Reggae music has never been more popular or readily available, but has anything really changed?

Penny Reel provides some clues

One hears much these days from various and often not entirely disinterested parties of the great and significant advances made in the field of reggae music in recent years; of its pervasive influence on much of the contemporary dance scene and of its ever growing universal appeal.

Evidence is cited to support this contention that on the face of it presents a very convincing case.

We learn for example that the ubiquitous urban rap with the hip hop beat has its antecedents in reggae toasting of the early school, even though it might equally be said that U Roy, Count Matchuki, King Stitt and the rest originally lift many of their own catchphrases verbatim from US radio jocks broadcasting in the Fifties, or even that performers such as the Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron portray their bleak visions of the American ghettoes in its own explicit language a good while before these Jamaican preachers make their presence felt in any way.

We are told too of the weird and mostly wondrous effect that dub techniques first pioneered in four track Kingston studios now have on defining the technological New Age enlightenment in all its ambient manifestations of inner space, while on the flip side of the same roots reggae coin is the sudden emergence of any number of dubious record labels busily collating onto compact disc scratchy vinyl recordings of newly discovered reggae legends for their expanding Eastern European and Far East markets, though with little visible benefit to the artists concerned as far as can be ascertained.

Closely aligned to all this is the roots and culture movement centred on Jah Shaka sound system and his many imitators, attracting audiences of different races in a not altogether unlikely alliance of dreadlock and crustie, while at the other end of the social scale we witness an entertainer like veteran Jamaican jazz guitarist and ska pioneer Ernest Ranglin playing Ronnie Scott to a polite and musically sophisticated yet almost exclusively European crowd.

I could reiterate at length other examples that apparently prove this same assimilative process. Clearly, it would seem, a hitherto much maligned music has finally succeeded in broaching all barriers and is now accepted on its own terms by the world at large, much as the pundits claim!

Yet is it? Standing there in the Brixton Academy last November as Luciano performs a storming two hour set on the sole London date of his UK Messenger ’96 tour, it occurs to me that nothing much has really changed.

At the present time, Luciano is the fastest rising star in contemporary reggae music. Probably the only other artist who can compete with him in terms of popularity is Beres Hammond. Yet whereas the latter establishes his power base slowly over more than two decades, Luciano is a relative newcomer and, with the possible exception of the ill-fated Garnet Silk, the most exciting talent on the scene in some time.

In view of all this, the Brixton Academy is duly ram for one of the busiest reggae shows seen in the capital for several years. Moreover, and the case in point, is that the audience is almost entirely black and of Caribbean, specifically Jamaican origin.

The few white faces in the crowd belong for the most part to members of the singer’s record company huddled backstage plus one or two dogged journalists and a photographer or two crouched in the pit. In spite of all the supposed wide interest in the music, Luciano’s core crowd proves to be much the same as might have been seen shuffling in to applaud say a Frankie Paul performance five years ago, a Barrington Levy 15 years ago, or an Alton Ellis 30 years ago.

A whistlestop tour of the Dalston reggae clubs later that night confirms me in my earlier observation, where I find the majority clientele at each are also of this similar ethnic background. At its heart the reggae scene has never left the ghetto; neither have many outsiders ever much ventured there to check out the music at source.

In fact, reggae shares a fate common to most popular black music forms and that is its discovery long after the event and appreciation thenceforth only in this ossified state.

During the late Fifties, British bluesologists like Max Jones and Alexis Korner were championing the since defunct country blues of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly, while decrying the amplified, urban variety played by Muddy Waters, who was nevertheless packing the black clubs of Chicago at the same time.

In the States in the early Sixties, the first collectible records of the rock‘n’roll era were those sentimental ballads sung in close harmony style by the so called doo wop groups recorded up to a decade earlier but long since usurped by a more urgent, gospel inflected style soon to be characterised as soul.

Rock‘n’roll itself, as we all know, was merely the jump and boogie post war black dance music called rhythm and blues current since the late Forties and given a countrified twang by the likes of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and the rest, much as the later Mersey sound of groups such as the Beatles and Searchers was the quintessentially British application of this same R&B and rock‘n’roll.

People say that outfits like the Rolling Stones are to be credited with helping promote black music through their overt use of rhythm and blues material and the name checking of mentors like Chuck Berry and the by now electrically correct Muddy Waters, but this is to falsify or at least overstate the facts. At their inception the Stones tap into a sound that due to its power and excitement already maintains a healthy underground following among British youth, and which their presence helps largely deflect; while their interpretation of the style is as studied and revivalist in its intent as the traditional jazz being played at the time by Humphrey Lyttleton and Ken Colyer. And in the final analysis the major beneficiaries of any promotion by the Rolling Stones are of course the Rolling Stones themselves.

