I Ain't Mad At Ya offers a rare insight into growing up in Birmingham's black community in the 70s and 80s and shines a light on the incredible amount of black music culture produced in the vibrant suburb of Handsworth and the role its musicians and entrepreneurs have played in shaping and influencing popular music in the UK.

Bob Marley is the unchallenged king of reggae and one of music's great iconic figures. Rita Marley was not just his wife and the mother of four of his children but his backing singer and friend, life-long companion and soul mate. They met in Trenchtown when he was 19 and she was 18, and she was very much part of his musical career, selling his early recordings from their house in the days before Island Records signed up the Wailers. She shared the hard times and the dangers - when Bob was wounded in a gunfight before the Peace Concert, Rita was shot in the head and left for dead. Their marriage was not always easy but Rita was the woman Bob returned to no matter where music and other women might take him, the woman who held him when he died at the age of 35. Today she sees herself as the guardian of his legacy. Full of new insights, No Woman No Cry is a unique biography of Marley by someone who understands what it meant to grow up in poverty in Jamaica, to battle racism and prejudice. It is also a moving and inspiring story of a marriage that survived both poverty and then the strains of global celebrity.

I Just Can't Stop It is the honest and compelling autobiography from British Music Legend, Ranking Roger. As the enigmatic frontman of the multicultural band The Beat, Ranking Roger represented the youthful and joyous sound of the post-punk 2 Tone movement. As well as his illustrious career with The Beat and its subsequent iterations, this absorbing book explores Roger's upbringing as a child of the Windrush generation, touring America and his outstanding collaborations with artists such as The Clash, The Police and The Specials.

The story of The Wailers is a litany of betrayal and greed that's rarely been reported elsewhere. Written in collaboration with Family Man and other surviving members, "The Wailers' Story" reveals the truth behind the Marley legacy. The Wailers played with Bob Marley on all of his hit singles and albums - records that have sold an estimated 250 million copies worldwide, and established Marley himself as a cultural and musical icon. This book traces the early lives of the Barrett brothers before they joined Marley in the '60s and discusses how reggae artists like Lee 'Scratch' Perry influenced the band. It includes insider accounts of the assassination attempt on Marley's life and his exile in London. It examines how hits like 'Exodus', 'Waiting In Vain', 'No Woman No Cry', and 'I Shot The Sheriff' were made - songs that have helped change the face of popular music.

This book explores the history of reggae in modern Britain from the time it emerged as a cultural force in the 1970s. As basslines from Jamaica reverberated across the Atlantic, so they were received and transmitted by the UK's Afro-Caribbean community. From roots to lovers' rock, from deejays harnessing the dancehall crowd to dub poets reporting back from the socio-economic front line, British reggae soundtracked the inner-city experience of black youth. In time, reggae's influence permeated the wider culture, informing the sounds and the language of popular music whilst also retaining a connection to the street-level sound systems, clubs and centres that provided space to create, protest and innovate. This book is therefore a testament to struggle and ingenuity, a collection of essays tracing reggae's importance to both the culture and the politics of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain.

A memoir by the woman who knew Bob Marley best--his wife, Rita.
Rita Marley grew up in the slums of Trench Town, Jamaica. Abandoned by her mother at a very young age, she was raised by her aunt. Music ran in Rita's family, and even as a child her talent for singing was pronounced. By the age of 18, Rita was an unwed mother, and it was then that she met Bob Marley at a recording studio in Trench Town. Bob and Rita became close friends, fell in love, and soon, she and her girlfriends were singing backup for the Wailers. At the ages of 21 and 19, Bob and Rita were married.
The rest is history: Bob Marley and the Wailers set Jamaica and the world on fire. But while Rita displayed blazing courage, joy, and an indisputable devotion to her husband, life with Bob was not easy. There were his liaisons with other women--some of which produced children and were conducted under Rita's roof. The press repeatedly reported that Bob was unmarried to preserve his "image." But Rita kept her self-respect, and when Bob succumbed to cancer in 1981, she was at his side. In the years that followed, she became a force in her own right--as the Bob Marley Foundation's spokesperson and a performer in her reggae group, the I-Three.
Written with author Hettie Jones, No Woman No Cry is a no-holds-barred account of life with one of the most famous musicians of all time. In No Woman No Cry, readers will learn about the never-before-told details of Bob Marley's life, including:
How Rita practiced subsistence farming when first married to Bob to have food for her family. How Rita rode her bicycle into town with copies of Bob's latest songs to sell. How Rita worked as a housekeeper in Delaware to help support her family when her children were young. Why Rita chose to befriend some of the women with whom Bob had affairs and to give them advice on rearing the children they had with Bob. The story of the attack on Bob which almost killed the two of them. Bob's last wishes, dreams, and hopes, as well as the details of his death, such as who came to the funeral (and who didn't).

