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 Brett Lashua • Stephen Wagg
Karl Spracklen • M. Selim Yavuz
Editors

Sounds and the City

Volume 2

kr558@geography.rutgers.edu
Editors
Brett Lashua Stephen Wagg
Leeds Beckett University Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, UK Leeds, UK

Karl Spracklen M. Selim Yavuz

Leeds Beckett University Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, UK Leeds, UK

Leisure Studies in a Global Era

ISBN 978-3-319-94080-9 ISBN 978-3-319-94081-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94081-6

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kr558@geography.rutgers.edu
 4
Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae
Music, and the Rise of a Popular Culture
Kevon Rhiney and Romain Cruse

There has been growing interest in researching the interconnections

between music, popular culture, and place (e.g. Brandellero and Pfeffer
2015; Brandellero and Janssen 2014; Cheyne and Binder 2010; Cohen
2007; Bennett 2002; Bell 1998; Kong 1995). These interconnections
have been explored in a variety of ways, with varying degrees of emphasis
on, and interpretation of, the role and significance of place in the produc-
tion and consumption of music. A common thread that runs throughout
most of these studies is an attempt to arrive at a better and deeper under-
standing of how place becomes embedded in the production of music. As
Gibson and Connell (2005, p. 4) point out, ‘music remains a powerful
presence in global mediascapes, in both the images and associations with
place captured in lyrics, in connections between artists, bands or whole
scenes and certain places’. Places serve as loci of individual and collective

K. Rhiney (*)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA
e-mail: kr558@geography.rutgers.edu
R. Cruse
Université des Antilles, Martinique, France

© The Author(s) 2019 55

B. Lashua et al. (eds.), Sounds and the City, Leisure Studies in a Global Era,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94081-6_4

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56 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

identity (Cresswell and Hoskins 2008) and are simultaneously shaped,

produced, and enacted through people’s lived realities and memories
(Cresswell 2004; Agnew 1987). Tied to this is an understanding that
music (and other cultural forms) both reflects and produces place (Cohen
1995). Music is simultaneously bound up with, and in place, and is con-
stituted through the interplay between the material spatial fixity of place,
and its imaginative geographies (Stone-Davis 2015). As Spring (2004)
points out, music scenes do not emerge arbitrarily from objective and
discrete spatial properties, but instead, are often the results of a complex
and overlapping interplay of discursive practices and narratives. In other
words, ‘places not only are, they happen’ (Casey 1997, p. 27).
This chapter builds on this growing body of literature through an
exploration of the origins and evolution of popular Jamaican music. We
pay attention to the wider socio-economic, historical, political, and
place-based contexts that helped shape this Caribbean nation’s unique
cultural heritage. The chapter is organized into several sections. We first
examine the evolution of popular Jamaican music from its early rural-
based origins during slavery to the more urban-oriented music form
that emerged in the post-colonial era. Here, we trace the birth and rise
of reggae as a subset of popular Jamaican music, linked to a specific
time period (post-independence/post-colonial), specific evolution in
technology (seen in the rise of private music studios and sound systems)
and a specific shift in population from rural to urban areas (seen in the
massive emigration from Jamaica’s rural countryside to Kingston and
the subsequent growth of ‘ghettos’). Next, we look more specifically at
the urban roots of reggae music, including the social and economic
conditions that led to its birth and popularity. Here we provide a brief
history of Kingston to arrive at a clearer understanding of how and why
reggae emerged in specific parts of the city (e.g. Trench Town, Denham
Town, etc.), and not in others. This spatial rootedness constitutes a
major part of our agenda in writing this chapter, as we attempt to illus-
trate the complex interconnections that exist between popular culture
and place. The third and final section of the chapter explores the
extraordinary rise of Kingston as a music city. In this section, we reflect
on the significance of the socio-economic and political landscape of
Jamaica in shaping Kingston’s musical heritage. We also pay homage to

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 57

a few of Jamaica’s modern-day reggae and dancehall icons, in an attempt

to highlight not just the global reach of Jamaican popular music, but
the highly competitive and creative local environments in which this
music is being produced.

