The beat with a hole in it
Most pop music lands hard on the first beat of the bar. Reggae does the opposite. In the 'one drop' rhythm, the drummer leaves beat one empty and puts the weight on beat three, while the guitar chops on the OFFBEAT, in the gaps between the counts — that chop is the SKANK. The BASSLINE fills the space underneath, so reggae manages to sound relaxed and enormous at once, and the bass is often the loudest thing in the mix. Our soul and funk puzzle covers the exact opposite instinct: James Brown told his band to hit the one hard.
Jamaican music arrived there by slowing down. SKA came first in the late 1950s, fast and bouncy with HORNS on top. It eased into rocksteady in the mid-1960s, and slowed again into reggae by about 1968.
Music delivered by truck
Reggae grew up around sound systems: huge home-built speaker stacks loaded onto a truck, driven to a street corner or dance hall, and run by an operator with a crate of records. Rival systems met in a SOUNDCLASH, a competition decided by whoever the crowd cheered loudest. Operators guarded their secret weapons: one-off acetate discs, cut with exclusive versions no rival could play.
To keep the dance moving, the operator talked, joked and chanted over the records. That was TOASTING, and it was rapping years before hip-hop had a name. When a young man who grew up in KINGSTON moved to New York, he took the sound-system idea with him — Kool Herc went on to throw the block parties where hip-hop began, as our hip-hop puzzle explains.
The B-side that became a genre
DUB began as a by-product. In the late 1960s Jamaican engineers started cutting instrumental versions of songs for sound systems, and King Tubby, who repaired radios and built his own amplifiers, realised how much could be done to them: drop the vocals in and out, shove the drums to the front, soak everything in ECHO and reverb. The result was remixing decades before the word was in common use, and producers such as Lee 'Scratch' Perry pushed it much further. Every modern song that comes with an instrumental version owes something to those B-sides.
One island, one stage
Bob Marley carried ROOTS reggae and RASTA faith from KINGSTON to the rest of the world. In April 1978, at the One Love Peace Concert, with Jamaica torn by political violence, he called the leaders of the two rival parties onto the stage and held their hands together above his head. It did not end the trouble, but the photograph travelled everywhere. His album Exodus was later named album of the century by Time magazine.
RASTA is a faith, not just a look. Rastafari began in Jamaica in the 1930s, and for followers DREADLOCKS are a religious commitment rather than a hairstyle. A class dressing up in wigs and knitted hats is treading on something people take seriously.
The reach of this music is wildly out of proportion to the size of the ISLAND. Jamaica has fewer than three million people, and you can hear its rhythms in pop, hip-hop, dance music and in the offbeat of ska bands on every continent.