In Jamaica, music is the vital expression. Night and day, amid the heat and narrow lanes of the capital, Kingston, rap, reggae, ska, dub, rocksteady, gospel and mento-calypso boom from giant loudspeaker cabinets: a joyous musical beat. Deejay-based dancehall – a digitalised reggae that Jamaicans sometimes call ragga or Yardcore – dominates the club scene and it conceivably influenced hip-hop with its turn-table-styles of delivery known as ‘toasting’ (scatting and talking over records while moving the crowds). But old-time reggae remains the musical voice of Jamaica, just as rai in the musical voice of Algeria and flamenco that of Spain. It is a trance-inducing music out of Africa.
In festively crowded rooms in south London, the ganja-heavy beat persisted into the sweaty early hours
Few know more about Jamaican music than the Brixton-born novelist Alex (‘Wheats’) Wheatle, who grew up in south London in the early 1970s when reggae first filtered into British culture with the Kingston rude boy film The Harder They Come.
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