The Evolution of Popular Jamaican Music:

From ‘Country’ to ‘Town’
Historically, Jamaicans tend to geographically divide their country into
two entities: ‘Town’ (primarily in reference to Kingston, the country’s
capital city) and ‘Country’ (rural Jamaica). In the early 1960s, at the time
of independence, two thirds of the Jamaican population lived in the rural
countryside.1 As most Jamaicans lived in rural areas, it is not surprising
that Jamaican popular music was born in rural Jamaica. Back in the nine-
teenth century, around 10% of Jamaicans lived in the capital—a level
that was only reached after a ‘sixfold expansion during the eighteenth
century’ (Clarke 1975, p.  7). In fact, the growth of Kingston is fairly
recent. In 1921, the population of Kingston was ten times less than what
it is today. This general shift in population from rural to urban areas
accelerated shortly after Jamaica gained independence from Britain in
1962. Presently, more than one half (55%) of Jamaicans live in urban
areas, with Kingston alone accounting for approximately a quarter of the
country’s nearly 2.8 million people.2
As Sonjah Stanley Niaah (2010, p. 18) puts it, ‘Dance halls date back
to plantation culture’. Music was there from the beginning; enslaved
folks even danced limbo on the slave ships (Fabre 1999) and would pass
the last day on board the vessel ‘dancing, halloing and clapping hands’
(Stedman 1992, p. 95). For Hedley Jones, former president of the Jamaica
Federation of Musicians:

We always have had our country dancing. Even small town, every village,
every nook, every cranny had its own little band […]. Dancehall has always
been with us, because we have always had our clubs, our marketplaces, our
booths […] where our dances were kept. And these were known as dance
halls. (Hedley Jones, quoted in Stolzoff 2000, p. 23)

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58 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

Those early forms of Jamaican popular music are known as ‘traditional

music’, and are believed to have evolved from a combination of planters’
ballroom parties, African drumming, and from Afro-Christian church
music. One of the earliest forms of music played in Jamaica was the
Trinidadian calypso (very popular in the region in the nineteenth cen-
tury), followed by the mento closer to the end of the nineteenth century.
Mento is a distinctive Jamaican sound, born from the creolization of
African rhythms, traditional Jamaican country music and calypso
(Augustin 2017, p.  56). According to Jones, the mento derives more
directly from the European quadrille dance which the enslaved people
had to learn in order to play during the planters’ ballroom parties. When
they started to play it for themselves, the enslaved folk changed the foot-
work and brought to the quadrille their own African dance. They also
incorporated their own rhythm structure, such as the syncopation and
polyrhythms, also adding instruments of their choice, such as drums,
flutes, banjos, and bamboo horns (Stolzoff 2000).
From the very beginning, these creolized forms of music and dance
were seen by the plantocracy3 as ‘grotesque’, ‘violent’, ‘licentious’, and
‘venery’ (Abrahams and Szwed 1983, p. 280). After mento came Afro-
American jazz in the 1920s. Though small mento bands could be seen
playing in the streets of Kingston by the 1940s, offering social commen-
tary and satirizing current events, it remained primarily rural, while jazz
held greater currency among Kingston’s elites (Katz 2012). Just like with
the European quadrille earlier, Jamaicans started to play the music their
way and developed their own peculiar forms. Small bands kept on play-
ing mento, and new big bands also started to play swing music, which
dominated Jamaican dance halls up until the 1950s when rhythm and
blues took over, and closely following the development of a new phe-
nomenon – the sound system (Augustin 2017, p. 58). As pointed out by
Stolzoff (2000, p. 36):

Jamaicans fell in love with American, in many cases black, popular music
and culture. They saw these creations as a model of cosmopolitan sophisti-
cation and a yardstick of artistic virtuosity […]. As a result of this new-
found interest, the Kingstonian dance bands supplanted the rural
village-based mento bands as the most popular form of dancehall

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 59

entertainment. Mento, and other rural-folk forms, such as buru, jonkonnu,

and kumina, symbolized country life. Some even saw these forms as back-
ward – not something that spoke to life in the modern city.

