Jamaican producers and record collectors adopted the fetish of making and collecting rare reggae covers of popular RnB songs. However, the amalgamation of the three genres became its own subculture. Beres Hammond’s 1976 album “ Soul, Reggae and More ”, helped to showcase soul, R&B and reggae in Jamaica at the time in an audible mirror of styles. With soul and R&B invading the keen ears of talented Jamaican musicians, R&B engaged reggae at the forefront of the island’s pop music. Inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Bell produced music for The Delfonics, The Spinners, Elton John, and a plethora of other artists and bands who were familiar voices on Jamaican sound systems and radio waves. Jamaicans were also present at the source of this music in Philadelphia, represented by Thom Bell, an instrumental figure in the Philadelphia Soul powerhouse of Gamble and Huff, who was born in Kingston. A close geographic and new immigration relationship allowed for a faster, easier exchange of music than with the U.K. In 1965, Britain restricted immigration from its former Black colonies, while America opened its doors. In the mid-1960’s, American music began to gain traction in Jamaica, eclipsing music from England, which Jamaica had recently gained independence from. Prior to such current-event narratives and outlets for the microcosms of Jamaican culture, the island’s music had an intimate relationship with American soul and rhythm and blues. It would be extremely naive to say none of the musicians at the time were not personally involved in this business in some capacity or that the lyrics were just the work of clever imagination. The hustler represented a ‘noble profession,’ the lyrics often depicting his transporting and delivering the ganja to lawyers, doctors and police officers, playing the role of a hero of sorts. Notably, the narrative of these songs seldom, if ever, represented the position of the financier, almost always focusing on a protagonist in abject poverty forced to traffic marijuana. Reggae music legends such as Eek-A-Mouse, John Holt and Sugar Minott all had ganja smuggling anthems. Marijuana, already synonymous with Jamaica since the earliest days of Rastafarians in music, was represented more broadly, eclipsing the prominence of cocaine smuggling, whose use was - and still is - publicly frowned upon in Jamaica. In its heyday, Jamaican reggae music engaged with the smuggling culture, highlighting this ‘ hustling ’ in both the lyrics of songs and sometimes even the demeanour of the artists.
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It was a very lucrative business, with marijuana and cocaine the choice products, and multiple jobs needing to be filled, allowing those with access to, as Jamaicans put it, “eat a food.” Financiers of the operations made the most money, but rural farmers and packers of the product, warehousers, drivers, shippers, ‘mules’, and a whole host of bribed officials in organisation’s supply chain also profited.
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Though maybe not where they are flourishing now.īack in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, the illegal trade of choice in the Jamaican underworld was drug smuggling. It’s in the cyclical way that the island’s great music industry and criminal elements deal with American culture - taking what they need and remaking for self - and in the alternative economies, literal and cultural, that have always flourished in JA. Though, of course, there are musical, historical and cultural antecedents of how the Jamaican trap dancehall sound and this chop lifestyle came about. Operating on the fringes of tradition, both musically and geographically, trap dancehall is the sound of now, carving its own place in history.
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This is not the music of “darling, I will swim the deepest sea and climb the highest mountain,” but depictions of the scamming underbelly of rural townships, and of the tenets and effects of Choppa culture. Where reggae in Jamaica continues to have the edge in performance, branding and experience, the young trap dancehall patriots come with a personal truth, community representation, and a message that does not portray Jamaica in the best light. The new generation has come armed with trap music, their own ideals and their own lifestyle to now create a sound that honestly represents a true island culture, with an intimacy not seen in Jamaica in recent years. The fraternal order of Jamaican musical genres, forever dictated from Kingston, has had to purposely turn a blind eye to allow the young firebrands to self govern. The era of the Bro god is upon us and the harbingers of its grimy culture come from an unexpected place on Jamaica’s musical map: Montego Bay.