Breaking new ground in the field of Sound Studies, this book provides an in-depth study of the culture and physicality of dancehall reggae music. The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Every night, on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, Dancehall sessions stage a visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic dominance for the participating crowd. "Sonic Bodies" concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "set" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks played; and, MCs (DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic movement of vibrations, and offers an analysis of how a sound system operates - not only at auditory, but also at corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. "Sonic Bodies" formulates a fascinating auditory critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in the mind, that communication is an exchange of information and that meaning is only ever representation.

He takes my hand, pulls me to him. 'This is our dancing time.' A debut about love, loss, freedom and dub reggae, Fire Rush is an electrifying state-of-the-nation novel and an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide - a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry. But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape. When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her first to Bristol - where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country - and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences. 5* Reader Reviews 'I will be recommending it to everyone' 'A phenomenal debut novel' 'Yamaye is a fantastic central protagonist and narrator ... This novel takes you on an emotional and unforgettable journey' 'This book has it all ... You're immersed into something really special' 'A stunning debut novel... as relevant to today's racial climate as the 1970s... it felt musical, with dub music almost a secondary character in the novel'

Dub reggae and the techniques associated with it have, since the late-1980s, been used widely by producers of dance and ambient music. However, the term was originally applied to a remixing technique pioneered in Jamaica as far back as 1967. Recording engineers produced reggae tracks on which the efforts of the producer were often more evident than those of the musicians - these heavily engineered tracks were termed 'versions'. The techniques used to produce versions quickly evolved into what is now known as 'dub'. The term, in this sense, arrived in 1972 and was largely the result of experiments by the recording engineer Osbourne Ruddock/King Tubby. Over the decades, not only has dub evolved, but it has done so especially in the UK. Indeed, much contemporary music, from hip hop to trance and from ambient soundscapes to experimental electronica and drum 'n' bass is indebted to the 'remix culture' principally informed by dub techniques. However, while obviously an important genre, its significance is rarely understood or acknowledged. Part One of the book examines the Jamaican background, necessary for understanding the cultural significance of dub, and Part Two analyses its musical, cultural and political importance for both African-Caribbean and, particularly, white communities in the United Kingdom during the late-1970s and early 1980s. Particular attention is given to the subcultures surrounding the genre, especially its relationship with Rastafarian culture - the history and central beliefs of which are related to reggae and examined. There is also analysis of its cultural and musicological influence on punk and post-punk, the principal political music in late-1970s Britain. Finally, moving into the period of the decline of post-punk and, indeed, British dub in the early 1980s, there will be an examination of what can be understood as the postmodern turn in dub. In summary, the book is a confluence of several lines of thought. Firstly, it provides a cultural and musical history of dub from its early days in Jamaica to the decline of post-punk in early-1980s Britain. Secondly, it examines the religio-political ideas it carried and traces these through to the ideologies informing the subcultures of the late-1970s and, finally, to their transformation and, arguably, neutralisation in the postmodern pastiche of post-punk dub. Thirdly, with reference to these lines of thought, it looks at dub's and roots reggae's contribution to race relations in 1970s Britain. Finally, it analyses the aesthetic and arguably 'spiritual' significance of dub, looking at, for example, its foregrounding of bass and reverb.