Other forms of Caribbean music were also appreciated by Jamaicans at

that time. Amongst them were the Dominican merengue, Trinidad
calypso, and Cuban mambo. But to a large extent, these remained the
preserve of Kingston’s elite, with big-band jazz and swing performances
being relegated mostly to high-class clubs and hotels in the city (Katz
2012).
This shift in popular culture happened following important changes
in the daily life of Jamaicans. Universal adult suffrage was introduced in
1944 followed by a number of other constitutional amendments that
allowed for greater self-rule. Local political parties emerged from work-
ers’ union and the Jamaican economy became more diversified with the
growth of industry and commerce in and around urban centres. This
shift went hand in hand with a massive migration of Jamaicans from
the rural countryside to Kingston, in search of new job opportunities
(Gray 2004). This saw Kingston’s population reaching 379,600 in 1960
compared to 117,000 inhabitants in 1921 (Clarke 1975). This also saw
a rise in Jamaican national consciousness and growing calls for inde-
pendence from Britain. The independence movement also influenced
the Jamaican music scene. Jamaican musicians now wanted to establish
a popular music they could truly claim as their own (Katz 2012, p. 37).
While this saw a greater engagement with Jamaican folk traditions and
proverbs in popular songs and sounds, it largely led to the reinterpreta-
tion of predominantly American soul and rock-and-roll classics. Local
musicians—who so far were considered as ‘dropouts’ (Jones, quoted in
Stolzoff 2000, p.  37)—creolized the jazz, rhythm and blues, African
drumming, mento, and calypso they were accustomed to playing and
created their own music according to their personal tastes. It is out of
this quest for charting a uniquely Jamaican music that Jamaican ska was
born (White 1998; Augustin 2017). Along with songs that were being
penned and produced by a growing number of Jamaican instrumental-
ists and vocalists, the early 1960s saw continual releases of US pop
tunes in ska (Mann 2012).

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60 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

The years immediately following the Second World War, were not only
marked by growing calls for independence from Britain, but saw a grow-
ing number of Jamaicans travelling throughout the Americas (including
the American South) in search of new job opportunities made easier by
improved modes of transportation. They brought back radios, phono-
graphs, amplifiers and other sound equipment, which exposed many
Jamaicans (including a growing portion of Kingston’s urban poor) to
American music. Local businessmen saw the opportunity and developed
the first sound systems as rhythm and blues started taking over the
Jamaican music scene. The sheer power and volume of these sound sys-
tems which were normally played out in the open would later become a
key defining element of Jamaica’s home-grown music industry (Katz
2012). What became known as ‘soundmen’ were instrumental in record-
ing and popularizing new music and sound through their sound systems
and their various recording studios—almost all of which were in Kingston.
Initially, these studios were recording Jamaican versions of songs that
were produced overseas, reusing foreign-made recordings in the studio,
with local vocalists singing over the instrumentals (Mann 2012). By the
late 1960s, ska music started giving way to a new genre called rock-
steady—a slower speed of music which places greater emphasis on the
third beat in the measure, prominent basslines and rhythm section, while
the guitars and keyboards receded further into the background (Mann
2012).
By the 1970s, reggae music had emerged out of ska and rocksteady.
Like these other genres, reggae was made popular by the sound system
and was associated primarily with Kingston’s urban poor—both in terms
of its content and main sites of production and entertainment. At the
same time, reggae took on a distinct and more explicit political form
largely fuelled by the economic hardships of the 1970s, worsening class
and racial divide, the rise of Rastafarianism with its anti-colonial political
roots and a growing discontent among Kingston’s inner-city youth with
mainstream Jamaican society. It is no surprise that most reggae artists at
the time, came from Kingston’s ghettos and were affiliated with the
Rastafari movement. So how could an understanding of Kingston’s com-
plex and socially segregated past enhance our knowledge of reggae music’s
origin and subsequent spread? We will discuss this in the next section.

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 61

The Birth of Reggae Music in the ‘Ghetto’

