Caribbean Influence On African American Culture

The black community has endured a long history of oppression, especially in the Western world, and for generations it has been fighting back with their own countercultural movements, whether it be art, dance, fashion, or music. Popular music, that is, popular as folk, has been utilized as a tool with which the black community fights back. Much of dub – one of popular music’s most influential practices – that arose following Jamaica’s independence was largely influenced by British colonial practices (i.e. using reverb to represent that historical soundscape and the violence of colonialism, and to suggest its impact is still felt). Similarly, reggae – another Jamaican-originated genre – was the politicization of rocksteady, which effectively

Jazz, blues, gospel, and African-American folk songs came about during the Civil Rights movement as a form of nonviolent protest. Moreover, as hip-hop began to materialize and evolve in the (largely black and Latinx populated) projects of the Bronx in the 1970s, the genre took upon itself a strong association with the black identity; largely assumed as the music of a people, naturally, its lyrics inherently reflected the beliefs and struggles of the people (i.e. artists like N.W.A. and Public Enemy spoke to class disparity in New York City and Los Angeles as a product of the Reagan

The music of black liberation saw an amalgamation of genres; from Pete Seeger’s folky “We Shall Overcome” to John and Alice Coltrane’s jazzy yet insurgent “Reverend King,” the soundscape of desegregation fused the heaviness of African American gospel and slave songs with “jazz courage.” In the mid-early twentieth century, musicians like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk used sonic dissonance to express the pain of black oppression, yet critics thinly veiled their racism with remarks like “the technique isn’t mainstream enough” – such artistic attempts to share the black experience fell on the deaf ears of white critics interpreting it as noise. Putting a new spin on noise as music, the new free jazz movement played a crucial role in expressing the sentiments of black America. The idea of free jazz was popularized by African-American saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 1960, and involved playing instruments without tonality, a set harmonic structure, or even a beat, allowing the artist to play and create freely. Having access to a kind of freedom at that time was incredibly valuable to black people since true freedom was being withheld from them in their everyday lives. Living in segregation and with the scars of not-so-long-ago slavery, having freedom from European standards of music and freedom to explore their