Whatever Happened to
Real Reggae
April/May 2001 Issue
by Lem Oppenheimer
[10 Essential Reggae Albums]
[A Brief Glossary of Reggae Terms]
[Five Reggae Artists Beyond Bob Marley]
For most of the planet, reggae begins and ends with Bob Marley, which is both a blessing and a curse for Jamaica's
greatest musical export. Because of Marley's worldwide popularity, most people are at least familiar with reggae's downbeat,
its role as a voice for Third-World sufferation, its intimate connection with ganja smoking, and its complex relationship with
Rastafarianism. Yet, for many, the knowledge stops there. Though reggae has produced an incredible number of talented artists,
musicians, and producers in its brief history, most folks are happy enough to have a copy of Marley's Legend sitting on the shelf
and call it a day. As a collection of Marley's best-known hits, that album is an important primer, but, for most reggae fanatics,
those songs have been played out. I never want to hear "Buffalo Soldier" again.
Reggae is messy. It's hard to compress into a nice and tidy box set (though the 1992 anthology Tougher Than Tough came
damn close). Conflicting facts, lost histories, often-indecipherable lyrics, and truly lo-fi recordings help keep reggae an
underground pleasure, even though artists such as Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Lee Perry are widely known.
Factor in a cutthroat Jamaican music industry and a U.S. music biz intent on finding the "next Bob Marley," and you begin to
understand how tough it is to get reggae the recognition and record sales it deserves.
Aware of these realities, but idealistic enough to believe in the
possibility of a broader audience for reggae, three friends and I started Easy Star Records in January 1996. We had a passion for
the music and a good in-house producer, my partner Michael G, but little else. Our original game plan was to put out music recorded
by living, breathing musicians, in the style of the classic recordings from the '70s and '80s that we adored. At the time, no one else
was doing that; reggae was just coming out of a particularly low phase, dominated by slack songwriting (gun and sex talk) and slick,
bland production styles. We wanted to make music that made us happy, that we could sit and listen to for hours on end. So far,
we have achieved this beyond anything we could have imagined.
But producing good music is only one aspect of hundreds that play into whether or not a label will flourish. We hoped that people
would flock to high quality music, regardless of its commercial appeal. Things haven't worked out exactly as we planned. We've had
to adjust our expectations and change our approach several times as we butted into the realities of the reggae industry and the
music business in general. After six full-length releases to date, and numerous singles, we still maintain a belief that reggae can
achieve much greater success than it already has.
My own addiction to reggae began just after college.
I had always been aware of the music, mainly through exposure to my brother's Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Steel Pulse records.
Something about the syncopated beat and the complex arrangements built around minimal instrumentation caught my ear right away.
But I was too caught up in classic rock, hip-hop, funk, and punk to delve further into Jamaican music on my own. After college,
I returned home and was exposed once again to reggae's seductive sounds. My roommate-and future business partner-had a
vast library of records, and the more I dug in, the more I became hooked.
I found that numerous innovations in popular music can be traced to Jamaican origin-from the remix, which stems from the
tradition of producers recycling backing tracks to save money, to hip-hop, merely an Americanized version of Jamaican toasting.
Rock has long dabbled in the rhythms of reggae: Clapton took "I Shot The Sheriff" to number one in '74; the Clash was fixated on
all things Jamaican; Elvis Costello and the Police made reggae rhythms a regular part of the new wave vocabulary; and 311 and
Sublime appropriated dancehall riddims and lyrics to fashion alt-rock hits in the '90s. In short, rock has primed fans to accept reggae
in its pure, unbastardized form.
Reggae is ripe to follow the path the blues took in the '60s, when kids began discovering artists who had inspired the British Invasion.
Once Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were playing their songs, bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Robert Johnson
suddenly became very hip. If it could happen to them, why not to reggae masters like Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs, or
Dennis Brown?
Part of the blame can be pinned on the reggae industry itself.
From artist to label to distributor to promoter, a lax attitude permeates the entire community; progress happens slowly.
For a number of reasons, it has become hard for Jamaican artists to spread their music here. The number of reputable booking
agents willing to plan tours for Jamaican artists has dwindled to a handful. Few local promoters take chances booking reggae acts
across the U.S., and only a handful of them conduct their businesses professionally. Equally at fault, many Jamaican artists have
an inflated sense of what they should be paid to perform. Thus, the promoters have an impossible time making a profit or breaking
even. Making a profit keeps promoters putting on shows, which keeps artists touring, which keeps records coming out, and the
cycle continues-or, in the absence of profit, stalls.
