The History:
Reggae is a music genre developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s.
The term reggae is sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, although the word specifically indicates a particular music style that originated after the development of ska and rocksteady. Reggae is based on a rhythm style characterized by regular chops on the off-beat, known as the skank. The tempo is generally slower than that found in ska and rocksteady. Reggae is often associated with the Rastafari movement, which influenced many prominent reggae musicians in the 1970s and 1980s. Reggae song lyrics deal with many subjects, including faith, love, relationships, poverty, injustice and other broad social issues.

Reggae's origins are in traditional African and Caribbean music; American rhythm and blues; and in Jamaican ska and rocksteady. In 1963, Coxsone Dodd of Studio One asked Jackie Mittoo (pianist of The Skatalites) to run recording sessions and compose original music. Mittoo, with the help of drummer Lloyd Knibbs, turned the traditional ska beat into reggae by slowing down the tempo. Bob Marley, who played an important role in popularizing reggae worldwide, recorded ska, rocksteady, and nyabinghi-drumming records early in his career. The word reggae may have been first used by the ska band Toots and the Maytals, in the title of their 1968 hit Do the Reggay. The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin of the word is unknown, but may be derived from the Jamaican-English word rege-rege, meaning quarrel. Other theories are that the term came from the word streggae (a Jamaican slang term for prostitute) or that it originated from the term Regga, which was a Bantu-speaking tribe from Lake Tanganyika.
Reggae includes several subgenres, such as roots reggae, dub, lovers rock and dancehall.

Roots reggae is the name given to explicitly Rastafarian reggae: a spiritual type of music whose lyrics are predominantly in praise of Jah (God). Recurrent lyrical themes include poverty and resistance to government oppression. The creative pinnacle of roots reggae may have been in the late 1970s, with singers such as Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, Freddie McGregor, Johnny Clarke, Horace Andy, Barrington Levy and Linval Thompson teaming up with studio producers including Lee 'Scratch' Perry, King Tubby, and Coxsone Dodd. The experimental pioneering of producers within often-restrictive technological parameters gave birth to dub music, which has been considered one of the earliest contributions to the developments of Techno music.

Reggae is noted for its tradition of social criticism, although many reggae songs discuss lighter, more personal subjects such as love, sex and socializing. Some of the music attempts to raise the political consciousness of the audience, criticizing materialism and unconsciousness. Some reggae artists have spoken up against what they perceived as the oppression of orthodox religious dogma. Many reggae songs discuss liberation, including that linked with the prohibition of (cannabis) or ganja, which is considered a sacrament by Rastafarians. The promotion of cannabis use (through lyrics, images and lifestyle) has been a staple of reggae since almost its inception. Bob Marley's Catch a Fire album cover, showing him smoking a spliff, was controversial at the time the album was first issued. Peter Tosh often performed with a spliff in hand, and lobbied for the decriminalization of marijuana. His most famous song is titled "Legalize It". Other topics of social activism include: black nationalism, anti-racism, misogyny, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, criticism of political systems, and criticism of the colonial education system.

The toasting style first used by 1960s Jamaican artists such as U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone influenced Jamaican DJ Kool Herc, who used the style to pioneer a new genre that became known as hip hop or rap. In Jamaica, the term Deejay or DJ is equivalent to the rapper or MC in American hip hop culture, while it is the selector who actually mans the turntables. Mixing techniques employed in dub music have influenced hip hop and drum and bass.

The dancehall genre developed around 1980, with exponents such as Yellowman, Super Cat and Shabba Ranks. The style is characterized by a deejay singing and rapping or toasting over raw and fast rhythms. Ragga (also known as raggamuffin), is a subgenre of dancehall, in which the instrumentation primarily consists of electronic music and sampling. Reggaeton is a form of dance music that first became popular with Latino youths in the early 1990s. It blends reggae and dancehall with Latin American genres such as bomba and plena, as well with hip hop.

Reg hop is a fusion of reggae, dancehall and hip hop. Reg hop takes the sounds of hip hop and the flow of dancehall. Examples of reg hop artists include Vybz Kartel, Aidonia, Assasin and Busy Signal. This style has been around since the late 1980s in the streets of New York City. Popular dancehall artists such as Mad Lion, Ini Kamoze, Apache Indian, Shinehead, Buju Banton, Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Spragga Benz, Tanya Stephens and Shabba Ranks have performed and recorded some reg hop songs that were labelled as dancehall.

Reggae is always played in 4/4 time or swing time because the symmetrical rhythm pattern does not lend itself to other time signatures such as 3/4 time. Harmonically, the music is often very simple, and sometimes a whole song will have no more than one or two chords. The Bob Marley and the Wailers song "Exodus" is almost entirely comprised of A-minor chords. These simple repetitious chord structures add to the hypnotic effect that reggae sometimes has. However, Marley also wrote more complex chord structures, and the band Steel Pulse have often used very complex chord structures.


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