Jamaican Artists and Producers

Jamaican Artists and Producers

Music has been a dominant source of change in our society, throughout the world, and spanning the generations. It is a source of change, expression, culture, symbolism, and in Jamaican music, particularly reggae, it can even be a silent, peaceful revolution. There are various ideas of what reggae is, or what it does, which will be a main concentration. The music of Jamaica is a changing structure as well, from mento to ska to rocksteady to reggae to dub. Dozens of people are responsible for the spread of the popular music of the Caribbean island known as Jamaica. There are the big producers, such as Dodd, Reid, Buster, and there are others like Perry, Blackwell, Higgs, and Gibbs. Without them the music of Jamaica would have been contained there, and never would the world have learned in quite the same personal way about the vast unhappiness and oppression of the majority of Jamaican society. Artists like Jimmy Cliff, Toots, U Roy, Winston Rodney, and especially Bob Marley have created a significant part of the culture of Jamaica through their lyrics of angst and frustration at their political and economical situation. Because music is also an industry of ever-changing circumstance, the lineage has proven to be much harder to trace and follow than previously expected.

A fitting statement was made by a reggae musician concerning the mystery of the island and it's music:"Jamaica: fragment of bomb-blast, catastrophe of geological history (volcano, middle passage, slavery, plantation, colony, neo-colony) has somehow miraculously-some say triumphantly-survived. How we did this is still a mystery and perhaps it should remain so. But at least we can say this: that the secret and expression of that survival lies glittering and vibrating in our music."(Edward Kamau Brathwaite, reggae artist)

The music of Jamaica began five centuries ago, when Columbus colonized the land of the Arawak Indians. This dates the start of oppression in this small island in the Caribbean. After the Spanish came the English, both extremely ethnocentric groups when dealing with"inferiors", or"minorities". Blacks were brought in as slaves, and although Jamaica has had it's independence since 1963, the tension of authority and control still reigns menacingly. Jamaica is a story of injustice, international influence, ineffective governing, and unequal distribution of wealth; all of these elements provide a solid base for the theme of oppression and the need for a revolution and redemption in