 label, was the first one to capitalize on the idea: he began releasing singles with two sides: the original song and, on the back, the instrumental remix. This phenomenon elevated the status of dozens of recording engineers.
Reggae music was mainly popularized by Bob Marley (1), first as the co-leader of the Wailers, the band that promoted the image of the urban guerrilla with Rude Boy (1966) and that cut the first album of reggae music, Best Of The Wailers (1970); and later as the political and religious (rasta) guru of the movement, a stance that would transform him into a star, particularly after his conversion to pop-soul melody with ballads such as Stir It Up (1972), I Shot The Sheriff (1973) and No Woman No Cry (1974).
Among the reggae vocal groups, the Abyssinians' Satta Massa Gana (1971) is representative of the mood of the era.
In 1972 reggae became a staple of western radio stations thanks to
the film The Harder They Come.
More and more studio engineers were re-mixing B-sides of reggae 45 RPM singles, dropping out the vocals and emphasizing the instrumental texture of the song. The purpose was to allow disc-jockeys to "toast" over the record. Engineers became more and more skilled at refining the instrumental textures, especially when they began to employ sophisticated studio devices. Eventually, "dub" became an art on its own. The first dub singles appeared in 1971, but the man generally credited with "inventing" the genre is Osbourne Ruddock, better known as King Tubby (2), a recording engineer who in 1970 had accidentally discovered the appeal of stripping a song of its vocal track, and who engineered the first dub record, Carl Patterson's Psalm Of Dub (1971). When he got together with producer Lee "Scratch" Perry, Blackboard Jungle (1973) was born: the first stereo "dub" album. It was a Copernican revolution: the engineer and the producer had become more important than the composer. It also marked the terminal point of the "slowing down" of Jamaican music, a process that had led from ska to reggae to rock steady. Compared with the original, dub was like a slow-motion version. a collaboration with melodica player Augustus Pablo led to another seminal work, King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1976).
Rainford Hugh Perry, better known as Lee "Scratch" Perry (3), who had nursed the Wailers, pretty much set the reference standard for generations to come with Double Seven (1974), the first reggae album that overdubbed synthesizers, Revolution Dub (1975) and Super Ape (1976), one of the genre's masterpieces.
Melodica virtuoso Augustus Pablo (2), aka Horace Swaby, penned the instrumental albums This Is Augustus Pablo (1973) and
East of the River Nile (1977), two of the most atmospheric works
of the genre.
"Rapping" originated from the complementary tradition of the "talk-over".
The disc-jockeys of the sound systems used to accompany the dance tracks
with impromptu melodic and spoken-word vocals, often simply to add enthusiasm
to the dance. This eventually became an art in itself.
U-Roy (Edwart Beckford) was possibly the first great
talk-over artist, the man who turned dub into a highly-effective vehicle
for agit-prop messages (Dynamic Fashion Way, 1969;
Runaway Girl, 1976;
Wake the Town, Wear You to the Ball).
Other pioneers of rapping were Dennis "Alcapone" Smith, with Forever Version (1971), Prince Jazzbo and I Roy.
Big Youth (Manley Buchanan) upped the ante with his wild sociopolitical raps
(S-90 Skank, 1972; The Killer, 1973; House Of Dread Locks,
1975; Every Nigger Is A Star, 1976), most effectively on
Dreadlocks Dread (1975).
Originally, the technique of these "toaster" consisted in
remixing other people's songs, removing the original vocals, emphasizing
the rhythmic base, and overdubbing their own rhyming stories on the resulting
As reggae became a world attraction, styles multiplied and inbred with the American genres.
Burning Spear (1), the project of Rastafarian visionary Winston Rodney, unleashed the supercharged Marcus Garvey (1976), perhaps the highest artistic achievements of reggae music.
Joseph Hill's 