This essay was written for a course on Popular Music at RMIT University. Please note that if it was written today, it would probably be very different.
JAH MUSIC NAH BUST
By Jesse I (June 1998)
Looking at Bob Marley's crossover success, and reggae's subsequent failure in the mainstream market.
In 1973, Island records released Catch A Fire by The Wailers, and Rastafari entered popular music's mainstream for the first time.This was not the first time Jamaican music had penetrated the charts. Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" introduced audiences to Ska back in 1964, and in the UK especially, reggae hits popped up numerous times during the late sixties (such as Desmond Dekker's "Israelites"). However, Catch A Fire was the first real "roots" reggae to encounter mainstream success, and by the time Bob Marley released his first solo album ( Natty Dread ) in 1974, reggae had a figurehead with a truly international profile.
Since Marley, reggae has had only fleeting success on major labels. With the exception of another ex-Wailer, Peter Tosh, no artist has even approached Marley's crossover appeal, although others have tried. Reggae remains a dominant musical form not only in the Caribbean, but also in many pacific islands and African countries. So why hasn't reggae been able break through and establish itself as a legitimate popular music form rather than an exotic novelty?
One approach to answering this question is to think about what might have allowed Marley to "bust" onto the world's stage. Chris Blackwell produced Catch A Fire , employing an approach worlds apart from that of producers such as Lee Scratch Perry whom the Wailers had worked with in Jamaica.
Blackwell's influence is most evident in the marketing of the group. The reggae market has always been driven by singles, and these continue to be important even in the CD world of today. Before Catch A Fire , most reggae LPs were simply compilations of current 7" hits (such as Trojan's Tighten Up series), but here was a full reggae album, complete with well-designed cover, and song lyrics included. The Wailers were marketed as a complete package - a legitimate black rock band. They just happened to play reggae.
When the Wailers broke up in 1974, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer both went solo, while Marley retained the talents of the band and passed the name "The Wailers" on to them. He continued to record and tour with this consistent unit, and unlike most Jamaican vocalists, he did not have to depend on session musicians in the studio nor a pick-up band on stage.
Musically, reggae has always been a strange sound to those versed in mainstream western music. It has been described as "inside out" in comparison to standard 4/4 time music, "a backbeat contrasted with accents on subsidiary beats" while "the rhythm guitar scratches out choppy chords on the offbeat" (Gracyk p145).
The emphasis on the bassline has led many to criticise the music as boring, or dismiss it as "all sounding the same". The problem here most likely comes from the nature of music that the listeners are "tuned" to. "Inside out" is a good description for the way people listen to reggae when "untrained" - generally people listen to the high frequency range for the melody, but in reggae this is less likely to be found in lead guitars, but instead in the riddim (rhythm) of the bass and drums.
However, Bob Marley's sound was never representative of the dominant reggae styles in Jamaica. In most session bands, the spot of lead guitar has generally been filled by a subtle player such as Chinna Smith. However, Marley went on to recruit the talents of Junior Marvin and Al Anderson into the Wailers, both players with a more rock-oriented aesthetic. The horn section was a major part of 70's roots reggae (listen to seminal albums such as Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey and Culture's Two Sevens Clash ), but the Wailers ignored this completely. The result was a more conventional melodic approach, which some have compared to Bob Dylan and John Lennon (Boyd), laid over the top of a purely Jamaican rhythmic foundation. The result was a form of reggae far more palatable to mainstream tastes. As reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson puts it, there is "really no dread in Marley's music... the dread has been replaced by the howling rock guitar and the funky rhythm and what we get is the enigma or "roots" and rock" (Johnson in Hitchcock).
Johnson's judgement of Marley's "dread" brings us to the issue of rastafarianism. While his music might not have had the pure dread sound that Rasta roots reggae had (such as the aforementioned horns), Marley was still very much a "dread" himself. However, while his religion was a major thematical concern, his brand of Rastafarian music was a far cry from that which ruled things in Jamaica, such as the "blood and fire" righteousness of Yabby You, the Abyssinians, or garveyite Burning Spear. Marley's music was still an uncompromising protest music, but it didn't have the potential to alienate foreign audiences like other reggae did (pro-black/Rasta messages were largely responsible for turning off the skinhead audience that had claimed early reggae as their own (Chambers p164)).
Likewise, Peter Tosh found success without compromising his revolutionary music, by singing about far more than just Rastafari. Columbia Records released Legalize It in 1976, his first solo album, produced "with an eye on Marley's crossover market" (Barrow p137). The controversial title subject didn't hurt sales as much as might be expected, and Tosh stayed with Columbia for a further album before a profile-rasing stint on Rolling Stones Records.
In the late 70's, the revolutionary vibe projected by reggae found an ally in Britain's emerging Punk scene, with bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash helping to publicise reggae (Virgin records signee Johnny Rotten was responsible for signing many of the artists who appeared with little success on Virgin's "Frontline" label).
