Jamaican music can be roughly divided into four eras, each with a distinctive beat - ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall. Ska dates from about 1960 to mid-1966, rocksteady from 1966 to 1968, while from 1969 to 1983 reggae was the popular beat. The reggae era had two phases, 'early reggae' up to 1974 and 'roots reggae' up to 1983. Since 1983 dancehall has been the prevalent sound. The authors describe each stage in the development of the music, identifying the most popular songs and artists, highlighting the significant social, political and economic issues as they affected the musical scene. While they write from a Jamaican perspective, the intended audience is 'any person, local or foreign, interested in an intelligent discussion of reggae music and Jamaica.'.
When Jackie Mittoo and Leroy Sibbles migrated from Jamaica to Toronto in the early 1970s, the musicians brought reggae with them, sparking the flames of one Canada’s most vibrant music scenes. In King Alpha’s Song in a Strange Land, professional reggae musician and scholar Jason Wilson tells the story of how the organic, transnational nature of reggae brought black and white youth together, opening up a cultural dialogue between Jamaican migrants and Canadians along Toronto’s ethnic frontlines. This underground subculture rebelled against the status quo, eased the acculturation process, and made bands such as Messenjah and the Sattalites household names for a brief but important time. By looking at Canada’s golden age of reggae from the perspective of both Jamaican migrants and white Torontonians, Wilson reveals the power of music to break through the bonds of race and ease the hardships associated with transnational migration.
Dub is the avant-garde verso of reggae, created by manipulating and reshaping recordings using studio strategies and techniques. While dub was one of the first forms of popular music to turn the idea of song inside out, it is far from being fully explored. Tracing the evolution of dub, Remixology travels from Kingston, Jamaica, across the globe, following dub’s influence on the development of the MC, the birth of sound system culture, and the postwar Jamaican diaspora. Starting in 1970s Kingston, Paul Sullivan examines the origins of dub as a genre, approach, and attitude. He stops off in London, Berlin, Toronto, Bristol, and New York, exploring those places where dub had the most impact and investigates its effect on postpunk, dub-techno, jungle, and the dubstep. Along the way, Sullivan speaks with a host of international musicians, DJs, and luminaries of the dub world, from DJ Spooky, Adrian Sherwood, Channel, and Roy to Shut Up and Dance and Roots Manuva. Wide-ranging and lucid, Remixology sheds new light on the dub-born notions of remix and reinterpretation that set the stage for the music of the twenty-first century.
The team of writer Chris Salewicz and photographer Adrian Boot have brought together 50,000 words of text and over 400 images from the ReggaeXplosion Archive to create a history that contains a potent cocktail of drama, turbulence, pride and protest. From the earliest emergence in the 1950s of the fiercely competitive sound systems, fighting sonic battles in downtown Kingston, the story of Jamaican music is traced through ska, the birth of reggae, dub, roots reggae and the impact of Bob Marley to the new, harder-edged developments that have emerged in the last twenty years, including dancehall, ragga and jungle. Unpublished transcripts of interviews with key figures like Lee 'Scratch' Perry and Prince Buster introduce the authentic voices of reggae history to the book - which blends researched facts, graphics and rare images to create not only a sense of the pulse of the music, but also the contrasts of poverty, humour, desperation and joie de vivre that typify both the island of Jamaica and its music.
A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music.
Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes. In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s. Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever. George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Literary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts, music and film. This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines, at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities, in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean. Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora, and Global South radical political and cultural theory.
Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: “Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope.” Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alike—indeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska.
'Political Messaging in Music and Entertainment Spaces across the Globe' uniquely expands the frontiers of political communication by simultaneously focusing on content (political messaging) and platform (music and entertainment). As a compendium of valuable research work, it provides rich insights into the construction of political messages and their dissemination outside of the traditional and mainstream structural, process and behavioral research focus in the discipline. Researchers, teachers, students and other interested parties in political communication, political science, journalism and mass communication, sociology, music, languages, linguistics and the performing arts, communication studies, law and history, will find this book refreshingly handy in their inquiry. Furthermore, this book was conceptualized from a globalist purview and offers readers practical insights into how political messaging through music and entertainment spaces actually work across nation-states, regions and continents. Its authenticity is also further enhanced by the fact that most chapter contributors are scholars who are natives of their areas of study, and who painstakingly situate their work in appropriate historical contexts.
