jahsteppa wrote:As Bob said, reggae is a music created by rasta people. And if you need to go further back, the ska and rocksteady is music create by RASTA people. All these old artists, the Tommy McCooks, Lloyd Knibbs et al they were all rasta people, Don Drummond etc. Just because the music they played may not have mention anything bout rasta does not make the music any less rasta.
We have to remember that most of the pioneers of this scene were the ghetto people, sufferers, Garveyites, therefore rRASTA!!
@kalcidis: Yeah that Horace Andy LP may not mention rasta anywhere in it, but the message is rasta. Horace Andy was an ardent follower of Rastafari from those times, 60's etc so its natural that the message he put across would be rasta, even if not totally obvious to the listener.
Haile I.
reggae was certainly not exclusively created by Rastas in any case - just because Bob Marley said it does not make it true. Lyn Taitt is the man most mentioned for creating rocksteady, he was not a Rasta. most of the musicians weren't, or else they wouldn't have been able to work most live dates at clubs and hotels that paid real money. the generalization of all the old musicians as Rastas doesn't hold water.
and while the musicians may have played the music, it was the business men that made it possible - otherwise, not one record could have been made. i'm not trying to take anything away from the importance of Rastafari in reggae, but the reality is if it were not for:
Syrian-Jamaicans (Ken Khouri, - arguably
the most important man in the industry)
Chinese-Jamaicans (Byron Lee, Leslie Kong, Vince "Randy"
Chin)
white Jamaicans (Edward Seaga, Chris Blackwell - like
them or not)
and even Australians (Graeme Goodall - Mr. Goody, the
father of Jamaican engineering)
without them, there's no way that Jamaican music could have become what it is today, no way on earth. i don't care if there were 10 or 100 Bob Marleys. and like it or not, without Chris Blackwell's promotion, Bob Marley could not have attained his level of popularity worldwide.
*Jamaicans* made the music, not just Rastas. if it were all Rasta, it would NEVER have attained the popularity that it did, sorry, that is just fact. for every Bob Marley you need a Bob Andy,Ken Boothe,John Holt or Ernie Smith to appeal to all. all of them had the vast majority of their hits before any conversion to Rasta.
the music industry in Jamaica was primarily a money making enterprise that fed a lot of people every week, and the majority of popular music was bought by regular Jamaicans who were not Rastas and didn't identify with it. little by little the stigma of Rasta went away and it became more accepted for the most part by the mid 70's.
has Rastafari made a big contribution to reggae? undoubtably. has it done so exclusively? no, and i really get tired of seeing things twisted.
i have my own biases about reggae being a Jamaican thing, i'm definitely a purist but i think UK lover's rock is reggae.
if you care to research without bias, you can see for yourself that it was the efforts of "out of many, one people"
and it's a mistake to equate all sufferers, Garveyites, and Rastas. plenty of very poor Jamaicans are devoted churchgoers. and not all Garveyites accepted Selassie's divinity - Garvey himself was critical about his lack of black identity, and Selassie was not very interested in the ideas of Garvey. they were not enemies, but not friends.
the men who were probably most responsible for the popularity of Rastafari were Leonard Howell (Pinnacle settlement) in the 30's, and later Mortimo Planno - he got the audience with Selassie that Garvey never did in 1961, and was the liason for Selassie's visit to JA in 1966.