Japan, Europe and the dancehall loop

By the 1990s Jamaican music abroad was no longer an audience. Mighty Crown in Yokohama, German sounds like Sentinel and Silly Walks, and a British dub tradition going back to the 1970s were producing selectors, singers and festivals of their own — and travelling to Kingston to record with the artists whose records they played.

New York, 1999

World Clash was staged for the first time in New York in 1999, putting the leading sound systems from several countries on one stage. It was won by Mighty Crown, from Yokohama. Two Japanese brothers, Masta Simon and Sami-T, had beaten Jamaican and American sounds at a Jamaican art form, in front of a largely Caribbean crowd, and the result was not treated as a fluke by anyone who had been paying attention.

What made it possible was a loop rather than an export. Records had gone out from Jamaica for decades, but by the 1990s the traffic ran both ways: foreign sounds were flying to Kingston to cut dubplates, booking Jamaican artists for their own festivals, and sending their selectors back into Jamaican dances to be judged there. A scene in Yokohama or Stuttgart was not receiving the music at a distance. It was participating in it.

Japan

Japan built a full reggae infrastructure and not just an audience. Mighty Crown, formed in 1991, ran the Yokohama Reggae Sai festival and toured internationally for three decades. Japanese singers and deejays — Pushim, Fireball, Rankin Taxi among many — recorded in Japanese and in Jamaican Patois. Japanese dancers have won international dancehall dance competitions repeatedly, in a discipline that most outsiders assume cannot be learned abroad.

Japan also became one of the most important places in the world for the physical archive. Japanese collectors bought Jamaican vinyl seriously and stored it well, and Tokyo's Dub Store Records reissued original singles with a precision that few labels anywhere matched. Some of the best-preserved copies of records pressed in Kingston in 1968 are now in Japan.

A scene in Yokohama or Stuttgart was not receiving this music at a distance. It was competing in it.

Germany and the festivals

Germany produced sounds that competed internationally — Sentinel in Stuttgart, Silly Walks Discotheque in Hamburg, Pow Pow Movement in Cologne — and a singer who was accepted in Kingston on his own merits. Gentleman, working in roots reggae from the 1990s, recorded with Jamaican musicians and producers and had a career in Jamaica as well as about it.

The European festival circuit became the single biggest employer of Jamaican artists outside Jamaica. Reggae Geel in Belgium has run since the 1970s, Summerjam in Cologne since the mid-1980s, and Rototom Sunsplash — begun in Italy in 1994 and relocated to Spain in 2010 — grew into the largest reggae festival on the continent. For many Jamaican performers a European summer became the reliable income the domestic market could not provide.

Britain, continuously

Britain is a special case, because it never had a distance to close. Caribbean migration built sound systems in London, Birmingham and Bristol from the 1950s onward, and the roots and dub tradition that grew there — Jah Shaka, Aba Shanti-I, Channel One at Notting Hill Carnival — has run without interruption for half a century. British dub is not an interpretation of Jamaican practice; it is a branch of it, with its own lineage and its own records.

That branch then fed back into British music generally. The sound system's bass weight, its dubplate exclusivity and its call for reloads are audible in jungle, in dubstep and in grime, and the people who built those scenes were frequently the children of the people who built the sounds.

What the loop costs and returns

The arrangement is not evenly balanced. Dubplate money and festival fees flow to Jamaican artists, which matters, but the festivals, the labels and the venues are owned abroad, and the economic weight of reggae now sits largely outside the island that made it. Jamaica's own live infrastructure has never been resourced on the scale the music's global reach would suggest.

The point of recognition came in November 2018, when UNESCO added reggae to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It was an unusual listing — a commercial popular music rather than a folk practice — and it registered something the loop had already demonstrated: that this is a Jamaican form with a genuinely international body of practitioners, and that both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.