What got you into reggae?

older sister, in elementary school.

bob marley, jimmy cliff, sly & robbie...

and then came my bad brains phase.

This is pretty weird, but in college I was into the drummer from Dub Trio's previous band (Birth), so it went from that to Dub Trio > dub > reggae.

I mean, I listened to some in high school when I did the obligatory ska band tour of duty, but I wasn't that into it.

For me it was totally mid-90s record shop work and being just amazed by the flood of quality in Blood & Fire/Pressure Sounds reissues and falling all over every dub reissue and On-U Sound nugget and then moving on to Black Ark/Studio One/Treasure Isle/Channel One/Mighty Two love. Paralleling all that was discovering jungle and dancehall just followed that.

From seeing "The Harder They Come" ranked #26 in Paul Gambaccini's "Top 200 albums" book way back when and thinking I needed to give reggae a shot. I loved it, then got "Funky Kingston," "Marcus Garvey" and probably some Marley after that.

the dub tracks on this

http://www.interpunk.com/itemimages2/38140.jpg

and then years later i heard

http://www.bloodandfire.co.uk/cds/images/bafcd002.jpg

and jungle/ragga all around the same time

weed

My mom had Legend when I was a teenager, and I bought Exodus on my own, but I kind of took Bob Marley as his own thing, just some guy who made music that sounded like that. I didn't discover reggae as its own thing until high school, when someone loaned me a copy of Burning Spear's 100th Anniversary (Marcus Garvey and the dub version, Garvey's Ghost, on a single CD - can't believe it's out of print). Now I have sort of the opposite attitude to the one I used to have - I prefer reggae in bulk. Like, I'll just shuffle through all the reggae compilations on my iPod without worrying about who's singing any given song; it all just blurs together, but pleasantly.

Yeah, the college radio station here runs dub like 50% of the time (I think whenever a dj doesn't show up they just rerun an hour of dub, basically), and I don't know who any of the artists are (unless it's from a Studio One or Joe Gibbs comp that I happen to have), and it's all great.

I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't hearing reggae in some form, be it Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue" and Aswad as a child or trustafarians blasting Marley in college.

my older brothers friend left a cassette of Steel Pulse's Handsworth Revolution at my house. i played that shit all the time and it was the first record i ever listened to stoned

Macka Splaff

forgot about eddie grant

where are the shameful 3rd-wave ska stories

Lucky enough to predate the "Legend" compilation, I don't really recall hippy fandom getting in the way until the late-80s. Black Market Clash was definitely the thing that made reggae click for me. Right from the start, it was about dub for me. I'd had Marley's live album for a few years, but it wasn't clicking. Side two of Black Market kicked it over for me. Next stop was Augustus Pablo.

haha amon

xpost

OPERATION IVY FOREVER

in truth it was probably the clash or the police being fucking omnipresent on pre-alt "modern rock" radio

My dad worked at the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies in the early 1970s and came back (to Britain) with a pretty great ska collection, which I stole from him in about 1996.

Toots and The Maytals Time Tough anthology in High School. A co-writer on the newspaper staff lent it to me and I gave him James Brown's Love, Power, Peace: LIVE!

pickitup pickitup

'Pass The Dutchie' would probably have been my first exposure to it as a kid and I liked that at the time. Hearing Marley stuff on the radio soon followed although I remember thinking he was pretty boring apart from 'Could You Be Loved'. I liked Ska pretty instantly (ditto most of the popular hits that still got airplay e.g. 'Israelites', 'Double Barrel', 'Uptown Top Ranking') because of seeing Madness, Specials et al on TV. Picked up on a lot of stuff via Jungle and a friend at college introduced me to dubbier stuff. It's not something I've ever bought in depth but I appreciate it as much as anything else.

I saw an On-U Sound comp in Sister Ray the other day and really want it now.

http://atomiq.org/images/33/10_cover.jpg http://atomiq.org/images/33/10_cover.jpg http://atomiq.org/images/33/10_cover.jpg

haha I think my brother edited that issue...? can't remember

1996, 13 yrs old, "Wannabemceez" - KRS-One, Mad Lion

SHABBA

Oh yeah, I forgot that I auditioned for a fratty reggae/rock band earlier in college and they lent me a bunch Toots/Burning Spear/etc.