This book explores the significance of reggae and hip hop in Southern Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present. Focusing on groups and solo artists located predominantly in the Southern Italian regions of Apulia and Sardinia, it examines the production and distribution of their music, lyrics and video clips. To this end, Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy emphasizes the linguistic aspects of cultural marginalization as well as marginalities linked to geographical location, gender, and to social and political identification. The authors put forward three key arguments, namely: that the Southern Italian transcultural and multilingual musical productions defy the cultural stereotype of the South; that the musicians discussed are creating new alliances and transcultural exchanges that engage critically with the challenges and opportunities offered by globalization; and that these musical productions represent one of Italy's most significant forms of creative political expression since the 1970s. Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy brings to light the distinctive characteristics of Italy's independent and marginal musical contexts of reggae and reggae-inflected hip hop. It will serve as an invaluable resource for academics and students of Italian cultural studies, global studies, and the politics of non-hegemonic cultural production. It also provides an engaging reference for those with an interest in southern Italy, Apulia, Sardinia, the southern question and independent and popular music more generally.

Born in 1953 to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents, Pauline Black was subsequently adopted by a white, working class family in Romford. Never quite at home there, she escaped her small town background and discovered a different way of life - making music. Lead singer for platinum-selling band The Selecter, Pauline Black was the Queen of British Ska. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she toured with The Specials, Madness, Dexy's Midnight Runners when they were at the top of the charts - and, sometimes, on their worst behaviour. From childhood to fame, from singing to acting and broadcasting, from adoption to her recent search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening story of music, race, family and roots.

Distillation of Sound focuses on the original music of Jamaica and how, through dub reggae, Jamaican culture was expanded and shifted. It will further the discussion on dub music, its importance to Jamaican culture, and its influence on the rest of the world. Dub music in Jamaica started in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade had influenced an entire population. The music began to use the rhythm track of a song as a song itself and spread quickly throughout the sound systems of the island. The importance of dub music and its influence on the music world frames the discussions in this new book. How dub travelled and distilled to three places in the world is covered in chapters focussing on the rise and spread of dub in New York City, in England and in Japan. Abbey discusses the separation between dub as a product and dub as an act of the engineer. Codifying these two elements, and tracing them, will allow for a more definitive approach to the culture and music of dub. To define it, and its surrounding elements, five of the first albums produced in the genre are discussed in three parameters that help to define and set up the culture of dub music. The albums discussed are Java, Java, Java, Java (Impact All Stars), Aquarius Dub (Herman Chin Loy), Blackboard Jungle Dub (Lee 'Scratch' Perry), The Message Dubwise (Prince Buster), King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Augustus Pablo). From the Preface: 'Jamaican music has always been about creating with what is at hand. Taking what is around you and making it into something great is the key to dub and Jamaican culture. This attitude is what this project is about. There is not enough written on the music that has inspired and influenced so many people around the world and this is an addition to the conversation. Dub music fixates on the engineer as a musician and, in doing so, allows for the creator to interact with echnology. Through this, the mixing board and other electronic elements become musical instruments. Now, these technologies are dominant in contemporary music and allow for people to easily create in their own homes. Without the engineers and musicians in the following work, these changes and shifts in technology and music would not have occurred. Dub is also a refiguring of already existing music. What this demonstrates is that music is ever evolving and can be shifted through technology. It also suggests that recorded music can always be modified and expanded upon. In our contemporary world, this modification is seen every day online and in people's daily lives. Dub created a way to view these changes through music. The influence of technology in the development of culture is the key to this work and to our development in society. How technology can be modified, changed, and evolved through the interaction of the engineer is the focus of this project. This work will further the importance of dub music and culture in our society. The definition and distinction between version and dub is also an important element in the following work. Jamaican music needs to be discussed more for its influence and creative force in the entirety of the music world. The author is a professional musician with the groups J. Navarro & the Traitors, Detroit Riddim Crew, and 1592 and a producer of dub, reggae and ska, and a professor of English and literature at Oakland Community College in Michigan, USA. Genuine popular and academic appeal. Will appeal to students and scholars of music and Jamaican culture - and to academic libraries. Has genuine popular appeal to those with an interest in Jamaican culture and music.