In addition to the punk market, disco also presented an avenue of approach at this time. Two of the most internationally successful reggae bands at the end of the decade were Black Uhuru and Third World. As well as functioning as a complete unit, they were not afraid to incorporate disco-funk elements (best typified by Third World's 1978 cover of Gamble and Huff's "Now That We Found Love"). However, it is likely that the disco connection may have also worked against reggae, as the "disco sucks" backlash may have extended to rhythm based music in general for some time (Gracyk p145).
While roots reggae's revolutionary messages and confronting Rastafarianism make some nervous, at the other end of the spectrum there has always been a mindset which refuses to take the music seriously. To many people, the Oasis softdrink commercials sum up reggae nicely - it's the music that you have playing in the background as you sip a sweet drink on a sunny Caribbean beach with a happy, easy-going "no problem mon" dreadlock wearer. There is a popular perception of reggae as a "summer music", and many stores report a substantial increase in sales over the warm season. Obviously, these kind of reggae listeners don't want to hear cries of injustice and poverty - they want to hear about "Red, Red Wine".
UB40 are a good example of a group who could see this as the path to crossover success. Their name comes from an English dole form, and their first albums were rootsy both in music and theme; but they soon realised that there was more money in light party tunes than sufferer's laments. It is not hard to see why crossover attempts are so often seen as "selling out".
Lightweight reggae bands such as UB40 continued to account for most of reggae's mainstream chart flirtations until the early 90's. The most successful US reggae band in terms of sales, Big Mountain, are a prime example of how a commercial outfit works. Their reggae arrangements are "watered down", the rhythms far less intense than their Jamaican counterparts. The lyrical content is non-threatening, their biggest hits generally coming from covers such as "Baby I Love Your Way" and "Get Together". Musically, they are far from being the most talented reggae band in the US, but they were created for the mainstream market and they have the major label support to get them there.
While the roots reggae of the 70's was toned down in order to be more widely accessible to a pop and rock audience, the reggae of the early 90's started to push for crossover success in a different way. Jamaican reggae became even more unmarketable to the mainstream after the mid-eighties, when the music was stripped back to digital keyboard lines and syndrums as the more abrasive "ragga" style emerged. Any commonality with the rock genre was now completely gone, and crossover focus shifted more to the "urban" genres of Hip-Hop and R'n'B.
Pop-reggae acts like Big Mountain and Maxi Priest continued to survive on the US, UK and Australian charts, while being completely out-of-touch with the specialist reggae market. However, proponents of the new Jamaican reggae did begin to break through, as ragga experienced a small boom in the early-to-mid 90's.
In 1993, white ragga-emulator Snow went to the top of the charts in Australia, the US, and the UK, with "Informer". Ragga deejay (a Jamaican-style patois rapper) Shaggy did the same with "Oh Carolina", and Shabba Ranks was not far behind with his "Mr Loverman". This was at a time when hip-hop was enjoying huge sales in the mainstream (Snoop Doggy Dogg and Coolio both had number one hits in the US with "Doggy Style" and "Fantastic Voyage" respectively), and it is likely that crossover-ragga reached a similar audience.
In this same period, Chaka Demus and Pliers had hits with "Tease Me" and a cover of "Twist and Shout" (both in a light ragga style), Ini Kamoze went to number one in Australia and the UK with the rap/ragga "Hotstepper", and the Television show "Cops" entrenched Inner Circle's "Bad Boys" in the popular consciousness. More recently a Levis jeans commercial helped Shaggy's "Boombastic" hold the Australian number 1 spot for weeks. To many commentators, this was evidence of what reggae is capable of when "the big label promo's decide that Reggae is trendy and give it big time airplay" before they "then decide it ain't and you don't even get 5 tunes in the top 100 for the next 12 months!" (Steely).
As with any type of music, major label support is extremely important in breaking a reggae artist. However, when artists are already established in the reggae market prior to signing with a major label, there is a strong potential for disaster. The majority of major label signees attempting diversification have failed to connect with the mainstream, while loosing their original fanbase in the process.
This was the fear exhibited by many fans in 1995, when Buju Banton was due to release Til Shiloh on the PolyGram subsidiary Loose Cannon. Closed press conferences were called, and virtually no members of the reggae community were invited, invitations going instead to the hip-hop industry (Blood). However, fears of a hip-hop crossover album were unfounded, as Til Shiloh proved to be an uncompromising reggae album, and arguably the definitive roots statement of the ragga era.
In this instance, Loose Cannon took a smart approach. The music was straight undiluted ragga, produced in Jamaica, distributed in the traditional reggae market on 7" singles, and played in the dancehalls. However, they marketed the album to the US mainstream as a hip-hop crossover album, despite the only real concession to this market being a hip-hop remix of one song, "Champion". While this didn't result in a Shaggy-style number one, it did help the album to near gold status.
