Talk:List of reggae genres
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"The term "Reggae" is, in a proper sense, only supposed to cover the period in Jamaican music from 1969 to 1979 or 1985 (depending on how you look at it). However, in today's vernacular the term has come to refer to all Jamaican music from the development of Ska in the early sixties up until today. Rather than create a more confusing "List of Genres of Jamaican music but not R&B or Mento" article it is therefore pertinent to keep everything under the Reggae name whether it warrants it or not.
Reggae, being predominantly confined to a small island, tends not to have too many different genres flourishing at once. Rather than in alphabetical order, therefore, the genres are presented roughly chronologically." From original article.
Personaly, I am very uncomfortable with calling all modern Jamaican music 'Reggae'. I don't agree that "in today's vernacular the term has come to refer to all Jamaican music from the development of Ska in the early sixties up until today".
Jamaican music has gone through a very fluid progression of styles since the 50's, of which Reggae is ONE style. One would never sub-catagorise Ska (for example) as Reggae, and neither Dancehall or Raga. I feel the term 'Jamaican Music' is both more descriptive and less confusing. Mento would come under Jamaican folk music, and R&B isn't Jamaican music at all.
In general, I find the use of one specific genre to describe a wider range of related but seperate genres (see the confusion some people have with techno music) is confusing and incorrect.
I would like to rename this article to "List of genres of Jamaican music" and include Mento. Does anyone have any thoughts before I do? --AudioPervert 14th December 2004
- I'd like to at least attempt to defend my original decision to consider Reggae as both an overall descriptor and specific genre in this article.
- What should be an important consideration here is that what we're refering to is a significant *subset* of Jamaican music, not all of it. Namely, the continuously connected working class popular music styles that have dominated the islands musical output, but not constituted all of it. Tourist steel bands, jazz orchestras, folk songs, classical readings... Excepting the naming issue, which I admit is problematic, it'd be a bit like calling the history of rock that of American music.
- (AudioPervert's assertion that "R&B isn't jamaican music at all" is, to my mind, rather strange - it may have originated outside the island but significant amounts of it has been recorded there, significantly different from the original genre. Jamaican R&B at least as different from its American counterpart as house is from techno, to carry on that analogy. Same with other borrowed genres - is west coast hip-hop not west coast music?)
- A second advantage to keeping the reggae name over Jamaican music is the theoretically possible expansion of the article to cover non-jamaican reggae forms (such as two-tone, african reggae, etc.) and mixed forms (seggae, reggaeton, dub house, whatever) which the nation-specific term would exclude.
- Then of course there's the issue of recognisability, and common use. I'd assert that even most reggae fans would consider the inclusion of ska in a reggae discussion to be no great abberation. Admittedly they probably wouldn't say it *was* reggae, but the inclusion of ska and dancehall in a reggae book, thread, page, etc. surely wouldn't surprise them. There's no problem of clarity here - people should be perfectly able to predict what this is about, and certainly to the general public ska *is* reggae. The iconography, language and style of reggae is so closely associated with the general public's preception of what jamaican music is that it has come to represent all of it. The same can certainly not be said about techno.
- Reggae as a term is recognisable, brief, distinct, reasonably descriptive and fitting well with the style of other generalised genre descriptors. It's also, technically, false, but I think the other considerations should carry preference. Birdseed 10:37, 2005 Mar 2 (UTC)
