What is reggae? - Music form, lifestyle, or all of the above?
Published:Tuesday | February 4, 2020 | 12:00 AMKimberley Small/Staff Reporter
In anticipation of the 13th iteration of Reggae Month, industry professionals, executives, and advisers were gathered for The Gleaner’s Entertainment Forum to seek to determine the importance of dedicating an entire month to reggae. The panel included entertainment executive Maxine Stowe, Howard ‘Big Mac’ McIntosh, president of the Jamaica Reggae Industry Association (JaRIA) Ewan Simpson, sound system owner and operator DJ Squeeze, and member of the entertainment advisory board Lenford Salmon. And within that circle of thoughtful, impassioned advocates, the conversation could not get rolling until first attempting to tackle a question usually left to musicologists.
“What is reggae?” McIntosh asked, repeating the question posed by the Rev Al Miller during Reggae Month’s church service last year. Since that service, McIntosh has taken every opportunity during his travels to ask international observers what their answer is. In response, some people have said that reggae is a depiction of life. “For them, it’s much more than a music form. I ask some people around the Caribbean, and they say it is the first genre of music they were ever exposed to. So we don’t understand sometimes what reggae means to the world. I want to suggest that we have to define it,” he said.
The JaRIA president added his two cents, positing that local attitudes have long treated entertainment as extra-curricular and so failed to define its musical spawn which has made a global impact. “We’ve taken it for granted, and it always has been treated like a hobby. That’s true for sports, music, and the creative industries. I think we’ve come to the realisation now that it’s truly an industry, a business. We need to ensure that we own it, we define it, and we benefit from it the way we need to,” Simpson said.
Gift Horse
Based on the panellists’ attempts, defining reggae would require combining local perception, that reggae is its own distinct genre with particular aural elements, and the international perception, that reggae relates to all popular music and associated cultural signifiers. “Particularly in the academic narrative, we make that kind of distinction when we say Jamaica has given seven genres of music to the world. However, we’re probably pushing against the winds of change,” Salmon said.
With the group chiming in with examples like dancehall artistes Sean Paul and Shabba Ranks celebrated as recipients of the Best Reggae Album Grammy award, the suggestion was made that the world has already defined reggae for us.
Simpson offered: “Even in the context of musicology, because reggae as a genre of music has become so dominant, it became synonymous with any significant, popular music out of Jamaica. It’s normal for things to morph. Everything else under that, whether it’s roots rock, dancehall, dub or any one of those, they are now sub-genres of reggae. There is no economic value in cordoning it. As it stands, why are we going to look a gift horse in the mouth? The world has named it for us and covered it. Let’s take it.”
Agreeable as the majority was, there wasn’t consensus among the panellists. Stowe offered an alternative view: that in order to lay claim to founding and popularising several genres of music, they must be distinct.
So Salmon continued: “Freddie [McGregor] started in the rocksteady era, but nobody knows Freddie as a rocksteady artiste. They know him as a reggae artiste. The world has accepted them as reggae. So we’re using reggae in a generic kind of way to benefit from that.”