Music dictionary - Reggae  

Posted by Son Of Alerik in

Reggae is defined as a Jamaican popular music and dance style. It originated in the mid-1960s as a music of the Jamaican poor, reflecting social discontent and the Rastafarian movement. Its instrumentation features an electric bass played at high volume as a lead instrument, around which an ensemble of organ, piano, drums, and lead and rhythm electric guitars plays short ostinato phrases with regular accents on the offbeats.

Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by regular beats on the off-beat, known as the skank. Reggae is normally slower than ska, and usually has accents on the first and third beat in each bar.

Reggae song lyrics deal with many subjects, including religion, love, sexuality, relationships, poverty, injustice and other social and political issues.

Although strongly influenced by both traditional African and Caribbean music, as well as by American rhythm and blues, reggae owes its direct origins to the progressive development of ska and rocksteady in 1960s Jamaica.

The 1972 film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, generated considerable interest and popularity for reggae music in the United States, and Eric Clapton's 1974 cover of the Bob Marley song "I Shot the Sheriff" helped bring reggae into the mainstream.

Bob Marley is recognised as the most representative singer of raggae genre. He evolved from ska and rocksteady to raggae to become a very influential singer of the '70 and '80. (Wiki)

This is "No Woman, No Cry".

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 at Wednesday, March 04, 2009 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

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