancehall toward the hip-hop crossover of the next decade.

Dancehall took over from roots reggae in the 1980s and in the 1990s it took over the world's bass. Shabba Ranks, gravel-voiced and unstoppable, won the Best Reggae Album Grammy in 1992 and again in 1993, the first dancehall artist to do it, and "Mr. Loverman" was on American radio. Super Cat signed to Columbia. Shaggy took an old ska song, "Oh Carolina", to number one in Britain and then made "Boombastic" a global hit and a Grammy winner. Beenie Man's "Who Am I (Sim Simma)" and his feud with Bounty Killer ran the Jamaican charts. Big Mountain's reggae cover of Peter Frampton sat in the American top ten. Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper" went to number one there in 1994.

Then the conscious turn. Buju Banton, the biggest and roughest voice in dancehall, converted to Rastafari and made "Til Shiloh" in 1995, a record of drums, scripture and "Untold Stories", the song that sounds like Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" for a new generation. Capleton, Sizzla and Luciano followed, and Xterminator's productions made the Bobo Ashanti sound the late-1990s roots revival. Bob Marley's "Legend" kept selling to every college dorm in the world; his estate was finally settled in 1991, and his son Damian released his first album in 1996.

The riddim, the instrumental track dozens of singers voice over, was the decade's quiet export. Shabba Ranks's "Dem Bow" (1990) gave its drum pattern to a Puerto Rican underground that would call itself reggaeton. Dancehall toasting sat inside New York hip-hop from Biggie to Lauryn Hill, who sampled Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" and recorded her album at Tuff Gong. Sean Paul cut his first singles in 1996 and 1997. The 2000s, when dancehall and reggaeton both went to number one, were already audible.

Dancehall had never been closer to the American charts. Shaggy's Hot Shot, in August 2000, was the second best-selling album in the United States in 2001 on the back of It Wasn't Me and Angel. Then Steven "Lenky" Marsden's Diwali riddim, in 2002, a handclap pattern that half of Kingston voiced at once, gave Sean Paul Get Busy, Wayne Wonder No Letting Go and Lumidee Never Leave You. Sean Paul's Dutty Rock, in November 2002, went to the top of the American album chart, he sang on Beyoncé's Baby Boy, and for two years Jamaican patois was the language of the club. Elephant Man, Beenie Man, Sizzla, Capleton and Tanya Stephens all rode the wave.

The music also got darker at home. Vybz Kartel and Mavado's Gully versus Gaza feud split Kingston's garrisons in the second half of the decade and turned dancehall into a soundtrack for real violence. Buju Banton's decade ended in a Florida courtroom. The roots side was carried by the Marley sons: Damian Marley's Welcome to Jamrock, in September 2005, put a Sizzla-style chant over an Ini Kamoze sample and won two Grammys, and Stephen Marley's Mind Control did the same in 2008. Tarrus Riley and Etana, with the Gentleman and Alborosie records from Europe, were the roots of the reggae revival the 2010s would name.

Reggae's pop afterlife was everywhere. Rihanna's first single, Pon de Replay in 2005, was dancehall. Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jew from White Plains, took reggae to Bonnaroo, and Rebelution, SOJA and Slightly Stoopid built an American reggae-rock circuit from California to Virginia. Toots and the Maytals won a Grammy for True Love in 2005, and Bob Marley's Legend, released in 1984, passed ten million copies in the United States and kept selling every week of the decade.

The strangest thing about reggae in the 2010s is how much of it you heard without noticing. Dancehall rhythms and Jamaican vocal phrasing became a default setting in global pop: Drake's One Dance and Controlla in 2016, Rihanna's Work, Major Lazer's entire career, Justin Bieber's Sorry. Sean Paul had a second commercial life as a guest vocalist. Jamaica exported its rhythm and often did not get the credit.

At home, dancehall's dominant figure spent most of the decade in prison. Vybz Kartel was arrested in 2011 and convicted in 2014, and kept releasing music from inside. Popcaan, Alkaline and later Shenseea carried the sound forward.

Against that, a reggae revival looked back to roots and rockers: Chronixx, Protoje, Kabaka Pyramid, Jesse Royal and Lila Iké made records about Rastafari, history and Kingston's present tense. Damian Marley's Stony Hill won a Grammy in 2018. Buju Banton won Best Reggae Album at the 2011 Grammys while free on bond and barred from travelling to the ceremony, was convicted on drugs charges nine days later and jailed that June, then came home in December 2018 and played to enormous crowds. And Koffee, who was nineteen when her Rapture EP came out, won Best Reggae Album at the Grammys in January 2020, the youngest person and the first woman on her own to take it.

The bigger African story ran alongside it. Afrobeats moved from Lagos to the world across the decade: Wizkid singing the hook on One Dance, Davido, Mr Eazi, Tiwa Savage, and Burna Boy's African Giant in 2019, which made the case that this was not a support act for Western pop but a centre of its own.

Jamaica lost an extraordinary amount in three years. Toots Hibbert, who put the word reggae in a song title in 1968, died in September 2020. Bunny Wailer, the last living Wailer, died in March 2021. Lee Scratch Perry, who invented most of what a studio can do to a recording, died that August. Between them they built the grammar of the music.

What came after was loud and online. Byron Messia, from St Kitts, made "Talibans" and it spread through the diaspora in weeks. Shenseea crossed into American pop. Skillibeng and Valiant pushed dancehall into harsher, stranger shapes. Koffee, who was nineteen when she became the youngest person and the first woman to win the Best Reggae Album Grammy in January 2020, spent the pandemic writing "Lockdown", which is what its title suggests and is also a love song.

And in July 2024 Vybz Kartel walked out of prison in Kingston after his murder conviction was overturned, having recorded a decade of hit records from inside. On New Year's Eve that year he headlined Freedom Street in the national stadium. Two months earlier, a biopic of Bob Marley had made most of a billion dollars' worth of noise about a man who died in 1981.