Present day demand for various Jamaican popular styles ranging from vintage ska to roots reggae is another instance of this same belated trend.

Music lovers from Finland to Japan are now able to add newly coveted items such as the first ever album from Lord Creator after 30 fugitive years and rare South East dubs originally pressed in tiny quantities for use on sound systems to a compact disc collection that already includes boogie woogie piano from Pete Johnson, the classic blues of Bessie Smith, gospel by the Swan Silvertones, Sixties soul and Seventies funk.

In the case of the roots cult and its post hippy adherents, this is a kind of nostalgia for a punky reggae party that only ever existed in the minds of rock journalists barely covering the scene at the time.

Meanwhile, in darkened basements and abandoned garments factories, a new generation of black youth are fusing the ingredients of swing beat, ragga, jungle, slow jams and nu-skool to create a dance music of their own that if derided now will doubtless be thought highly of a decade or so hence.

Though ignored by the indigenous mainstream at large, the black underground dance culture has nevertheless attracted a small number of white hipsters on its fringes from the very beginning.

At the dawn of the swinging Sixties, daughters of some of the most famous and well-connected families in the land were consorting with West Indian émigrés at places like the notorious Powis Square shebeen in Notting Hill Gate or otherwise at the Strip along then derelict Carnaby Street.

It was at blues gatherings like these where Harley Street osteopath Stephen Ward recruited his demi-monde models from an entirely different class of girl, as well as those black studs with whom they were obliged to perform sex in hotel rooms for the voyeuristic glee of certain, unnamed Members of Parliament.

This delicious mix of low and high class with the novel added spice of black men from the Caribbean, the playground of the rich, is what made the Profumo affair such a cause célèbre of its day.

By the time that Ward’s antagonist Lucky Gordon had begun instructing Georgie Fame in the rudiments of ska and how to sing ‘Humpty Dumpty’ like Eric Morris, a new breed of working class hipster known as the modernist started arriving in some number at a Soho joint patronised mainly by a clientele of West Indians living in London and black US sailors on shore leave, namely the Flamingo club in Wardour Street, where Fame played a regular session.

Though ska was but a passing fad to most of these English youth amid many glittering pop images and psychedelic styles on the immediate horizon, even so a few of this crew stayed loyal to Jamaican music well into the rock steady era, transmuting into a hard breed of mohair clad sub mod known as a suit, which species in turn evolved into the skinhead of the late Sixties, the most vociferous yet in their preference for Jamaican popular music, now known by its new name of reggae, and it was their influence in turn that brought the music into the comprehensive schools and from there into the pop charts with Dave & Ansel Collins, the Harry J Allstars, the Boris Gardiner Happening, the Upsetters and others.

A generation of working class English schoolchildren attained puberty to a soundtrack of ‘Tighten Up’ albums played back to back and track by track at the local youth disco.

The skinhead was the first of the reactionary modern youth cults prior to punk to openly and defiantly reject the liberal values fostered by the Welfare State, and their fiercest scorn was reserved for a peer group slightly older and more worldly whom they regarded with a mixture of envy and contempt, namely the burgeoning bohemian student movement.

Indeed, the skinheads were first sighted in number in the guise of jeering Millwall football supporters on the fringes of one of the crowning moments of Sixties counter culture solidarity, the anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square during the summer of 1968.

The skinheads were in every way the antithesis of the British hippies, the heads; in attitude, attire and taste.

Where the one was libertarian in outlook, the other was puritan. Where the heads called for peace, love and understanding, the skinhead preached violence and intolerance. Even as the freaks favoured flowing clothes and sported long locks and facial hair, so their peers adopted a cropped, militaristic hairstyle, whence their name, and conservative modes of dress.

And where the skinheads now seized on reggae as the theme music for their own rude boy belligerence, the heads tripped out to something known as progressive rock. The latter term proved to be a misnomer though, as the music it spawned was gradually submerged by its own pomp or became increasingly mainstream or bland.

Meanwhile, the hippies fallaciously regarded reggae as crude and beneath notice, although in fact it was altogether more sophisticated and musically inventive than much of what passed for progressive rock, and infinitely more durable too.

