Reggae's Northern Renaissance: Globe & Mail
Reggae's northern
renaissance
Far from its island roots,
the summer of 2001 is turning out to be high season for Jamaica's most famous
export, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
TORONTO -- Shaggy's favourite number is
10. That's how many millions of copies of his latest album Hotshot have been
sold around the world -- more than any other album this year. Shaggy is the
biggest thing to happen to reggae music since Bob Marley.
But he didn't get that way by rocking
the clubs of his native Kingston, Jamaica.
Shaggy, who turns 33 in October, left
Jamaica for New York when he was a teenager. The former U.S. Marine and Gulf War
veteran says he wouldn't have had anything like the success of Hotshot without
the cultural diversity of a New York life, and the hip-hop sensibility of his
New York producer, Shaun (Sting) Pizzonia.
"There's no reggae format on the radio,
so you have to find a way to bridge the gap and get in, and the way we do that
is to use samples and beats that fit their formats more," Shaggy said, during a
visit to Toronto to shoot a video for European TV. "I keep the reggae feeling
through the sound, or the language, or the bass lines, and Sting, who's a real
DJ at heart, drops the beats."
The
result has been the reinvention of reggae as a mass-market pop form, and the
reiteration of a basic truth about Jamaica's most famous export. Central as it
may be to the island's life and culture, reggae has always needed a northern
component to be heard on the world's radio.
Even Bob Marley, whose music still
stands for millions as the essence of reggae, needed some strategic tweaking in
the northern hemisphere. His big breakthrough came only after his music had been
carefully adapted by Island Records producer Chris Blackwell in his London
studios.
"All those pianos and organs
and guitars that were overdubbed were not done by Bob Marley and the Wailers,"
Shaggy said. "They were done by session musicians in London who were brought in
to give the music more of a rock sound, that would fit on the radio at the
time."
The summer of 2001 is turning out
to be high season for a reconsideration of what reggae is and has been,
especially in the clubs and records stores of the north. Shaggy's Hotshot is
approaching a full year in the Top 10 in Canada and several other countries. And
Bob Marley's output, 20 years after his death, is the focus of an unprecedented
number of retrospectives and tribute albums.
JAD and Koch International, the Marley
family label, have launched a 10-disc series that covers Marley's recordings up
to 1972, when he signed with Island. Universal, which now owns the Island label,
is releasing remastered versions of five Marley discs next week, in addition to
a recent compilation of 20 of his biggest hits. Koch also has Shakedown: Marley
Remixed, the first authorized dance-club album drawn from the catalogue of the
world's second most-bootlegged artist (after the Beatles); and Verve has put out
A Twist of Marley, 13 jazz versions of his songs by a group led by guitarist and
producer Lee Ritenour.
More specialized
reggae labels have released many other recent discs spanning reggae and its
forerunners ska and rock-steady, and the more mechanized forms of dub and
dance-hall that have succeeded it. Peter Tosh, Horace Andy, Dennis Brown,
Desmond Dekker and Gregory Isaacs have all come back to the record stores in
style. Trojan, a major Jamaican label, has just released a 30-CD retrospective
of 500 tracks by all the big names in reggae.
One of the most intriguing -- and
beautiful -- new albums is Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamdown, 1973-1980 (Blood
and Fire). It's a collection of cover versions of American soul tunes by Alton
Ellis, Ken Boothe, John Holt and Delroy Wilson, all of whom were stars of the
soulful rock-steady scene that flourished in Jamaica during the seventies. They
covered American tunes because that's what Jamaican musicians have done ever
since U.S. radio signals started drifting across the Gulf of Mexico. Ska,
reggae's up-tempo forerunner, was in part a Jamaican adaptation of the R&B
sounds played by stations in Louisiana.
