Jamaican Music: Understanding This Genres of Music
Jamaica, an island in the brilliant blue waters of the Caribbean, claims the roots of a number of some of the most culturally evocative types of music in the world. When one hears reggae, there’s no question in your mind what it is. Bob Marley took it worldwide, along with a few others, and spread a message of love, redemption, and harmony, captivating audiences the world over. When a ska song comes on, again, you can feel where the music originated from and how it inspired the reggae and rocksteady styles that followed it.
An amazing number of musicians, both past and present, claim influences and inspiration based on the many different forms of Jamaican music. There’s mento, the aforementioned ska, rocksteady, and reggae, dancehall, and dub music. Nearly all of those spawned from Jamaican folk music, an aggregate of African cultural influences imported in by the English traders in control of the island in the late 1600s and the influences of the Europeans themselves. A language, known as Jamaican Creole or Patois, spawned from this aggregation and created the unique language so well-known around the world today because of such vibrant music.
All of that aside, Jamaican music seems, to me, to be about keeping love in your heart and never allowing your spirit to be conquered, no matter what the world may throw at you.