Bob Marley and Media: Representation and Audiences presents an analysis of how media, radio, television and print represented Bob Marley, including his popularity after his death. Mike Hajimichael examines unexplored connections between Bob Marley and media representation and the specifics of audiences, including coverage in tabloids, music magazines, and fanzines, as well as radio and television interviews. Hajimichael builds an extensive catalogue of Bob Marley's media engagements and connects Marley to media through forms of political discourse and ideologies relevant to social change in different contexts globally, such as civil rights, anti-racism, Rastafari, and liberation movements. Given that varieties of representation exist, the book unpacks these media discourses with regard to public perceptions and key themes articulated, including mainstream versus fan-based coverage, issues of Rastafari, Black Consciousness, economic crisis, legacies of colonialism, slavery, racism, links to other music idioms, concepts of identity, and Marley's personal relationships.

Is Bob Marley the only third world superstar? How did he achieve this unique status? In this captivating new study of one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, Jason Toynbee sheds new light on issues such as Marley's contribution as a musician and public intellectual, how he was granted access to the global media system, and what his music means in cultural and political terms.
Tracing Marley's life and work from Jamaica to the world stage, Toynbee suggests that we need to understand Marley first and foremost as a 'social author'. Trained in the co-operative yet also highly competitive musical laboratory of downtown Kingston, Marley went on to translate reggae into a successful international style. His crowning achievement was to mix postcolonial anger and hope with Jamaican textures and beats to produce the first world music.
However the period since his death has been marked by brutal and intensifying inequality in the capitalist world system. There is an urgent need, then, to reconsider the nature of his legacy. Toynbee does this in the concluding chapters, weighing Marley's impact as advocate of human emancipation against his marginalisation as a 'Natural Mystic' and pretext for disengagement from radical politics.

On the basis of a body of reggae songs from the 1970s and late 1990s, this book offers a sociological analysis of memory, hope and redemption in reggae music. From Dennis Brown to Sizzla, the way in which reggae music constructs a musical, religious and socio-political memory in rupture with dominant models is vividly illustrated by the lyrics themselves. How is the past remembered in the present? How does remembering the past allow for imagining the future? How does collective memory participate in the historical grounding of collective identity? What is the relationship between tradition and revolution, between the recollection of the past and the imagination of the future, between passivity and action? Ultimately, this case study of 'memory at work' opens up a theoretical problem: the conceptualization of time and its relationship with memory. -- .

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderon criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaeton's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: "Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope." Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alike-indeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska.

Vibe Merchants offers an insider's perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

As the ubiquitous Jamaican musician Bob Marley once famously sang, "half the story has never been told." This rings particularly true for the little-known women in Jamaican music who comprise significantly less than half of the Caribbean nation's musical landscape. This book covers the female contribution to Jamaican music and its subgenres through dozens of interviews with vocalists, instrumentalists, bandleaders, producers, deejays and supporters of the arts. Relegated to marginalized spaces, these pioneering women fought for their claim to the spotlight amid oppressive conditions to help create and shape Jamaica's musical heritage.

Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from "less respectable" segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and consider whether and how their "pulp" preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated and consumed from within the Caribbean.

Roger Steffens toured with Bob Marley for two weeks of his final tour of California in 1979 and the music icon was the first guest of Steffens' award-winning radio show. In So Much Things To Say, Steffens draws on a lifetime of scholarship to tell the story of Marley's childhood abandonment, his formative years in Trench Town, his seemingly meteoric rise to international fame and his tragic death at 36. Weaving together the voices of Rita Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer-as well as band members, family and friends-Steffens reveals extraordinary new details, dispels myths and highlights the most dramatic elements of Marley's life; his psychic abilities and his overriding commitment to the peace and love message of Rastafari. This landmark work will reshape our understanding of this legendary performer.