The religious side of the Rastafari movement is said to have emerged
around the charismatic figure of Leonard Percival Howell during the
1930s (Lee 2010; Hutton et al. 2015). This period was important as it
was at that time that the divinity of the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile
Selassie—or Ras Tafari—was first introduced. Howell is an interesting
figure who embodies what Glissant (1997) calls the unpredictability of
creolization. Born in Jamaica from an Anglican family, he spent 20 years
abroad and was later deported from the US because of his involvement
with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). Upon his return to Jamaica, Howell started preaching sermons
promoting black liberation from colonial rule and asserted the divinity of
Haile Selassie as the ‘Black Messiah’. Howell also had his close followers
refer to him in Hindi terms such as Gangunguru Maragh (‘The Gong’,
for short)—which translates from Hindi as the Great King, teacher of the
virtue and wisdom. Although his activism resulted in his being arrested
by the Jamaican colonial government, tried for sedition, and imprisoned
for two years, the Rastafari movement grew. When released in 1940,
Howell created one of the first Rastafarian communities in a rural por-
tion of the neighbouring parish of Saint Catherine (called ‘The
Pinnacle’)—which the local authorities called a ‘communist experiment’.
The Pinnacle was raided many times by state police forces and was finally
destroyed by the government in 1958. Howell’s followers were displaced,
and many of them sought refuge in Kingston’s burgeoning shantytowns
(Lee 2010; Hutton et al. 2015).
The rapid spread of Rastafarianism in Kingston’s expanding shanty-
towns (mostly west Kingston at that time) by the late 1960s provided
fertile ground for the birth of reggae music, exemplified by reggae icon
Bob Marley (King et al. 2002). If reggae is not a Rastafarian music (as is
considered Nyabinghi drumming for instance), reggae cannot be under-
stood without the contribution of the Rastafari movement—amongst
other things. Rastafarian influence has been noticed in earlier forms of
music, such as ska, and Prince Buster is credited as the first producer to
have introduced Nyabinghi drumming on his single Oh Carolina (adapted
from the original single by the Folkes Brothers) in the early 1960s, often

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62 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

cited as one of the first ‘reggae’ songs (though it is clearly ska), alongside
Do the Reggay by The Maytals in 1968. As Mann (2012, p. 69) points out,
‘Rastafarian linguistic idioms were increasingly predominant in reggae
lyrics, as were Rasta-associated drum patterns and sounds, while growing
numbers of artists locked up their hair in the distinctive Rasta style’.
Geographically speaking, it has been claimed that Trench Town was
the birthplace of reggae music, largely owing to the tremendous number
of reggae artists that emerged from this single community. Trench Town
was not only home to reggae icons such as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and
Bunny Wailer, but countless other local and international reggae stars
such as Junior Tucker and Leroy Sibbles, Delroy Wilson, Dean Fraser,
and Johnny Osbourne and bands such as The Abyssinians and The
Heptones. While other nearby inner-city communities such as Denham
Town and Rae Town were instrumental in the growth of reggae music as
well (Fig. 4.1), Trench Town was clearly the epicentre of a phenomenon

Fig. 4.1 Kingston Metropolitan Area. (Created by author)

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 63

that would affect the entire Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, and soon
Europe, the US, Africa, and many other parts of the world (Rhiney and
Cruse 2012). Reggae music’s explicit anti-colonial stance was embraced
by a large and expanding audience in the global South and became a
highly sought after genre at punk scenes in the UK and across Europe
(Heble and Fischlin 2003).
As shown earlier, musically, reggae is a direct spin-off of rocksteady, a
later style of music that was born around the mid-1960s (Hopeton Lewis,
Take It Easy (1968); Alton Ellis, Rock Steady (1967)) in another ghetto
community in eastern Kingston, known as Wareika Hills (located close to
Harbour View). Rocksteady, a slow style of ska, was born after two events
that would change the Jamaican cultural scene—the death of Don the
death of Don Drummond in 1969, one of the most famous ska players,
and Haile Selassie’s trip to Jamaica in 1966. Rocksteady is said to have
been born in the Wareika Hills because of the presence of Count Ossie’s
band, the legendary Nyabinghi percussionist. Not only is the rhythm of
rocksteady slower than ska, but also the joyful horns sections are aban-
doned and replaced by cheaper electric bass and keyboards (Augustin
2017). The feeling of the music progressively became heavier as the
national mood switched from hope to disappointment (Lee 2010). By
the end of the 1960s, Jamaican ska and rocksteady are already known and
appreciated in Europe and North America (Augustyn 2017). Reggae is
born somewhere around 1968, and the precepts of Leonard Howell are
now heard on all the radios. In 1973, while Bob Marley is signed by
Island Records, the reggae star in the streets of Kingston is Big Youth. He
sings and deejays about the destruction of Rome, its pope, and Black
emancipation (Ehrengardt 2016).
Geopolitically, reggae was born on the ‘frontline’ between Jamaican
gangs—Trench Town being known as one of the most violent places of
confrontation between members of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), who
control entire neighbouring communities of Tivoli Gardens and Denham
Town to the south, and members of the People’s National Party (PNP),
who control communities in the north such as Concrete Jungle (Arnett
Gardens). These local disruptions occurred alongside the unravelling of
global geopolitics during the cold war era, with the CIA allegedly bring-
ing in weapons to support the free-market oriented party of Edward

