For a recent lecture, Managing Editor John Vilanova put together a performance of a new style of academic presentation titled “critical karaoke.” The premise—first introduced by Joshua Clover at Seattle’s Experience Music Project POP Conference—was simple: talk about a song for the length of the song while it plays behind you. This multimedia experience could allow for a more dynamic presentation
The format has expanded as the practice has grown in popularity. Rather than follow one song, John’s presentation follows one reggae riddim, or instrumental backing track, through its uses in Jamaican popular culture and musics spanning a 40-year period.
To fully experience this, you should press play on the embedded video while you (or a colleague) reads the below text aloud. It’s collaborative and fun! They should map fairly closely to each other. Either way, the mixed form is a still-new and exciting way to pursue musical scholarship.
The year is 1978. Bob Marley has just released Exodus, which includes hits that would be known the world over like “Jammin’” and “One Love.” It would stay on the British charts for more than a year, a massive success. Back in Marley’s home country of Jamaica, acts like Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, and the Abyssinians are emerging in a lively ecosystem of reggae. Boosted by a combination of international capital from Island Records and a flourishing community of indigenous recording studios in Kingston, reggae is finding its footing.
That year also marks the release of Rockers, the second of two major films depicting this cultural moment in Jamaica. The first, The Harder They Come, launched the career of Jimmy Cliff. In these films, the characters spoke patois, the story was Jamaican, and thee music was Jamaican, featuring many of the up-and-coming artists of the time, including Third World, Bunny Wailer, and this man, Jacob Miller.
Jacob Miller, like so many others at the dawn of Jamaican independence in 1962, moved to Kingston and discovered a nascent music scene. At the age of thirteen, he recorded his first song, at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One, the most notable studio in Jamaica. Miller paired up with a band, Inner Circle, and recorded this sing, “Tenement Yard.” It has a simple but interesting message—its refrain, “Dreadlocks can’t live in a Tenement Yard”—speaks to the anti-Rastafari sentiment in the nation and the conflicts that arose between Rastafari ideals and the government-sponsored public housing built in areas like Trench Town, where a young Bob Marley was raised. In this scene from Rockers, we see the song’s sunny critique masking its politics. There’s dancers; it’s a fancy restaurant; some diners miss the memo.
This backing track—that should be drilling itself into your heads at this point—is what’s known as a Riddim in Jamaican culture. Riddim is more than the Patois pronunciation of rhythm. In musics of the Caribbean—calypso, soca, dancehall, reggaeton, dub, ragga, bouyon, and of course reggae—a riddim is the instrumental accompaniment to a song. Often, a repeated up-stroked guitar chord on the off-beats (2 and 4) is doubled by the piano and accompanied by a walking bass line. Riddims were recorded instrumentally with studio bands at places like Studio One.
Riddims helped many early-career singers during the Jamaican music industry boon—they would record new lyrics over preexisting riddims to save money (on studio players). Riddims are used interchangeably, with new singers and new lyrics over recurring riddims recorded years or decades prior. Many riddims recorded at Studio One by the legendary producer Dodd in the 1960s remain popular and in-use in various circles, including “Real Rock,” “I’ll Never Let Go,” and “Hot Milk.” Notably, though not for our purposes,“Sleng Teng,” one of the first fully computerized riddims, is said to have helped launch dancehall. While no direct connection has been made, it’s not unfair to speculate a connection between this and the use of the hip-hop beat, especially given the origins of hip-hop, blasting out of DJ Kool Herc’s mobile sound system speaker array in the Bronx. The recordings you hear now all utilize the Tenement Yard Riddim.
We see many riddims utilized by contemporary artists who are part of a loose collective called the Reggae Revival. Jah 9’s “Steamers a Bubble” utilizes the 1982 Roots Radics “Apartment” riddim. Protoje’s “Resist Not Evil” uses a riddim called Militancy Riddim. Kaya Digital, citing a frustration with the growing popularity of foreign reggae, created a riddim called “Rasta Riddim,” whose purpose was to give Jamaican artists a backing track that came from the island itself. And of course, Chronixx, the revival’s most popular artist, took up Tenement Yard for his 2015 release, “News Carrying Dread.”
Part of the Reggae Revival’s significance involves a caution towards the digital—emphasizing full, live bands means wider participation and opportunity for local artists as well as what we might call a critique of technological advancement. Boys can’t play sports together, families can’t dine together, and date night is kind of boring if everyone’s too preoccupied with their smartphones. And musicians are better served playing together than singularly.
That’s where Chronixx comes in, picking up the Tenement Yard riddim and portraying more communal scenes. Chronixx is using the old riddim, but he makes sure to bring his elders—Inner Circle, who recorded the original riddim—along with him. So even though the sample sounds old—I don’t believe it was re-recorded—the video still looks to emphasize the collective experience of what Christopher Small calls “musicking.” “A lot of live music was happening because of the bands,” he told Vogue in 2015, talking about the beginnings of the Reggae Revival. “Whenever there’s a lot of solo acts in the music, then live music is not as vibrant. But when there are a lot of bands, then you find that, you know?”
This emphasis on collectivity extended beyond the band and into how Chronixx saw the industrial arrangement of working musicians in contemporary Jamaica. Playing together, he said “It was more a more holistic approach, where it was more centered around the music. We tried to make holistic music, even on our computers, you know? But whenever we performed, we wanted real guitars, real drums, real…everything.”
Additionally, this video is a kind of meta-performance of what a riddim does—it unites the musical past and present. “All of this kind of happened already in the Seventies,” he says, speaking to an American interviewer about the Revival moment. “You coming to interview me…It happened already in the Seventies. You know what I mean? It’s just like…kind of a relapse. Like us reliving these things.”
He continues: “Here Comes Trouble,” you know what I mean…Ini Kamoze…”Here Comes the Hotstepper.” And it’s his bass line…the whole rhythm is his. Protoje says, “Kingston Be Wise;” Ini Kamoze said “England Be Nice.” Protoje said “Where Can I Find My Black Cinderella?” Damian Marley said “Welcome to Jamrock.” It’s same…Ini Kamoze again.
“So what’s new, then? I don’t glorify new-ness. And what people call “originality.” I don’t glorify in that. I glorify in continuity. Progress. Because progress don’t mean new. And continuity don’t mean new.”
What riddims show us is that what is new is ALSO old. And in the case of Jamaica, that means wrestling with a long colonial history where the problems of the past are the problems of the present—namely a music industry where it is still too hard to profit from your cultural production, especially in Jamaica, where the only real way to make a living with music is to cross over into the global economy; where the problems of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment leave the island’s urban poor facing long odds for progress; and where the legacy of white supremacy looms large in the day-to-day lives of black Jamaicans.
Chronixx’s suggestion in the song is not that far from Miller’s—that by speaking out, he has created problems for himself. Carrying dreads and living in a tenement yard was a personal instantiation of a systemic problem before; in a similar way now, Chronixx finds himself against modern technology, speaking out even though doing so will put him against the system.
Using the riddim as our sonic connector, the past and the present coexist in the cultural context of Jamaican music. What that context is deserves further study.
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