"fratty"

lolz

mad professor came to my school for a reggae festival we were having last year. most of the bands sucked but mad professor was incredible so i bought a bunch of his cds, got really into dub, and now i can enjoy reggae

fratty dread

the scorching summer of '79, aged 11 on holiday in the south of england and janet kay's 'silly games' was on the radio incessantly. my sister and i were instantly smitten.

Doing research for 6 months on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where they played reggae everywhere, all the time. I had only scratched the surface (Marley, Tosh, Cliff) until then.

Parents took me to see The Harder They Come in 1975, when I was 5. I spent the next year pretending I was Outlaw Ivan.

Four years later my dad took me to see Bob Marley play Vanderbilt's gymnasium in Nashville.

Dug second wave ska as an early teen, then got in to reggae up through the roots period. Rockers soundtrack rules. Then lost the plot with the dancehall revolution.

where are the shameful 3rd-wave ska stories

-- am0n, Friday, August 24, 2007 5:28 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

i don't know if this is what you're asking, but a number of DC area ska bands would visit my college, and i knew some people who were into that scene. my freshman year at a party, this guy insisted that The BossTones invented ska, and realizing there was no way to argue the point, i had an overwhelming desire to suckerpunch him. this was years before i heard the Scharpling & Wurster "Madness invented ska" line, but when i died laughing thinking of that dude.

ragga shows on the radio in paris, "uptown top ranking," and a friend of a friend who really really loves the music of linton kweisi johnson

Must've been around '76 when reggae kinda-sorta registered for the first time. Thanks to, erm, "I Can see Clearly Now" -- heard, sure nuff, on a Johnny Nash compilation that, weirly nuff, I found inside a Neil Young LP sleeve, brought to me by a friend whose name I cannot recall any more. Nor do I know how the Young/Nash sleeve/LP mix-up happened. Anyhow, after that it took a little time before I heard any more reggae (or any Neil Young, for that matter). And a loooong while before I got me first dub records.

i don't know if this is what you're asking, but a number of DC area ska bands would visit my college

-- sanskrit, Friday, August 24, 2007 3:32 PM (10 minutes ago)

looool Pie Tasters amirite

Dread Inna Babylon

Late 70s/early 80s, parents put Burnin' by the Wailers and the Harder They Come soundtrack into heavy rotation.

I was really into ska (1st wave and 3rd wave) for a few years but never got much into reggae beyond Legend. Then Sublime blew up. There were enough reggae references and covers on the first two Sublime discs to spur a lot of musical fact-finding.

I got pretty heavily into dancehall and dub in the mid 90s, albeit via some very suspect compilations in most cases. I don't listen to very much reggae anymore though, and still consider myself a neophyte.

a 1990 comp on rykodisc, towering dub inferno: the ROIR tapes was my hell yeah moment. particularly the track "none a jah jah children no cry" by ras michael and the sons of negus. opened my ears.

the pop stuff i loved as a kid—"electric avenue," "pass the dutchie" (which was one of my very first 45 purchases with my own money)—i didn't really associate with any sort of wider genre or anything. just liked them.

dad a, will your parents adopt me? Please.

My mom had Legend when I was a teenager, and I bought Exodus on my own, but I kind of took Bob Marley as his own thing, just some guy who made music that sounded like that. I didn't discover reggae as its own thing until high school, when someone loaned me a copy of Burning Spear's 100th Anniversary (Marcus Garvey and the dub version, Garvey's Ghost, on a single CD - can't believe it's out of print).

Roughly similar to me. Had Legend in middle school, but was never exposed to any other reggae (I knew there was other reggae out there obv, but had NO idea of its depth) until I got curious and bought Marcus Garvey at Best Buy 1st year of college. Then saw press about the Arkology set, and bought that (which didn't really *hit* me until at least a year later. I guess I still think it's a spotty comp. perry's dubs can be pretty rudimentary and boring, esp if you're just getting into dub).

was into Police, Specials, PIL as a kid.
Lee Perry did the rest...

towering dub inferno:

This comp had some great moments. Especially the track you mentioned and Puls der Zeit.

WEED

black uhuru - sinsemilla

cant resist those synths...plus stevie wonder jams on a track, i believe. ha

Not all that long ago -- and because there's a few good reggae reissue labels on eMusic -- I downloaded The Congos' Heart of the Congos. I had no expectations for it, really, but I loved it. That got me started, and a bunch of good recommendations from the "Blood & Fire S/D" thread here kept me interested and downloading.

The Harder They Come soundtrack helped, too.