I think this is exactly it. As you and several others have noted, Reggae’s never really had much of a marketing push behind it in the States. I’d say that, more than anything, is why it’s so unknown and marginalized to the “average listener.”
I don’t know much about reggae, but it seems to me that, as someone upthread noted, it’s always been treated as something of a novelty. Pleasant background music, and little more. Bob Marley is widely recognized by the music-literate as a prominent figure, and his socio-political impact is pretty well-known, giving him a kind of brand recognition.
But most artists don’t enjoy such a benefit, and without a more concerted effort on the part of record companies to establish an artist as an easily-identifiable personality, it prevents the music scene from truly penetrating the mainstream pop-culture conciousness. I don’t think I’m telling you all anything you didn’t already know when I state that the success of music acts in the US over the past 50 years or so has largely been associated with people’s ability to associate the music or even the entire style to a particular band or performer, someone for listeners to identify with or try to emulate.
This is why teen-idol singers are a recurrent fad, and why people like Madonna and Michael Jackson have such power and influence (as they once did). Granted, those last two examples are both legitimately talented individuals, but it was their ability to market themselves and put a face on their music that really made them cultural icons. Reggae’s overlooked and it’s artists are relatively unknown because of a failure to create that kind of identity.
I’ve said this a few times before, but I don’t understand why classic rock stations avoid reggae. The Wailers’ peak years are well within the time frame of what they play, it should appeal to the same audience, and Exodus has as many radio-worthy songs as Dark Side of the Moon. Maybe they’re afraid of what will happen if they play Legalize It.
They probably both appeal to the same younger audience, but reggae does not appeal to the people who were young when what is now called classic rock was new. At least none that I’ve ever met. My dad saw Bob Marley and the Wailers open up for the Rolling Stones somewhere around 1980 and he said the crowd was not into them at all.
I think reggae is: too laid back, too religious, too strongly associated with drugs, and at this point too old to ever gain a mainstream foothold. If someone or some group were to ever reinvent the genre such that it rose significantly in popularity, I think it would have to be so different that it would be called something else. Like reggaeton or third wave ska. But not reggaeton or third wave ska.
Regular classic rock? No. But the local classic rock stations play stuff that came out long after- they’ll play stuff from the '80s and ‘90s. Stuff that’s significantly newer than any of the Wailers’ material. I see a lot of younger people at ‘classic rock’ shows (I’m 24 and I’ve seen the Allman Brothers 40-some odd times, and I’m certainly not the youngest one at the shows anymore), so who knows. Reggae is probably biggest these days among 50-year-olds and the college crowd who also got into Sublime.
Good points there, although I don’t know if the popular Wailers songs are any more laid back than some of the entries the radio will play from the Eagles or Rolling Stones or many other artists. I’m not talking about revitalizing reggae as much as wondering why they don’t play the stuff everybody already knows. Playing the stuff everybody knows, over and over, is the one thing classic rock radio is good at!
Ironically, I bet most people would not be able to name a raggae-rock or reggae-punk or reggae-dance act besides 311, Sublime and Sean Paul either.
I’ll take Toots and the Maytals over Bob Marley any day…but Id’ take Lee “Scratch”
Perry over any of them.
You can’t really compare reggae to the other music you mentioned. Pop, rock, country, and hip-hop have much larger sales (at least 10% of CD sales) while even under the broadest definition reggae probably has 1% of the market. It should really be compared to world music or gospel. Outside of Ravi Shankar, how many people can name a single world music performer? Or any gospel, CCM, post-swing jazz, or modern classical composers? Plus, the success of Sean Paul, Shaggy, etc. means a lot of younger people would be able to name reggae performers. To claim they don’t count because they don’t sound like classic reggae would be like claiming modern country singers don’t count because they don’t sound like traditional country music.
Me. I laughed my ass off when I found out that in the US Prince gets filed under “R&B” (which doesn’t seem to mean so much a kind of music as it seems to mean “anything done by blacks, until we came up with rap and with the occasional jazz exception”)… we’d seen him at a RB concert in Barcelona years before and wondered what was he doing there.
The whole American music classification is pretty much in Chinese, to me. Pronounced by a Greek with a lisp.
