Jamaica

For a country that's slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut and has a population of less than 3 million, Jamaica has done more to influence world music that any other country its size—and far more than numerous countries that are much bigger. The country's ska, reggae and dub musical styles and influences are heard around the world.

The Arawak people settled the land they called Xamayca around 1,000 A.D. Christopher Columbus landed there in 1494, and Spain began its occupation of the country in 1509, dubbing it Santiago. The island's indigenous population was soon wiped out by disease, war and slavery, but Spain's dominion wouldn't last. In 1655 Britain seized Jamaica, and by 1661 the country was in full colonization mode. African slaves, first brought over by the Spanish, continued to be brought to Jamaica to work the highly profitable sugar cane and coffee plantations, which made the island one of Britain's most valuable Caribbean outposts for more than 150 years. With slaves outnumbering their white masters, numerous uprisings occurred throughout the years and many indentured servants escaped. These escaped slaves, called Maroons, developed their own societies, and several of their communities are still around in modern Jamaica.

A strike organized by Samuel Sharp on December 25, 1831, turned violent and was squashed, but it led to Britain abolishing slavery in 1834. But it wasn't until 1865's Morant Bay rebellion, led by Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, that Britain eventually renounced its authority and made Jamaica a Crown Colony. In 1872 the island's capital moved from the interior Spanish Town to coastal Kingston, and over the next 90 years the island went through a series of economic challenges as well as rising political movements pushing for independence. Britain finally granted the island freedom from its Commonwealth on August 6, 1962. Jamaica's main two political groups—Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP)—continually struggle for leadership, sometimes violently, and "politricks" (as Rastafarians call it) have influenced many a songwriter.

You can't go anywhere in Jamaica today without hearing reggae or its harder-edged evolution, dancehall. Modern Jamaican music has its roots in earlier forms that were popular on the island, including the percussive junkanoo (jonkunnu, jonkonnu) and kumina styles from West Africa, and the European dance mode called quadrille. These morphed into mento, Jamaica's unique brand of folk music that is sometimes confused with Trinidadian calypso. By the 1930s and 1940s American jazz raged on the island, and in the 1950s R&B, especially that from New Orleans, began its meteoric rise. Also, Jamaica's Rastafarian religious sect kept alive the African-derived drumming style called burra or Nyabinghi. Other influences on Jamaican music over the years include calypso and soca from Trinidad as well as various styles from nearby Cuba and Haiti.

In the early 1960s Jamaican musicians took mento, burra and R&B and mashed them together to form a music called ska. The drumbeats were emphasized on the second and fourth bars, as in R&B, as the bass played driving quarter notes, but it was the syncopated guitar or piano accents, as in mento, on the upbeats that gave ska its distinctive sound. Ska was high-energy dance music, but by 1966 the tunes had slowed into a style called rocksteady: bass took on a more prominent and syncopated role, and Motown-inspired vocalists were able to stretch their soulful pipes over richer melodies. By 1968 the tempo had decreased yet again and funkier bass lines emerged as did the one-drop rhythm—where the bass drum is "dropped" on the one and reintroduced on the three, while the two and the four are heavily accented by the snare and guitars—which became the lifeblood of the music named reggae. (Nobody really knows how the names ska or reggae emerged: the former may be onomatopoeic to represent the sound of the guitar; the latter term was first documented on the 1968 hit "Do the Reggay" [sic] by Toots and the Maytals.)

As Bob Marley spread Jamaican music throughout the world in the 1970s, musicians at home continued to experiment. Dub is a ghostly style that treated reggae tunes as playgrounds for producers who stripped out vocals and added echo and reverb to create new versions of the songs. While a dub "version" was often used as the B-side of a 7-inch single, the style took on a life of its own, spawning new instrumentals that were meant specifically for dub treatments. Another outgrowth of "versioning" was the toaster or deejay, which in Jamaica means someone who chants, raps or talks over a beat, not someone who spins records. Older songs were recycled for new deejay versions, and singers would put a new set of lyrics and melodies over a classic rhythm (riddim). This sort of recycling and invention through reinvention is a hallmark of modern Jamaican music. Other styles than emerged in the 1970s include rockers (where the bass drum is hit on all four beats), reggae-disco and, from England, home to millions of Jamaican immigrants, lover's rock, which concentrated on sweet songs of romance.

By the 1980s dancehall emerged and it still dominates today. This new form of deejaying often featured more aggressive vocals, sexually suggestive or violent lyrics (called "slackness") and stripped-down music. Over the years, with MTV and BET being pumped into more and more Jamaican households, dancehall was heavily influenced by American hip-hop, which itself borrowed heavily from Jamaican deejays during its Bronx birth in the 1970s. But dancehall artists still have an approach that is uniquely their own, no matter what outside inspirations come to the island, and they've continued to do what musicians in "Ja" have always done: Ingest influences from all sorts of music and recast them as a something undeniably Jamaican. —Christopher Porter