One Love

Torah toaster: Hasidic reggae singer Matisyahu performs at the 2005 mtvU Woodie Awards in New York. Photo Scott Gries/Getty Images.

A recent performance by Matisyahu at Toronto’s Lee Palace had all the hallmarks of a reggae show: references to Babylon, the smell of sensimilla and roots reggae’s trademark “one drop” rhythm. But when the performer jumped into the dancing crowd during an impromptu skank session and lost his hat amid the bouncing bodies, what was handed back to him was not a knit tam — the headgear favoured by most Rastafarians — but a yarmulke. “I feel like I’m in shul,” joked the guy in front of me.

Matisyahu (aka Brooklyn’s Mathew Miller), who sports a familiar Lubavitcher beard and tallit prayer shawl beneath his sweater, may be a self-described “Hasidic reggae superstar.” But he’s not the first to fuse Jewish and Jamaican music, much less the first foreigner to try his hand at the island nation’s hallmark sound. Everyone from Eric Clapton and the Clash to Snow and No Doubt has done it. In the past few months, we’ve seen reggae releases from such unlikely sources as Irish chanteuse Sinead O’Connor (Throw Down Your Arms) and Austin, Texas icon Willie Nelson (Countryman). Both were recorded with Jamaicans — legendary producers Sly & Robbie and members of Peter Tosh’s ex-band, respectively — but where O’Connor sticks to remakes, Nelson combines reggae-fied versions of his own songs with covers like Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come. Countryman reveals aesthetic connections between old country and roots reggae beyond Nelson’s well-known penchant for pot.

This was the year reggae broke — again. The Caribbean invasion that began in earnest a couple of summers ago turned into a full-blown occupation in 2005. Not only did we get record-breaking reggae albums from Damian Marley and Sean Paul, but old-schoolers Toots & the Maytals (credited with coining the term “reggae”) opened for the Rolling Stones, while Caribbean pop singer Rhianna stormed clubs with Pon De Replay.

This was also the year that reggaeton — a long-simmering genre that douses Jamaican rhythms with Latin spice — exploded from the barrios of Panama and Puerto Rico onto the dance floors and airwaves of North America and Europe. Having made its way into almost every corner of the globe, reggae has become more representative of “world music” than any other form.

Nowadays, there’s simply no such thing as purebred music — least of all reggae. In fact, thanks to a continuous back-and-forth conversation between Jamaica and rest of the world, reggae has become pop music’s lingua franca. Although foreign attempts at reggae are often dismissed as cultural appropriation, they only prove the music’s pliability.

Given Jamaica’s inherent internationalism — conquered by Columbus, retaken by the Brits, populated with slaves — it’s not surprising that mento, the country’s rural folk music, was a synthesis of African and European traditions. Jamaica’s urbanization in the early ’50s coincided with the rise of rhythm and blues in America. AM radio waves brought R&B over from Memphis, New Orleans and Miami and imported records fuelled Jamaica’s emerging open-air sound system parties.

When rock ’n’ roll split off from R&B in the later 1950s, Jamaicans initially formed their own bands to make up for the shortfall. But with Jamaica’s independence from Britain in the early ’60s, mento was absorbed into R&B, becoming ska, a horn-blasted dance music that provided the sound systems with a new staple. According to legend, the summer of 1967 was so hot in Jamaica, upbeat ska had to be slowed down; when combined with U.S. soul, the concoction became known as rocksteady, which then morphed into reggae. In the 1980s, it changed into harder-edged dancehall, which has made extensive use of beats — or “riddims,” in Jamaican patois — often built from foreign sources, most notably the Middle East and South Asia.

During this evolutionary process, reggae spread out beyond its shorelines as a result of the multicultural mosaic referenced in Jamaica’s national slogan, “Out of many, one people.” The country’s post-independence economic collapse also produced a reggae diaspora. In 1970s Britain, punks adopted ska and sparked a racially integrated second-wave music movement known as two-tone. In the ’80s, Jamaicans like Kool Herc brought DJ culture and “toasting” — a Jamaican tradition of chanting over instrumental, or “dub,” rhythms — to the Bronx, where it gave birth to hip hop. In the ’90s, British ravers adopted Jamaica’s sound-system aesthetic; dancehall later influenced drum ’n’ bass, garage and, upon mixing with hip hop, became Britain’s most recent musical innovation: grime. The studio-engineered instrumental esthetic first popularized by reggae has evolved into the remixes that now permeate pop, dance and rap.

Prodigal son: Damian Marley performs at the Roots, Rock, Reggae Tour 2004 in New York. Photo Frank Micelotta/Getty Images.

Marley broke first-week sales figures in the U.S., according to Billboard magazine. It wouldn’t last long. A week later, Billboard reported that Sean Paul, who marched into the mainstream back in 2002 with the six-million-selling Dutty Rock, moved 107,000 copies of his follow-up The Trinity. Paul is reportedly approaching a million worldwide.

Having been inundated with the same sellout accusations that haunt fellow international star Shaggy, Sean Paul — who spent part of his youth in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough — reasserted his Kingston cred by bragging that The Trinity “was all done right here in the Third World,” with Jamaican producers. “As much as the recent popularity of reggae music is a great thing,” he told the Jamaica Gleaner, “’nuff people worldwide have a misconception as to what real reggae and dancehall music sound like.”

Caribbean-Canadian rapper Kardinal Offishall — who collaborated with Sean Paul on the 2001 single Money Jane — is a product of all this cultural symbiosis. Though born in Scarborough, he spent every summer with relatives in Jamaica. From his first single, the Bob Marley-sampling Naughty Dread, to his new album Fire & Glory, Kardi’s music has deftly combined hip hop and dancehall, a fusion that becomes more mainstream by the day.

“I love my people, but sometimes they’re not the most rational,” he laughs. “They will talk about the purity of dancehall while wearing [50 Cent’s] G-Unit clothing.” Offishall points to the tradition of Jamaican covers of Western pop songs, which can be traced from mento to Elephant Man, whose last album interpolated Celine Dion’s I’m Alive and Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. One of the most popular riddims in recent years is based on the Cure’s Close To You and was produced by a German, no less.

“I think it’s dope,” says Offishall. “If anything, it’s just elevating the music to a whole different level, because maybe some people that don’t give an ‘F’ about reggae but check for Willie Nelson will look at the credits [on Nelson’s recent album] and be like, ‘Who the hell is Jimmy Cliff?’”

As reggae pushes further into the pop charts and influences more and more Westerners, purists will have to realize that reggae was meant to be adapted.

“All of these things is increasing the prestige of the genre,” offers Damian Marley. “We as people put music in a box [but] music is music and collaboration is another way of communicating. So it benefit everything. It benefit the island by exposing our culture to new people. It benefit reggae music.”

Acknowledging reggae’s globalized nature doesn’t dismiss the creativity flowing from Jamaica — which boasts, per capita, the most prolific music producers on the planet. It merely proves that no genre is an island.

Joshua Ostroff is a Toronto writer.

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