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64 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

Seaga (JLP) against the social democratic party (Fabian socialism) of

Michael Manley (PNP) (Sives 2010; Cruse 2014). Though many reggae
icons claimed to have been non-partisan, reggae music quickly became
intertwined with local party-based politics. Both political parties started
using popular song lyrics in their election campaign slogans and speeches
as a strategy to connect with the majority of Kingston’s urban poor4
(Mann 2012). Often, popular local artists would perform at social events
sponsored by one of these rivalling political parties. The ‘victory band-
wagon’ concerts, which were held in the months leading up to the 1972
general elections, were held under the banner ‘Change is coming with the
PNP’, featuring the likes of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Ken Boothe and
Max Romeo, backed by one of the best bands of the time, the Inner
Circle. Amongst the numerous ‘Joshua tunes’ (the songs in favour of
Michael Manley5), Max Romeo sings Better Must Come, Delroy Wilson
Beat Down Babylon, and Junior Byles Pharaoh Hiding (Ehrengardt 2017).
Economically and socially, reggae is a music traditionally played and
sung by Kingston’s urban poor, but registered and produced by wealthier
classes. Since few people were able to buy discs and phonographs, reggae
was mostly consumed through sound systems, the dance halls of the elec-
tronic period, and evolutions of the bamboo shacks reminiscent of the
plantation era. Reggae therefore benefited from the technological
advancements made during the Second World War and brought back by
war veterans. The first sound systems were bought by shopkeepers—such
as Tom Wong, today considered as a sound system pioneer—to attract
and entertain their clientele. Wong was the first to understand that those
gatherings of people in front of his shop could also take place in the eve-
ning as social entertainment—a business that could make more money
than simply attracting idle young men in front of his shop. A small indus-
try grew around those sound systems, with local youth building amplifi-
ers, boom boxes, and everything that could differentiate their sound from
others. This created a competitive soundscape that saw sound systems
competing against each other to play louder and clearer, with a stronger
bass and so on. Sound systems would soon ‘war’ (compete with) each
other during events dubbed as ‘sound clash’, in which each sound would
lay ‘specials’, exclusive songs specially ‘cut’ (recorded) by a known local
artist for a sound man (Stolzoff 2000, pp. 42–45). Reggae was born and

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 65

evolved in this rich local context, promoting a new space within Kingston’s
urban ghettos.
Reggae music, like the Rastafarian movement, became rooted in
Kingston’s inner cities and was embraced and fuelled by the vast majority
of the city’s urban poor who had become increasingly critical of the status
quo, and felt disenfranchised and cut off from mainstream society (Waters
1989; King et al. 2002). Reggae’s cultural outgrowth was mostly hinged
on the lived realities of Kingston’s inner-city residents, and its sounds and
lyrical contents reflected key moments in Jamaica’s social and political
history. For instance, the use of police sirens in dance halls was reflective
of the political unrest of the 1970s and the tense and often violent forms
of state-led policing that became more and more prevalent in these low-
income communities. As Stanley Niaah (2004, p. 105) points out, these
spaces have consistently been frequented by police raids to apprehend
known or alleged criminals believed to be hiding in dance halls and
smokers of marijuana or simply to terminate the dance.6 Overtime, sirens
have become a form of ‘sonic punctuation’ signalling a high point in the
song itself or during a party (Mann 2012). Nevertheless, the origin of this
practice shows just how much popular music and culture are shaped by,
and inextricably interwoven in, the social fabric of the particular places
that give rise to them.
Kingston’s divisive post-colonial class structure was also central to reg-
gae music’s content and geography. The massive flight of the rural poor to
Kingston in the late 1960s in search of new opportunities, combined
with inadequate urban planning and a weakened economy, led to the
development of numerous informal communities, mostly situated in the
southern and western sections of the city (Kingston’s inner-city core).
Overtime, this produced a unique urban socio-spatial divide connected
to a history of racialized exclusion and characterized by a strong correla-
tion between class, skin colour, and space (Austin 1984; Dodman 2004;
Howard 2005). A division marked by ‘racial and social cleavages’ that
associated darker skin Jamaicans with poverty and the inner-city com-
munities of downtown Kingston (Clarke 1966). Stanley Niaah (2004,
pp. 105–106) describes the harsh social and living conditions that typify
urban life in Kingston’s inner cities, where Jamaican popular music is
largely generated:

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66 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

A large number of their dwellings or yards, today concealed behind metal

or cardboard fences mostly bordering narrow lanes, maintain the character
of “Negro yards” of plantation Jamaica…Some of the streets are blocked
with barbed wire to signal “no entry zones,” and police and army contin-
gents are posted at volatile garrison borders. Residents fear the bark of guns
during the conflicts between political factions. A child with a bullet lodged
in the head, others sleeping under the house or hiding during conflicts and
a clinically depressed father are not unusual.