A comparison of any album issued on say the Chrysalis label during this period with a contemporaneous set from Studio One will I think readily prove the point.

The turnaround for reggae in terms of its wider recognition was the release in 1972 of the feature film The Harder They Come starring singer Jimmy Cliff.

Interestingly and not without significance is that while most of the movie’s West Indian audience identified with Cliff’s main protagonist Ivan Martin, European and American filmgoers found their own hero in the benign locksman portrayed by artist Ras Daniel Heartman.

In the wake of the film’s success, Island Records signed the Wailers and started promoting the group’s rebel dread image to their rock audience at large. Shortly, certain of the more percipient music critics on the weekly tabloids began discovering esoteric names like Burning Spear, Big Youth and King Tubby, so that by the time the punks arrived on the scene during the mid-Seventies, a groundswell of interest in reggae had been generated.

In the vacuum created by the demise of pomp rock and prior to the emergence of the so-called new wave, the punks latched on to this thriving underground music in much the same way as the mods had claimed R&B as their own a quarter of a century previous to this.

Yet even here there was a wide dichotomy between what the music press and the punks perceived to be reggae and how it was appreciated at source.

Then as now, the music was manufactured with a main eye on the dancehall, and though live concerts from visiting Jamaican acts were to attract audiences across the racial spectrum, these were only ever as an extension of where its true spirit lie.

Similarly, the reggae acts signed to the big record labels and strenuously promoted by the mainstream press were at odds with the leading names on the sound system circuit.

Groups like Steel Pulse and Third World achieved huge international success, while poet Linton Kwesi Johnson celebrating the release from prison of Darcus Howe was an item heard at every student dance throughout the late Seventies; yet none of these artists were ever played by the sounds in the reggae clubs, except occasionally for Third World’s ‘Now That We’ve Found Love’ during a set’s soul interlude.

In the meantime, leading names in the reggae field such as Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Delroy Wilson, Ruddy Thomas and others were mostly ignored by the music critics and generally kept out of the picture.

The popular image of the music as portrayed by the media was always a romantic one involving natty hairstyles, ganja smoking and protest lyrics, whereas clubgoers for the most part aspired to lifestyles much less flamboyant or radical than this, and preferred a more sentimental style of music designed for the serious business of dancing cheek to jowl.

Following Bob Marley’s death and reggae’s subsequent retreat into insularity with the advent of dancehall and ragga in the Eighties, the critics declared the music obsolete and even this cursory coverage soon disappeared from view.

The real diversification of the music in modern times has occurred within the reggae scene itself.

In the early days, the Jamaican sounds and blues were informal and egalitarian, attracting gatherings across the boundaries of age and sex.

At house parties then it was not unusual to see aged matriarchs holding court in the kitchen or small children scampering beneath their skirts, while such as nurses and bus drivers would arrive at the door straight from their shifts and still dressed in uniform.

The first signs of division appeared during the mid-Seventies when female clubgoers began shunning the heavier dub-oriented sounds in favour of a more pop based reggae characterised by the name lovers rock and this once cohesive scene has continued to splinter into various incompatible factions ever since.

Even more dramatic in its effect was the demise of the sound system as the focus of reggae music towards the tail end of the Eighties.

From the very beginning, these had carried the voice of the Jamaican underclass and unified the whole community under their banner, but now their time has seemingly passed and in recent years they have been supplanted in clubs and at dances by pirate radio DJs, who are able to promote themselves and the music they play far more effectively on air.

The intense rivalry of the pirates coupled with social changes in the West Indian community as a whole has led to even greater specialisation as the DJs vie with each other to create and hold an audience of their own.

Thus we now have some jocks who serve up a strict diet of upfront ragga or jungle; others who concentrate on lovers rock, both old and new, to the exclusion of all else; and some who play an eclectic mix of small island music classified under the generic soca.

There are plush champagne promotions in wine bars where a well heeled clientele drink and dance into the early hours to a mainstream selection of all these styles, and there are seedier dives too where all of the current hits are played and crack cocaine is proffered at the door.

Then there is the increasingly popular revival scene catering for the more mature clubgoer, offering everything from the popular hits of yesteryear, to those more competitive affairs where the rarer the disc played is the greater its approbation.

One thing they all share in common is their existence as retreats where black people can relax, mingle or otherwise let off steam at their leisure. Another is that thus far they have resisted all attempts at cultural colonisation and on past form will continue to do so for some time to come.

Originally published in Black Echoes, February 1, 1997