Avant Records

Let's talk about Reggae Music Tonight

Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by T***s and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use the word "reggae", effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument....

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Afrobeats (not to be confused with Afrobeat or Afroswing[1]), also known as Afro-pop, Afro-fusion (also styled as Afropop and Afrofusion), is an umbrella term to describe popular music from West Africa and the diaspora[2][3] that initially developed in Nigeria, Ghana, and the UK in the 2000s and 2010s. Afrobeats is less of a style per se, and more of a descriptor for the fusion of sounds flowing out of Ghana and Nigeria. Genres such as hiplife, jùjú music, highlife and naija beats, among others, were amalgamated under the 'afrobeats' umbrella.

Afrobeats is primarily produced in Lagos, Accra, and London. Paul Gilroy, of The Black Atlantic, reflects on the changing London music scene as a result of shifting demographics:[8]

"We are moving towards an African majority which is diverse both in its cultural habits and in its relationship to colonial and postcolonial governance, so the shift away from Caribbean dominance needs to be placed in that setting. Most of the grime folks are African kids, either the children of migrants or migrants themselves. It's not clear what Africa might mean to them".