In other words, reggae music (like ska and rocksteady) emerged out of
the harsh social realities of these inner-city communities, characterized by
extreme poverty and violence, as opposed to the spacious, well-guarded
residential areas of uptown Kingston. It is no surprise that reggae was
often regarded as ‘ghetto music’ or ‘sufferers’ music’ (Mann 2012, p. 68).
These claims not only reflected where the majority of reggae artists came
from but also emerged out of a conscious effort by Kingston’s urban poor
to assert their identity and counter dominant ways of seeing ‘ghetto
music’ as base and undesirable. Reggae music not only became a means
of survival and hope for Kingston’s talented inner-city youth, but it took
on a greater political significance—giving voice to a marginalized group
of people whose lives were intricately interwoven in a complex web of
socio-spatial antagonisms and class struggles (Cooper 1995). These class
struggles were often manifested in the lyrics of popular songs such as
Peter Tosh’s Equal Rights (1977) and Bob Marley’s Babylon System (1979).
These were often matched by songs that celebrated the inner-city and its
centrality to Kingston’s urban life and culture.7

Kingston as a Hyper-Creative Music Cluster

Jamaican popular music—and notably reggae—has indisputably achieved
exceptionally high levels of production, both in terms of quantity and
quality. Quantity is the easiest measure, and it is estimated that to this
day Jamaican studios have ‘cut’ (recorded) more than 100,000 songs
since the 1950s (Vendryes 2017). Reggae artist, Miguel Orlando ‘Sizzla
Kalonji’ Collins, a 41-year old native of the August Town community, in

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 67

Kingston, has recorded 54 albums since 1995 (with about 20 songs each).
He has also released ten compilations and two live albums. Convicted
dancehall artist, Adija Azim ‘Vybz Kartel’ Palmer8 (who is also in his early
40s), has still managed to release hundreds of new songs (more than 50
for 2016 alone) since recording his voice from his prison cell on a cellular
phone (Serwer 2016). Reggae icons, such as Damian ‘Junior Gong’
Marley, constantly tour the world to perform in stadiums and other huge
gatherings, as shown on the artist’s website.9
The quality of Jamaican popular music is obviously harder to charac-
terize or measure due to its more subjective undertones—and public
reactions to a Vybz Kartel video clip featuring face tattoos, bleached
skins, dancehall queen-like makeup, and purple wigs vary widely. Still,
Bob Marley was listed as one of the 100 greatest artists of all time by the
Rolling Stone magazine.10 Whatever you think of Grammy awards, reggae
has been a category for more than ten years now, and Marley’s son, Ziggy
Marley, has received no less than six awards (2007, 2010, 2012, 2014,
2015, 2017). Arguably, alongside Hip-Hop, contemporary Jamaican
popular music (reggae and dancehall) have become one of the most pop-
ular music genres amongst youth throughout the world for many years.
Jamaican artists constantly tour the world, from the US and Canada to
Brazil and Colombia, throughout the Caribbean and Central America
(Belize, Costa Rica), Africa (Ghana, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, South Africa,
and Malawi are hotspots), Europe, Japan, and Australia.
How this small island state with fewer than three million inhabitants,
its comparatively low level of GDP and income per capita, reached such
a level of productivity and quality in the global music industry (the same
could be said of athletics) is truly extraordinary. Part of the equation
comes from concurrence and competition according to Vendryes (2017).
Vendryes compares Kingston to the Silicon Valley and Hollywood—US
giant clusters for new technologies and cinema. According to Vendryes
(2017), Kingston is also an example of a small territory where an impor-
tant number of complementary persons and activities gather around a
similar activity (the definition of a cluster), producing popular music.
Jamaica also has a large and demanding audience, wherein young upcom-
ing artists are tolerated in early parts of stage shows, and are pushed out
of the stage by a gentle ‘clap out’ if the performance is not perceived as