The flow in the other direction has been
at least as significant. Marley's success prompted covers of his songs by rock
musicians such as Eric Clapton (I Shot the Sheriff), and more recently by
hip-hop groups like the Fugees (No Woman No Cry). Other groups, from punk
pioneers the Clash to Canada's Big Sugar, have incorporated reggae elements into
a rock idiom. Hip-hop itself is a child of reggae and its derivatives. Jamaican
DJs were the first to start talking, or "toasting," over the music they played,
and the first to start stripping and remixing the instrumental tracks to support
the kind of extended patter that, in North America, became rapping.
Ironically, stations and labels that now
make millions from rap and hip-hop are wary of reggae and dance-hall music as
made in Jamaica. Reggae fans in the Toronto area found that out the hard way
last winter, when they tried and failed to get more of their music on the city's
new urban station, The Flow 93.5.
"A lot
of the reggae community initially thought we were rejecting them," said Michelle
Price, The Flow's American-born program director. "But we were just looking for
reggae that could fit our profile, which is mostly R&B and hip-hop." With a
few exceptions, such as Juno-winner Lenn Hammond and Sonia Collymore (whose
cover of Faith Hill's Breathe was a top reggae single last year), many Canadian
artists didn't make the cut, either because they were too close to the Jamaican
sound or not up to the quality of American R&B.
At The Flow, you won't hear tracks by
dance-hall star Bounty Killer in rotation with Shaggy's It Wasn't Me, or with
Kardinal Offishall's Toronto-centric BaKardi Slang, even though the Toronto
rapper's music shows a pronounced dance-hall influence. As with Shaggy's
reggae-pop, it's all in the strength of that Jamaican flavour, and the way it's
used to spice a familiar genre.
"Kardinal is getting his break because
he's using a lot of dance-hall beats," said Spex, host of The Flow's Sunday
reggae program, Riddim Track. "I don't think he'd be where he is now if he had
just gone with straight hip-hop."
Much
of Spex's playlist comes from new singles by the likes of roots-reggae newcomer
VC (By His Deeds) and dance-hall star TOK (Shake Your Bam Bam), both of whom
have a huge following in the reggae scene. Neither is likely to make any mark on
the mainstream without some strategy for appealing to ears attuned to other
sounds.
"I write a lot of hard-core
dance-hall numbers for artists in Jamaica," said Shaggy. "But could I do dance
hall in its authentic format and market that in North America? No one's going to
buy it. . . The language and the culture are so different. I can't take that and
drop it in people's laps and hope they'll accept it."
"If another reggae band is ever going to
break in North America, it will have to happen outside the reggae circuit," said
Kevin Lyman, a concert producer who runs the Bob Marley Days festival in Los
Angeles every winter. This summer, Lyman is betting that reggae's reputation as
outsiders' music will help ease the way for Morgan Heritage, a roots-reggae band
performing on Lyman's Warped Tour, the raucous punk festival that's expected to
play for 450,000 fans in the U.S. and Canada by the end of the summer.
Morgan Heritage, made up of five
offspring of singer Denroy Morgan, is another example of reggae's deep northern
roots. The band members were all born in Brooklyn, and had never been to Jamaica
until six years ago. Now they're one of the most prominent groups in a recent
revival of the kind of socially conscious reggae championed by Marley, and
especially Burning Spear (Winston Rodney). The band's smooth sound and close
harmonies, as heard on their recent album More Teachings, on the VP label,
recall the vocal style of the rock-steady period, mixed with elements of North
American folk.
A further incursion of
reggae into the expanding soul-music scene could be on the way. Hip-hop, which
burns through beats and flavours almost as quickly as the dance halls of
Kingston, also seems ripe for more artful fusions by rappers such as Kardinal.
"Reggae is the future of R&B and
hip-hop," said The Flow's Spex. "A lot of those songs now have reggae slang, a
reggae beat, reggae foundations. Reggae can only get
bigger."
Copyright (C) 2001 Globe
Interactive, a division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
Posted: Thu - February 13, 2003 at 04:17 PM