America's Misunderstanding of Reggae

Reggae music finds itself in an interesting position in the music world: It is both powerfully message-driven and keenly danceable.

One thing that will probably forever stand out in my mind from my conversation last week with The Meditations' frontman Ansel Cridland is our chat about Americans' misunderstanding of reggae music. When Cridland and his group first started playing clubs in America, the Jamaican-born vocalist felt frustrated, he said, because people heard reggae only as a groove and a happy soundtrack for rainbow-colored drinks.

In Europe, he said, people heard the words of strife and hunger and the call for peace and the Promised Land. Here, most people heard only that catchy xylophone sound and saw it as an excuse to tuck an umbrella in their daiquiri.

It's getting better, Cridland said, but it happens all the time. And it's not limited to reggae. Rock music, rap music, even funk and disco have made people move, but not always in the way the writers intended.

You see it all the time at political rallies. A candidate will stand on the podium and rail against drug use in middle American suburbs. Then he'll hop off the stage and shake voter hands to the tune of a band who loudly advocated marijuana, concentrating only on that one line about "survival" or "victory" or "celebration."

You see it in movies and on TV; you hear it on soccer moms' car stereos and I see it even in the album collections of my friends. Too often, people go straight to the primal rhythm of a song or the upbeat guitar lick and miss out on what the songsmith was trying to tell them.

Some songs are written for the sake of a dance; some songs are written with a message encoded in a danceable beat. But some songs, and much reggae music, is written to capture someone's attention before broadening their minds.

In those message songs, the rhythm is there to get into your core, to tap into that purer instinct that's in you from birth. The heavy guitar or beautiful violin stroke or deeply repetitive drum beat is designed to get inside you.

The hope, I think, is that once the song gets in your head, the message can be driven home. It's spiritual surgery, slice open your soul so the words of love or hope or anger or frustration can be implanted.

There's really no harm, I suppose, in listening to a song for the beat alone, aside from the disrespect to both the music and the musicians. Like Cridland said, "At least they be happy."

Maybe that's the reason the hippies never quite got over that very high mountain they were trying to climb: Too many people heard a lovely, folksy melody instead of a call to action

Justin A. Hinkley


The Reggae News Agency

www.riddimja.com