What Is Reggae? The Offbeat That Changed Popular Music

The sequence of styles is quick and traceable. Mento, a rural Jamaican folk form with acoustic instruments, was the local music of the 1940s and 1950s. Sound systems, mobile discos with enormous speaker stacks run by operators competing for crowds, dominated popular listening from the 1950s and created a demand for exclusive records that could not be bought elsewhere, which pushed operators into producing their own. Ska arrived around 1960 with a fast shuffling offbeat, horns and a jump-blues influence absorbed from American radio stations audible across the water, and it coincided with independence in 1962 and carried its optimism. Rocksteady slowed it down around 1966, dropped the horns forward and gave the bass a much larger role. Reggae emerged from that around 1968, slower still, heavier on the bass and drums, and named in a Toots and the Maytals record that used the word. Each shift took two or three years.

The style is defined by a set of specific rhythmic choices that are easy to name once heard:

• •The skank, a short chopped chord on the offbeats played by guitar or keyboard, which is the sound most people identify immediately
• •The one drop, a drum pattern in which beat one is left empty and the bass drum and rim shot land together on beat three, removing the expected anchor
• •A bass line that is melodic, prominent and often the main hook, played with a heavy muted tone rather than as harmonic support
• •Tempos generally between about sixty and ninety beats per minute, slower than nearly all contemporaneous popular music
• •A bubble organ pattern filling the spaces, and horn lines used as punctuation rather than as a constant presence
• •Lyrics drawn from Rastafarian religious language, from Jamaican politics and poverty, and from ordinary love songs in roughly equal measure

The religious movement that shaped much of the music's vocabulary began in Jamaica in the 1930s, following the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, and holds him as a divine figure, treats Africa as a homeland from which the diaspora was taken, and rejects the structures of colonial society under the name Babylon. Its practices include dreadlocks, a dietary code and ritual use of cannabis. The movement was marginal and heavily stigmatised in Jamaica for decades, and the international success of reggae in the 1970s carried its language and imagery worldwide, which is why phrases and symbols from a small religious movement became globally recognisable. The music also carried explicit political content, in a country where the two main parties were violently opposed and where musicians were caught in the middle, most dramatically when Bob Marley was shot at his home in 1976 two days before a concert and performed anyway.

The most far-reaching contribution was technical and came from engineers rather than performers. Around 1967, producers in Kingston began issuing instrumental versions of records on the flip side so that sound system operators could talk over them. King Tubby, an electronics repairman with a mixing desk he had modified himself, and Lee Scratch Perry at his Black Ark studio, turned this into a form: they removed and reintroduced instruments in real time, drowned individual hits in spring reverb and tape echo, filtered the frequencies, and treated the mixing desk as an instrument played live onto tape. Dub established that a recording is raw material rather than a finished object, and its consequences are enormous. Toasting, in which a performer talks rhythmically over an instrumental, travelled with Jamaican immigrants to New York and is a direct ancestor of rap. The version, the remix, the drop, the bass-centred mix, and the use of the studio as a compositional tool all run back to this, through dub reggae into hip hop, disco, house, drum and bass, dubstep and most of what is made on a computer today.

Bob Marley's international career from the early 1970s made the music global, and his posthumous compilation is among the best-selling albums ever released. Britain was the first major foreign market, through Jamaican immigration, which produced lovers rock, the two-tone ska revival of the late 1970s that deliberately paired Black and white musicians against a background of racial violence, and a lasting influence on punk, with the Clash and others recording with Jamaican producers. Reggae's rhythmic vocabulary then appears everywhere: in Nigerian and South African music, in the reggaeton of Panama and Puerto Rico, which took the Jamaican dancehall rhythm and set it to Spanish rap, and in the Polish, Japanese and Brazilian scenes that sustain it locally. Jamaica's own music continued to change, into dancehall from the late 1970s with digital production from 1985, and the country's outsized influence on world popular music remains one of the clearest examples of how much a small place can export.

Reggae emerged in Jamaica around 1968 from mento, ska and rocksteady, defined by chopped chords on the offbeats, a one drop drum pattern that leaves the first beat empty, a melodic and dominant bass, and slow tempos. Its lyrics carried Rastafarian language and Jamaican politics to a world audience. Its most consequential export was dub, in which Kingston engineers treated the mixing desk as an instrument, establishing the remix, the instrumental version and toasting, which run directly into hip hop and most electronic music since.