Jamaican music and its influence

reggae music was considered a rag-tag, hodge-podge of other musical styles, namely Jamaican Mento and contemporary Jamaican Ska music, along with American jazz and rhythm & blues, something like what was coming out of New Orleans at the time.
It’s a time for Jamaicans to celebrate their unique contributions to world music. Certainly, they have more than one reason to celebrate.

During the early years of the post-Independence (i.e., 1970s), “roots” reggae music—through its close association with the philosophy and culture of the Rastafari—played a major role in transforming Jamaica’s national identity from one of an Anglophilic British post-colony to a “conscious” Black nation with a proud African heritage. The roots of the Rastafari-reggae nexus traces back to early decades of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, Marcus Garvey—the Jamaican-born champion of Pan-Africanism—mobilized millions of Black people in Harlem and across the Diaspora with his vision of racial upliftment and a return to Africa. He encouraged his followers to “Look to Africa where a Black king will be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.”

In Jamaica, Garvey’s followers remembered this when the young Ethiopian nobleman, Ras Tafari Makonnen, was enthroned in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The first Rastafari preachers took the Emperor’s pre-coronation name as their own—pointing to the titles in Scriptures that identified him as the Second Coming (see Revelation 5:5; 19:16)—they proclaimed his divinity. As his rightful subjects, communicants saw themselves as “exiles” in a modern-day Babylon whose redemption required the development of a consciousness that would liberate Black people from the “mental slavery” fostered by enslavement and Eurocentric miseducation about Africa and its peoples.

Decades later, roots reggae music would serve as the medium to carry that message with anthems praising the divinity of the Emperor, recalling the historic struggles of the Jamaican people, and condemning the ongoing inequities and forms of injustice that affect not only Black people, but peoples everywhere. Since the 1970s, reggae—in its varied genres (e.g., roots, lover’s rock, dub, and dancehall), has reached virtually every corner of the globe from Kingston to Cape Town and from Amsterdam to Auckland. At the front of that worldwide trend was Jamaica’s own planetary icon: Bob Marley.