Banton is also important in that he is confrontingly Rastafarian, something which can't be said for most other successful reggae artists of the decade. In typical Rastafarian fashion, he is cautious of the mainstream music industry, defiantly warning that "the artist is not to be ridiculed by them [major record labels] telling us that we have to remix the stuff for it to work... we haven't changed and we haven't softened in no way. They want to control I and I, but they nah control I and I!" (Banton in Regis).
This attitude to major labels may explain a great deal about reggae's failure in the wider commercial marketplace. Reggae has long had a reputation as difficult and unreliable music. In his book Reggae Bloodlines Stephen Davis speaks of being on Jamaican time, where an artist will always show up at least an hour late for any appointment (Davis p106) - but as well as the "soon come" attitude to punctuality, there are certain innate elements of Rastafarianism which can never really work in a mainstream context. The militant and afro-centric elements of the religion have the potential to alienate more than just certain listeners, for the righteous Rastaman can easily rub record officials the wrong way.
While they are deserved superstars in Jamaica, we might never hear mention of Anthony B or Sizzla on Top 40 radio. It is easy to blame the major labels for reggae's failure in the mainstream, with the perception that they push the pop-reggae crossover attempts at the expense of the "real" reggae (the kind which gets the job done in the reggae singles market and dancehalls around the world). However, perhaps it is fundamentally necessary for "real" reggae to stay on small independent labels in order to retain its identity as such.
It has been argued that reggae is of the people (Iriedon), and when distanced from its everyday roots and glossed as a commercial product, it has already changed. Further discussing Marley's music, Linton Kwesi Johnson holds that the image of Rastafarianism and rebellion, rooted in the historical experience of the oppressed Jamaican, "becomes an instrument of capital to sell Marley and his music, thereby negating the power which is the cultural manifestation of this historical experience" (Johnson in Hitchcock). Perhaps Rasta reggae cannot ever truly work in the mainstream - as Rasta deejay Tappa Zukie chants, "dreadlocks don't deal with Babylon" - and the major labels are as Babylonian as the music industry gets.
However, while there can never be another Bob Marley, there are artists who do have a sound which appeals to both the hardcore reggae fan and the more mainstream music listener. Luciano is the top-ranking singer in Jamaica at the time of writing, his music being a gentle roots interpretation of the ragga style. Coming from a different angle is the South African Lucky Dube, who has a singing voice reminiscent of Peter Tosh, but an image closer to Marley's "safer" brand of revolutionary, with similarly melodic arrangements.
Reggae music can never again be a new fascination, or the latest exotic thing, but there is really no reason why artists such as Luciano and Dube shouldn't be able to make major inroads into the mainstream charts. Legendary reggae singer Horace Andy recently enjoyed major airplay on JJJ FM, voicing a slow song by Massive Attack; while Buju Banton achieved the same by guesting with punk-ska band Rancid. It is obvious that reggae can be successful in the mainstream if given the necessary major label support - the major labels simply need to figure out who to push.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrow, Steve & Peter Dalton: Reggae: The Rough Guide . Rough Guides, London, 1997.
Blood, Joshua (Heartbeat Records): "Buju marketing plan" posted to Rec.Music.Reggae (internet discussion group) 7/6/95.
Boyd, Joe: "Beating World Music Into Submission" Musician , August 1995. Reprinted in Reggae, Rasta, Revolution . Chris Potash (ed) Schirmer Books, New York, 1997, p237-238.
Bradley, Lloyd: Reggae on CD. Kyle Cathie Limited, London, 1996.
Chambers, Iain: Urban Rhythms. MacMillan, London, 1985.
Davis, Stephen & Peter Simon: Reggae Bloodlines . Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1977.
Gracyk, Theodore: Rhythm and Noise. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996.
Iriedon: "Where is reggae heading?" posted to Rec.Music.Reggae (internet discussion group) 8/4/96.
Johnson, Linton Kwesi quoted in Hitchcock, Peter: "'It Dread Inna Inglan': Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity" Reprinted in Reggae, Rasta, Revolution . Chris Potash (ed) Schirmer Books, New York, 1997, p165.
Postash, Chris: Reggae, Rasta, Revolution. Schirmer Books, New York, 1997.
Regis, Marlon: "Buju Banton: Journey To The Inna Heights" in The Beat , Vol.17, No.4, p43.
Stapleton, Chris & Chris May: African All-Stars . Paladin, 1989.
Steely: "Reggae Crossover Hits" posted to Rec.Music.Reggae (internet discussion group) 30/5/97.
Zukie, Tappa: "Dreadlocks Don't Deal With Babylon" from the Virgin Frontline LP MPLA , 1976.