WALK THE YEARS
1955 is quiet. 1973 catches fire. 1985 goes digital. 2026 is everywhere. Drag the year and hear it change.
MANY ROOTS · MANY ROUTES · ENDLESS VIBES
KINGSTON 1968 · THE WORLD SINCE
Reggae from Kingston, 1968, to every place it landed. Two hundred pages on the genres, artists, riddims, studios and scenes, with the years and the records that prove it.
1955 is quiet. 1973 catches fire. 1985 goes digital. 2026 is everywhere. Drag the year and hear it change.
Story, routes, places, spirit, riddims. Same music, five ways to ask about it.
Every name has a year, a place, and a line on how it stands with the others.
Many currents, not one root: Kongo-derived Kumina and Burru drumming, Nyahbinghi ceremony, Revival church music, Jamaican folk song and mento, Caribbean exchange with calypso, and American R&B, jazz and soul arriving over sound systems. They converged through ska (late 1950s) and rocksteady (1966) into reggae around 1968.
Both. Dub is a Jamaican genre of released versions AND a mixing-desk methodology invented by engineers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry around 1968–72. The methodology traveled further than the genre: jungle, dubstep and global remix culture inherit its production DNA without being dub subgenres.
Through sound-system practice. Kingston-born Kool Herc brought big systems and talking-over-records to Bronx block parties in 1973. Hip-hop itself was built by Bronx Black and Latino youth — reggae is a transmission line into its founding moment, not its parent. Where the two musics meet as equals today, that lane is hip-hop reggae. Since the 1990s dancehall and rap also feed each other in both directions.
A Black British reggae scene from mid-1970s South London: romantic songs, women’s voices out front — Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson, Brown Sugar — produced by figures like Dennis Bovell. It was second-generation Caribbean Britain singing its interior life; “Silly Games” topped the UK chart in 1979.
No. In 2018 UNESCO inscribed reggae of Jamaica on its intangible cultural heritage list — a bow to a living practice. Since then: Koffee’s 2020 GRAMMY, the revival generation, dancehall worldwide, the afrobeats conversation of 2025 and Keznamdi’s 2026 GRAMMY. The story is still being written.
Three places at once. Jamaican dancehall supplied the Dem Bow riddim (1990); Panama’s reggae en español translated the sound in Spanish; Puerto Rico’s 1990s underground fused it with hip-hop into a new genre that went global with “Gasolina” in 2004. It is multi-parent — no single-country origin story is true.
No — it is reggae’s sibling ecosystem. Dancehall emerged from reggae in the late 1970s around deejays and riddims, went digital with Sleng Teng in 1985, international in the 1990s, and is now a planetary network in two-way exchange with afrobeats and rap.
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