Jamaican Music: Reggae

Research Paper

Bob Marley was the person who made Reggae a worldwide phenomena. Bob Marley was very succesful in the 1970s and it didn't take much time afore reggae became a genre of music. As a result of the development in Jamaica reggae was introduced. Everything commenced with ska and the rocksteady. Jamaica had made an astronomically immense impact on music worldwide in the last 60 years, it developed dramatically and impacted an abundance of people.

People in Jamaica commenced to go to the capital, Kingston in order to have a more preponderant life and search for opportunities as Jamaica mainly was rural economy. People would go to open spaced which is called "lawns" to dance on the weekends. There was a boom in the sound system business in Jamaica as people commenced to sell most of their paraphernalia to buy sound systems to plays incipient records. Jamaica is a poor country and many people didn't have radios so they would peregrinate to these lawns to aurally perceive the incipient records sound systems were loud additionally.

Young and old people were intrigued with R&B as it was expeditious and it had a thick beat. The sound system business was growing so well that some people travelled to the U.S. to buy the latest records or having someone to send them these records. It was an authentically competitive war as people wanted the most incipient sounds. Popular disc would be played several in the dance people wouldn't get tired of it.

Duke Reid with the Trojan and Clement Dodd with Sir Coxsone Downbeat, these two people has a furious competition between their sound systems. However, this competition was the catalyst that made the Jamaican music industry grow and amend. As mentioned afore, people would peregrinat...

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Reggae uses musical elements of rhythm, blues, jazz, mento, calypso and Latin American music and other genres. it is played in 4/4 time because the symmetrical rhythmic pattern does not lend itself to other time signatures such as 3/4 time. offbeat rhythms is one of the most facilely recognizable elements. On the offbeats staccato chords is played by a guitar or piano and this is called skank.

So in reggae the rhythmic pattern accents the second and fourth beats and merge with the drums to give you the reggae sense of phrasing. The reggae offbeat can be counted so that it falls between each count as an "and" (example: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and etc.).

Reggae Tempo is customarily more gradual than ska and rocksteady. it's the guitar and piano offbeats with this more gradual tempo and the utilization of Syncopated which makes reggae different from other music.