Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 206

When those knowledgeable about popular music listen to a song, they can often pick out the stylistic influences that helped shape it. Each musical style, after all, represents a unique way of combining rhythm, melody, harmony and lyrics. And, while it does not take a genius to notice the differences between rock, rap or folk, for example, musicians often combine a number of styles in composing songs. Different musical styles tend to emerge from different social groups, and studying how these combine and fuse is a good way to chart the cultural contact between social groups.

Some sociologists turned their attention to reggae music because it exemplifies the process whereby contacts between social groups result in the creation of new musical forms. Reggae’s roots can be traced to West Africa. In the seventeenth century, large numbers of West Africans were enslaved by British colonists and brought by ship to work in the sugar-cane fields of the West Indies. Although the British attempted to prevent slaves from playing traditional African music for fear it would serve as a rallying cry to revolt, the slaves managed to keep alive the tradition of African drumming, sometimes by integrating it with European musical styles imposed by slave-owners. In Jamaica, the drumming of one group of slaves, the Burru, was openly tolerated by slave-owners because it helped meter the pace of their work. Slavery was finally abolished in Jamaica in 1834, but the tradition of Burru drumming continued, even as many Burru men migrated from rural areas to the slums of Kingston.

It was in these slums that a new religious cult began to emerge – one that would prove crucial to the development of reggae. In 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia. While opponents of European colonialism throughout the world cheered Selassie’s ascension to the throne, some in the West Indies came to believe that he was a god, sent to Earth to lead the oppressed of Africa to freedom. One of Selassie’s names was ‘Prince Ras Tafari’, and the West Indians who worshipped him called themselves ‘Rastafarians’. The Rastafarian cult soon merged with the Burru, and Rastafarian music combined Burru styles of drumming with biblical themes of oppression and liberation. In the 1950s, West Indian musicians began mixing Rastafarian rhythms and lyrics with elements of American jazz and black rhythm and blues. These combinations eventually developed first into ‘ska’ music and then, in the late 1960s, into reggae, with its relatively slow beat, its emphasis on bass and its stories of urban deprivation and of the power of collective social consciousness. Many reggae artists, such as Bob Marley, became commercial successes, and by the 1970s people the world over were listening to reggae music. In the 1980s and 1990s, reggae was fused with hip-hop (or rap) to produce new sounds (Hebdige 1997), heard in the work of the groups such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Shaggy or Sean Paul.

The history of reggae is thus the history of contact between different social groups and of the meanings – political, spiritual and personal – those groups expressed through their music. Globalization has increased the intensity of these contacts. It is now possible for a young musician in Scandinavia, for example, to grow up listening to music produced by men and women in the basements of Notting Hill in London and to be deeply influenced as well by, say, a mariachi performance broadcast live via satellite from Mexico City. If the number of contacts between groups is an important determinant of the pace of musical evolution, we can forecast that there will be a profusion of new styles in the coming years as the process of globalization develops.