Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. She even said, Yaman, right before we started recording, because this is Stuff You Should Know, Rege edition.

**Chuck** (0:22)
That's right. And here's the little thing you probably didn't even notice, my friend, is we always clap on the count of 3 when we go to record, so we can sync our sound. Here's a little behind the scenes for you, everybody.

**Josh** (0:36)
Sure.

**Chuck** (0:37)
But I clapped on the 4

**Josh** (0:40)
Did you?

**Chuck** (0:42)
Just, you know, make it super reggae.

**Josh** (0:45)
That was pretty great. Yeah, because, so what you were doing was skanging.

**Chuck** (0:51)
That's right.

**Josh** (0:52)
And skang is slang for gun in Kingston. Yeah. And Kingston in Jamaica is the world capital of reggae. It's where I was born. It's one of those things where you're like, well, where'd jazz come from? Where blues come from? Well, it came from here, here. No, reggae 100% came from Kingston, Jamaica, and it was built from all this other stuff, all these other influences, but there is no question where it actually emerged, and that was Kingston.

**Chuck** (1:21)
Yeah, for sure. I was playing golf yesterday with my friend Justin, who you know.

**Josh** (1:28)
Justin from Trenchtown?

**Chuck** (1:29)
Justin from London, which will also play a part, but he asked what we were recording on today, and I told him reggae. And he was like, did you know that reggae is fairly new?
And I said, he was like, I always thought it was like in the 40s and 50s. He was like, but true reggae was like the late 60s.

**Josh** (1:50)
You make Justin sound like a real milk toast. I can tell everybody that is not what Justin sounds like.

**Chuck** (1:57)
Yeah, but that was, you know, that's true. And we'll get to all that and the timeline and everything. But yeah, reggae is a, I mean, on the general timeline of music history, it's a pretty new form.

**Josh** (2:06)
Yeah, almost just a little over 50-ish years old?

**Chuck** (2:12)
Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm 55 I was born in 71, so you do the math.

**Josh** (2:18)
You're the expert. No, I'm not doing the math. Yeah, I think 1968 tends to be like the year that people pretty much put their finger on when reggae was born.
But let's talk about all this. Let's get to the beginning, I guess, okay?

**Chuck** (2:34)
Yeah, which means we've got to talk about Jamaica as a place, right?

**Josh** (2:38)
Yeah, because one of the things about reggae, Livia helps us with this, so hat to Livia.
One of the things about Jamaica and reggae is that they're like a melange of different people and cultures who are all brought together, a significant number of them against their will, and all formed this society where it was all mixed together. One of the things that emerged was a real appreciation of music and folk music. That kind of developed, and it was very unique because Jamaica is unique. I mean, every Caribbean island is unique, even though they have similar histories, they all just, they form different melanges in different ways.

**Chuck** (3:22)
Yeah, different melanges because you have indigenous people. And then in the case of, well, most of them you had people from Africa brought over in the slave trade. So in this case in Jamaica, that combined with like African work songs and the European musical influence that was there at the time, they mixed together. And in the 40s and 50s, the first thing we got as sort of a predecessor to reggae was called Mento.

**Josh** (3:52)
Maybe that's what Justin was talking about.

**Chuck** (3:55)
No, he's talking about Mento, the Freshment.
Capital M-E-N-T-O, which is sort of like if you heard it, it might sound a little bit like Calypso out of Trinidad. It's got banjo and like guitar. It's got something called a rumba box, which is like a percussive thing with pluck steel tines. So Mento was kind of the earliest predecessor. And then in the 50s, I guess the late 50s and early 60s, because that was the 40s and 50s, American R&B on the radio, which also came from African and European influences, obviously, that produced what became the more direct predecessor to reggae, which was ska.

**Josh** (4:37)
Yeah. That's when things took a really dark turn.

**Chuck** (4:42)
Oh, man, ska.
I like all this stuff. I guess we'll talk a little bit about like our affinity for it. But it's not the kind of thing I listen to like all the time. But I have my moments where I will put on like, for an entire morning, I will listen to like old, like 50s and 60s ska and like super early reggae. I like the early, early stuff.