Major retailers barely touch reggae releases, even though certain reggae albums have sold more than 200,000 copies in recent
years (such as Buju Banton's Inna Heights and Beenie Man's Many Moods of Moses). Retail chains won't take a chance on smaller,
independent releases and often expect labels to buy into expensive promotional plans. Keep in mind, Jamaica is a
Third World country-there's not a lot of money going around. And even for a U.S.-based label like ours, these promotions
are either out of our price range or too risky, so we end up with tiny spreads in many of the nation's biggest chains.
Currently, record labels are little more than moneylenders, pushing releases through complex and costly marketing plans.
It takes money to make money. Money creates hype, but, all too often, reggae has had nothing to depend on except its music to
pave the way.
The major labels are the only companies with the money and clout to promote reggae on a huge scale. However, when they do
attempt it, the results are invariably watered down versions of the music-lost in hip-hop beats, drenched in hippie happiness and
handed-down Marleyisms, or reduced to bland island music covers of old hits (e.g., the UB40 blueprint). Major labels are unable to
let reggae simply be, and trust that people will like it for what it is, bumps and all.
Some artists only make the problem worse. Groups like Big Mountain and UB40 have turned reggae into a novelty act with such
insipid covers as "Baby, I Love Your Way" and "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You." The wannabe Marley approach is destined to
fail, mainly because no one will ever be the next Bob Marley. Talents like Bob come along only once a century or so. If people would
stop focusing so narrowly on Marley, they might discover the wealth of great artists coming out of Jamaica.
At least reggae radio thrives in the States, though mostly on college radio formats. Many of the bigger markets, such as New York
and Miami, play reggae on mainstream commercial radio, but payola by producers and deejays has tainted the reputations of some
of these broadcasts. The urban approach has had the most success, which has a lot to do with the genetic connection between
hip-hop and dancehall. A number of dancehall songs have enjoyed immense popularity on hip-hop radio (Mr. Vegas' "Heads High"
is a great recent example), but most of those originated as independent productions and slowly spread through positive word of
mouth.
The majors, on the other hand, usually get these cultural cross-pollinations wrong, because the marketing plans behind every
song are painfully transparent. When Shabba Ranks signed with Columbia, for example, he achieved brief success on the
international level, but none of his music matched the brilliance of his earlier, strictly Jamaican productions. Shabba softened his
tone, brought in different producers, and seemed to be working for the money instead of the music. Columbia must have seen this
incredibly talented deejay and thought, "How can we shape Shabba into a star?" They should have been asking, "How can we
make his music reach a wider audience?"
There is hope for reggae. The genre continues to produce
extremely talented artists. The music itself has taken a dramatic upswing since we started Easy Star five years ago. More and
more artists are returning to the elements that made reggae so strong in its golden age, often taking those ingredients and
bringing them into the present to give the music a fresh, new voice.
Even faced with the realities of the reggae world, my partners and I refuse to give up. We have chosen to work harder to bring
this powerful medium to light. When I'm at a concert or sitting in my living room, and that deep bass hits me in the chest and the
interplay of instruments begins to play with my head, I'm reminded that there is no finer music on the planet. Reggae soothes me,
fires me up, keeps me positive. I am that much more determined to make Easy Star Records-and reggae in general-succeed.
As long as we in the industry openly address our problems, we can find solutions and better ways to bring this gritty music to the
masses. Living in the small college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, I am beginning to see seeds of progress. When an act comes
through town, or when I spin reggae at our local diner, I see more and more people getting turned on to the music-from hippie kids
who grew up exposed to the Dead and Phish, to older folks rediscovering how powerful reggae can be. On urban radio, I hear
more straight dancehall records getting airplay during hip-hop shows. Perhaps in a few years, record shelves across America will be
blessed with more than that single copy of Legend; they'll be loaded down with discs by the Meditations, Max Romeo, Sizzla,
Capleton, Jacob Miller, and others-the music that Marley himself loved and worked so hard to advance.
Virginia-based Lem Oppenheimer co-founded the reggae label, Easy Star Records.
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