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68 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

good enough. If an artist decides to disobey the tacit rule, they run the
risk of being a target of a slew of missiles (usually consisting of rocks,
bottles, and even the occasional chair). Kingston, and Kingston ghettos
in particular, also benefits from a high concentration of skilled artists,
players of instruments, studios, producers, and other businessmen
involved in the music industry. Thousands of songs have been recorded
in Kingston studios since the 1950s. Music is played almost everywhere
in Jamaica—in the streets where vendors use portable sound systems to
sell pirate copies, in taxis, buses, houses, radios at work, and in the
evening, on sound systems. There is at least one Sound System playing
every night somewhere in Kingston, with names such as ‘Nipples
Tuesday’, ‘Weddy Weddy Wednesdays’, ‘Hookah Thursdays’, ‘Sunday
Kingston Dub Club’, plus fetes on weekends, and live shows that are also
held every weekend in small bars and private places, and once or twice
monthly at the larger venues. Singers, sound disc jockeys, bands, and
dancers are all continually measuring their skills in some form of com-
petitive clashes.11 Young people sing or dance and record themselves on
their phones, constantly improving their skills as would do professionals
in other countries. It is obvious that such an audience becomes very
demanding as a crowd. As Vendryes (2017, p. 42) points out, ‘This envi-
ronment is extremely favourable for creativity and innovation. As every-
body has to cooperate with others to create and produce, in fluid and
changing settings, novelties merge and circulate easily and quickly. The
intense competition to stand out and provide the sound systems with
novelties and specials create a fecund emulation’.

Concluding Remarks
The main aim of this chapter has been to elucidate the complex intercon-
nections between music, popular culture, and place, through an explora-
tion of the origins and evolution of popular Jamaican music. We briefly
traced the evolution of popular Jamaican music from its early rural-based
beginnings during slavery, to the more urban-based music form that
emerged in the post-independence era. We pay attention to the rise of
reggae, a cultural by-product of a confluence of socio-spatial, historical

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 69

political, and economic processes and events. We argue that early forms
of reggae music must be understood within the place-based and time-
bounded contexts that gave rise to their very production. Reggae emerged
out of a specific era (post-independence/post-colonial), specific evolution
in technology (spread of private music studios and sound systems), and
in specific sections of a socio-economically fragmented city. Kingston’s
divisive post-colonial and urban class-based struggles were central to the
music’s lyrical contents and its spatial rootedness in poor inner-city com-
munities. Reggae’s radical origins partly stem from the efforts of poor
inner-city youth to challenge Kingston’s status quo, and to carve out an
identity and cultural space more akin to their socio-political and eco-
nomic realities.
We see Kingston as a hyper-creative music cluster, a city that has ben-
efitted from the coming together of an important number of comple-
mentary persons and activities around the production and consumption
of Jamaican popular music. Kingston’s extraordinary rise as a global music
city is reflective of the highly competitive and creative local environments
in which popular music is being produced. At the same time, we note
that much has changed over the years, with reggae giving way to dance-
hall as the dominant form of contemporary popular Jamaican music
(Stanley Niaah 2004; Hope 2013). There are still however, several well-
known local performers that identify themselves as reggae artists. Aside
from the obvious differences in sound, the only distinguishing feature
between these two groups is that modern-day reggae artists are usually
associated with the production of ‘conscious music’, in contrast to dance-
hall that has been the subject of much controversy given its more violent,
hyper-sexual, and ‘vulgar’ overtones (Cooper 2004; Stanley Niaah 2004;
Hope 2001). Several scholars have pointed to the moralistic tensions sur-
rounding dancehall lyrics and performances (Chang and Chen 1998;
Cooper 2004, 2007), including concerns over dancehall artists’ use of
foul language in their public performances, lyrics suggesting sexual prow-
ess or the sexually suggestive nature of dancehall fashion and cultural
practices.
Yet, many similarities exist between these two genres. Dancehall, like
reggae, is still tied to Kingston’s inner cities. As Hope (2017, p.  181)
points out, ‘Dancehall culture stands as an organic and informal popular

