Kingston, Jamaica, serves as the epicenter for a community of creative and music industry professionals dedicated to fostering creative industrial development and social progress. This article delves into the cultural productions of a group of politically conscious reggae musicians and music industry professionals largely based in Kingston, Jamaica.
This article historicizes and contextualizes one group, Manifesto Jamaica, and situates its work alongside close readings of new music written by political Jamaican artists organizing alongside Manifesto under the umbrella of the “Reggae Revival.”
Named the "Reggae Revival" by Jamaican intellectual and participant Gavin “Dutty Bookman” Hutchinson, the group coalesced around a combination of interrelated forces: a shared experience of perceived global consciousness-raising among members of the African diaspora; a connection to other movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring; a desire to create empowerment programming for urban Kingston youth; and a commitment to issues of social justice, broadly organized around addressing the historically White supremacist structures of globally unequal systems, or what their forebear Bob Marley called a “Babylon System."
The combination of these forces, along with the island’s already rich musical history, created a cultural space for the popularization of a return to conscious roots reggae recalling the genre’s political and popular apotheosis in the 1970s, complete with live bands and lyrical themes that ran contra to much of the dancehall music that had taken the lead in Jamaican music at the turn of the 21st century.
This new group of artists-headlined by musicians such as Chronixx, Protoje, Kabaka Pyramid, and Jah9 and supported by a group of intellectuals known as Manifesto Jamaica-is once more sharing a progressive political message using the past as present rather than mere prologue. Jamaica’s reggae past lives in the musical culture of its present.
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The mission of such groups as the Reggae Revival is sustaining and nurturing Black diasporic consciousness in the face of disadvantage birthed by the historical conjuncture of colonialism and its ongoing aftereffects. It is an article about how the musical and ideological histories of the past reverberate across time and space.
This project asks a series of research questions to explore the historical past’s influence on cultural production in the present. How is the Reggae Revival inflected by larger histories-of race, diasporization, colonialism-and by the golden age of reggae? Where did the renewal come from? How do the musicians of the present relate to the past and to each other? And what do the creative industries workers of the Reggae Revival see as their broader social goals?
In addition to its historical work, telling the story of the Reggae Revival’s rise, this article makes two interlocking claims about the Revival and its musical and intellectual expression.
First, collective development is central to the Reggae Revival’s ethos, and the specific idea of collectivity extends historically and diasporically, expanding the bounds of how collectivity might be understood. Revival members evoke the Rastafari concept of livity, or the life force flowing through all living things. The music and politics of the Reggae Revival suggest what we might call a kind of musical livity, or a oneness throughout their musical expression. This article explores what that means and why it is an important ideological and identity-based formation for Afro-diasporic citizenship.
Second, and closely attuned to livity, a pattern that emerges among the artists and intellectuals of the movement illustrates a complication of linear time and history. By that, this work suggests that the past is never far from the present in the cultural output of the Reggae Revival, and the Revival’s cultural production unites the 1970s with the contemporary moment. This kind of teleological collapse-also grounded at least in part in Rastafari-does political work.
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The artists suggest that they too are neocolonial diasporic subjects and that the slavery-era past continues to impact their position today. The artists turn backward so often because the colonial past is never far from their epistemological and ontological present. And their vision of the contemporary collective makes space for events, sounds, and people of the past.
The groups’ media are characterized by two themes: (1) a cross-textual referencing practice connected to the Rastafari folk religion’s concept of livity, or collectivity; and (2) an intentional troubling of temporal order, which connects the politics and people of the 1970s reggae golden age to today through the use of riddims, or backing tracks. Together, Manifesto Jamaica and the Reggae Revival represent creative industries development and cultural production in a specific neocolonial and Afro-diasporic global context that is worthy of study for its connection to previous histories and its impact today.
A Brief Contextual History of Jamaica
First, we should briefly contextualize the big-picture terms-colonialism, global White supremacy, Babylon-that the artists of the Revival (and this article) are attempting to address. By the early 20th century, a printer’s apprentice named Marcus Mosiah Garvey had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which elaborated the concept of pan-Africanism, suggesting that the slave trade had created a shared ideology among Black people globally and that this common ground should be a place of solidarity for the oppressed and their progeny. Garvey advocated for a return to the African continent and a global Black nationalism that would develop educational, financial, and mercantile institutions independent from the system that had created Blacks’ subjugation.
The island’s indigenous Arawak population was colonized by Columbus and the Spaniards in the late 15th century; they held the island until 1655, when English troops took the island and ignited the Anglo-Spanish War. Seizing on the turmoil, many African slaves brought to the island by the Spanish used this moment to break free, uniting with the remaining Arawaks and setting up Maroon communities in the island’s mountains. It is to these communities that many Jamaican’s music-making and cultural practice can be traced.
By the mid-20th century, Jamaica was transitioning to national independence, with the founding of its two major political parties, the conservative Jamaica Labor Party and the democratic socialist People’s National Party. A ceremonial flag-raising ceremony was held on August 6, 1962. The new nation would join the International Monetary Fund one year later and become subject to structural adjustment and austerity measures dictated by their international benefactors. Around this time, thousands of poor farmers from the island’s rural interior began to move into its cities; the population of Kingston swelled with tens of thousands of new migrants looking for work and housing, including a young Bob Marley.