Everyone ALWAYS forgets Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Mak’er” from March, 1973 on the album “Houses of the Holy”. Man, that song was pure reggae, and it was an original to boot, written and arranged entirely by Zeppelin way before Marley became big news. The very title of the song (say it real fast) entirely betrays where Zeppelin got their influence from, but I find it ironic that the most iconic hard rock band in history can lay claim to writing one of the earliest reggae songs of all time, and a damn fine one too!
1.) The song isn’t even close to “pure” reggae.
2.) It came out only two years before Marley became “big news.”
3.) It’s not even close to one of the “earliest” reggae songs.
What next? Led Zeppelin invented the blues? I’m going to bed before my head explodes.
I’ll second that. It seems much of the music I like does not neatly fit into an established genre. Where, for instance, do you put Tom Waits? :dubious:
:dubious: What exactly do you mean? I always thought the song title meant “You don’t have to go [to your maker]” - in other words, you don’t have to die (or commit suicide.) I came to that conclusion on my own in the 7th grade and I haven’t re-examined it since then so I hope I don’t get laughed out of the thread if I’m way off base.
It supposedly sounds like “jamaica”.
That’s how I always understood it.
I don’t think it’s much of a reggae song, even though I like it.
According to Wikipedia:
"The name of the song is derived from a play on the words “Jamaica” and “Did you make her”, based on the following old joke: “My wife’s on vacation in the West Indies.” “Jamaica?” “No, she went of her own accord.” "
Judging from the lyrics, it just seems to be a dumb song about some guys girlfriend breaking up with him with a Dear John letter.
As long as we’re throwing out reggae-ish mainstream pop tunes, it’s more helpful to look at Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” and Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” as examples of popular tunes that helped introduce the international public to reggae music. Both were released in 1972, both were big hits, and both are much closer to real reggae than Led Zeppelin’s plodding oddity. The former even features the Wailers as the backing band.
How about Christian reggae? Avion Blackman and Christafari are pretty good.
WARNING- second link has sound…
Back in the day this was the standard introduction to the history of reggae (up to that point). It’s outdated now, but it gives you some idea of what a lot of reggae fans thought about the genre in 1976. If the OP were correct, this book would simply be a biography of Bob Marley.
I’ve been meaning to start a thread about mis-categorized musicians. Prince can actually be correctly placed in both R&B* and rock genres, depending on what song you’re listening to, but I think he’s much more the latter than the former. “America”, “Fury”, “When Doves Cry” are examples of pure rock songs, featuring guitar solos and everything. Too bad the rock stations (new or classic) won’t play them!
Besides the race thing, I think the splitters get confused when they hear all the synth. Plus, his music makes you want to dance. Apparently rock music and dancing don’t go hand in hand. I await the day Depeche Mode or New Order get played on the classic rock station, but I won’t hold my breath.
*Although it has been historically used to mean “black music”, R&B is an umbrella term for distinctive subgenres such as soul and funk. As Prince is definitely both soulful and funky, I don’t think he’s misplaced in the R&B category.
Yeah, he pretty much INVENTED it, and then before hardly any “influencees” (Tosh notwithstanding)/copycats had a chance to come along, he died.
Since then, the genre has basically split in two:
The groups you don’t want us to mention are now classified as “Roots Reggae”. I think Steel Pulse and Luciano (side story: My wife and I met him and his band on a plane in first class on an Air Jamaica flight from Kingston to Chicago, and they were awesomely cool and were happy to sign his tape, that a Jamaican friend had just given us… we then went to see him at House of Blues and were slightly taken aback at how religious the whole show was) are prime examples.
The other segment is Dance Hall, which isn’t technically reggae any more. More Americanized rap ghetto style IMHO.
So, to clarify, I think the reason the genre is so “Bob Marley top heavy” is that reggae split into the heavily religious “roots reggae”, and the somewhat violent angry “dancehall”.
Why this happened, I can’t answer, but I can offer the opinion that perhaps the political turmoil in Jamaica split the population into two groups: “Let’s all smoke a spliff, worship Ja, and all get along”, and “Fuck this noise, Revolution!”.