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70 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

cultural out-growth of Kingston’s inner cities in the early 1980s’, and it

remains critically interwoven with the everyday practices and struggles of
inner-city residents. At the same time, these two musical genres are seen
as iconic of Jamaican culture. Both reggae and dancehall, then, occupy a
sort of dualistic or liminal space—one that is inherently contradictory,
given that it is both marginalized and celebrated, disruptive yet unifying.
The dancehall itself—the actual space/venue where dance events are
held—is still considered ‘a contradictory and liminal space: one that
occupies the margins in terms of social class and yet is a centre of national
and postcolonial identity’ (Stanley Niaah 2004, p. 103). And while there
is some truth to the earlier distinctions made, given reggae’s more out-
right political and spiritual genealogy, both genres represent and are rep-
resentative of the struggle of a particular group of Jamaicans centred
around issues of poverty, political marginalization, and oppression
(Stolzoff 2000; Stanley Niaah 2004). Finally, both genres now co-exist in
a highly competitive and increasingly commoditized industry—that in
many respects is global in both its reach and scope. While this offers
many opportunities for locally grown talents, it also presents huge chal-
lenges for the industry in terms of maintaining its authenticity and com-
petitive edge while being responsive and subjected to changing global
consumer demands.12
In closing, we would like to reiterate the close interconnections
between Jamaican popular music and place. We argue that reggae music
(like ska, rocksteady and dancehall) simultaneously embodies and trans-
forms place. The unique sounds, lyrics, and practices that constitute these
cultural forms are a reflection of Kingston’s harsh and uneven geogra-
phies. The inner-city space, historically characterized by overcrowding,
unemployment, poverty, stigmatism, and violence, simultaneously serves
as a locus of creativity and resistance. Jamaican popular music is therefore
innately political and its origins and evolution cannot be seen in isolation
from the marginalized spaces in which it first took form and the social
and lived realities of its chief constituents—Kingston’s inner-city com-
munities. At the same time, we have shown how Jamaican popular music,
though constitutive of, also transforms place. This can be seen through
the tremendous growth of private music studios and dance hall venues
since the 1960s. The tightly knit network of human bodies, sonic

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 Placing the Music: Kingston, Reggae Music, and the Rise… 71

technologies, fashion, texts, and images that make up Jamaica’s musics-

cape, as well as its own particular imaginary geographies and discourse,
all play a role in shaping Kingston’s convoluted and ever-changing music
scene.

Notes
1. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS.
2. http://statinja.gov.jm/Census/PopCensus/PopulationUsuallyResidentin
JamaicabyParish.aspx.
3. Comprises a ruling class, political order, or government composed of (or
dominated by) plantation owners (similar to ‘slavocracy’).
4. Though the practice of integrating popular songs in local election cam-
paigns in Jamaica dates back to the 1920s, it is commonly agreed that
the 1970s was the most prolific period of political songs (see Higgins
2014: ‘Politics songs’ and Michael Manley’s message, Jamaica Observer).
5. Part of Manley’s political paraphernalia was a rod he claimed was given
to him by Haile Selassie. Manley would normally wave his ‘rod of cor-
rection’ at political meetings mimicking biblical figures such as Moses,
Aaron, and Abraham. Manley also nicknamed himself Joshua, the Old
Testament figure who led the Jews into Canaan after they had spent 40
years wandering in the Sinai desert.
6. Confrontation like these heightened between inner-city residents and
security forces shortly after the Noise Abatement Act was enacted in
1996. The Act prevents public entertainment events from going beyond
2:00 a.m. The Act itself has come under heavy criticism for its alleged
bias against Dancehall events.
7. It is not uncommon for artists to refer to particular places in their songs
and albums, example Trench Town (Bob Marley), August Town (Duane
Stephenson) and Spanish Town (Chronixx).
8. Palmer was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 2014.
9. http://www.damianmarleymusic.com/tour.
10. He ranks 11th: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-
artists-of-all-time-19691231/the-beach-boys-20110420.
11. The Magnum Kings and Queens of Dancehall is an annual talent com-
petition that showcases young dancehall artists in front of a live audience
and three judges. The competition is aired live on local television and the

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72 K. Rhiney and R. Cruse

reigning King and Queen not only win cash prizes but also gain an
opportunity to get their hit songs recorded.
12. This also relates to recent tensions around well-known pop stars in North
America incorporating ‘light Patois’ and co-opting elements of dancehall
in their songs. See, for example: https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/
article/65z7jz/jamaica-dancehall-reggae-pop-appropriation.

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