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Although musical genres of the Caribbean are syncretic, Trench Town is identified as the birthplace of reggae, which drew its roots from ska, rocksteady, and other indigenous musics. It was in this setting where Marley learned to play guitar, composed songs such as “No Woman, No Cry,” and founded his group The Wailers. He was also taught Rastafari, the Afrocentric religious practice popularized in the wake of Garvey’s principles.
Rastafari suggests a singular God figure (Jah) who resides in every living being on earth; by virtue of that, all people (especially Afro-diasporic people) share an interconnectedness (i.e., livity). Rastafari suggests that Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I was Jah incarnate, creating a homeland for the Garveyites’ return in Africa. Perhaps most germane to Manifesto, it also argues that the White European nations are “Babylon,” a name drawn from the Biblical civilization that conquered the Hebrews and exiled them, creating the first major diasporization.
We should understand Rastafari as more than mere metaphor or academic-theoretical frame: When you connect the dots between slavery, colonialism, and contemporary structural adjustment and austerity policies put into place by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that have hamstrung the nation into the 21st century, sufferation remains for many on the island and self-determination is not realized in any deep and durable way.
Instead, the island’s complex neocolonial condition is manifest today in its television programming, copyright, street dance and dancehall space, and music and media-production technologies. The very foundations of the island’s modern media systems themselves have their roots in the island’s British imperial history. And the artists connect their subjectivity to a long history of Afro-diasporic creative work and political thought.
The Roots of the Revival
This was the context in which the Reggae Revival emerged in the early aughts, with a group of intellectuals and backline creative industries workers including managers, publicists, and community activists. According to my interviews with Revival cofounders Dutty Bookman, Lesley-Anne Welsh, and Kareece Lawrence, they sought to engage youth throughout Kingston in the arts.
Most of the founders met in high school and began working in the music business after graduation: Welsh as an assistant to the Marley family, Lawrence as an event planner, and Bookman as a tour guide at the Bob Marley Museum and organizer of the Ignite the Americas youth arts policy forum. Beginning with reasonings (a Rastafari term for sustained discussion) in 2009, the group, which also included Natalie Reid and Rita and Bob Marley’s granddaughter Donisha Prendergast, organized under the banner Manifesto Jamaica, a nongovernmental organization-style program to “educate, expose, and empower” Kingston’s urban youth through the arts.
They began to plan workshops, seminars, and healing activities, along with an annual Festival of ART’ical Empowerment. Creative practice and creative industries work, they said in their Indiegogo fundraising materials, could serve as “an agent of personal, community and national empowerment” (“Manifesto Jamaica: Educating, Exposing, & Empowering,” 2011, para. 1). The group began to cultivate international partnerships with a Canadian organization, Manifesto (there is a large Jamaican diasporic community in Toronto, Manifesto’s home city), and after less than a year, they had acquired sponsorship from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, a funding apparatus of the Canadian government that, under special circumstances, grants money to groups, like Manifesto, outside Canada. They also received some money from the Jamaican Social Development Commission to help sponsor the first festival.
The first event was held August 19, 2010, at Kingston’s Bookophilia bookstore and was covered in the city’s longstanding newspaper the Jamaica Gleaner (“ART’ical Provides Intimate Entertainment,” 2010). It began with a traditional Afro-diasporic ritual called libation, which traces its roots to West African Igbo and Akan culture. Practitioners frame this gesture as a ritual of heritage in which the performance practice connects the actor to their ancestors-in spirit if not explicitly in the form of religious transubstantiation.
Poetry readings and musical performances from local artists followed. Meanwhile, artists also gathered at Jamnesia, a surf camp and performing arts space 10 miles east of Kingston, for weekly jam sessions on Saturday evenings. Jamnesia’s full array of instruments for the musicians to use helped foster the live-band emphasis that would continue as the Revival grew. Their events began to receive extensive coverage and near-universal praise in the Gleaner (Beckford, 2010; Cooke, 2010; Hansen, 2010; Henry, 2010; “Manifesto Jamaica Receives,” 2010; “Women Fuse Sight, Sound,” 2010; and more). Moved by the broad agenda and programming, including more performances, art demonstrations, vocational film training, and other arts-based events that supported the narrative of Jamaica’s musical and creative significance, Kingston began to take notice.
Other events quickly followed, including a weekly radio show on Kingston’s Roots FM. The performers involved included those who went on to become a who’s who of Reggae Revival musicians. Protoje (then still known as Oje, his birth name) and Jah9 (née Janine Cunningham) headlined the August 27, 2010, Roots Rock event; Kabaka Pyramid performed on September 10.
“Empowerment” appears throughout the Revival’s cultural production and is something of a vague goal. Thus, writing about the early cultural work of the Manifesto group means engaging with some of these abstractions.
Key figures of the Reggae Revival movement, including Chronixx, Protoje, Kabaka Pyramid, and Jah9.
Here's a table summarizing the key figures and their roles in the Reggae Revival movement:
| Key Figure | Role | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Chronixx | Musician | Progressive political messages through music |
| Protoje | Musician | Headlined early Reggae Revival events |
| Kabaka Pyramid | Musician | Performed at key Reggae Revival events |
| Jah9 | Musician | Headlined early Reggae Revival events |
| Manifesto Jamaica | Intellectual Group | Supported artists and promoted creative industries |
Reggae Music - A Brief History
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