Burning Spear, "My Island" (1997) (page 213-14)

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WebLinks: Contexts for Exploring Visual and Verbal Texts

For a musical genre that formed on a Caribbean island in the 1960's, Reggae has earned an astonishing number of fans worldwide. In this sense it's a lot like Hip-Hop, an originally black music that members of all races have embraced. Its themes, too, have claims to universality: joy and suffering, oppression, the roots of culture. What forces—social or personal—do you think are responsible for the genre's popularity?

The Web sites below will provide an introduction to the political and cultural heritage of Reggae music. What does Reggae have in common with American music genres like blues and soul? How much of the music is universal, and how much of it is specific to Jamaica?

http://www.burningspear.net/
This is the official Web site of Burning Productions. Its colorful pages incorporate Burning Spear's past and present into a slick design that includes a biography, a blog of past tours and current tour information, and an extensive photo gallery. It also includes dozens of links to published articles and interviews in mainstream newspapers as well as obscure online music journals.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4269714
http://www.jahsonic.com/Reggae.html
Listen to a National Public Radio review of a new compilation of reggae from the 60s and 70s at the first site. The second site, a written history of the music, covers reggae's many spin-off variations and includes links to many other online articles.

http://www.speakjamaican.com/glossary.html
This site contains the largest glossary of reggae lingo out there. The topics of the words and expressions defined here range from food to social relationships to sexuality, and you can see how the local slang has incorporated the language of the English colonizers over the years. The term "quattie," for example, which means "of no value," comes from the name of a half-penny coin used under British rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jamaica
In his lyrics, Burning Spear makes reference to the origins of the Americas as we know them—to their "discovery" by Christopher Columbus. He seems to suggest that the legacy of Jamaica's former slave owners repeats this conquest, and continues to oppress its people. Learn more about Jamaica's complex history at this encyclopedia site.

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
http://www.postcolonialWeb.org/caribbean/caribov.html
Burning Spear's song, with its rousing call to action, can speak for more than just Jamaicans—its themes are common to colonized peoples around the world. The first of these Web pages provides an introduction to the field of postcolonial studies—the academic discipline that examines the effects and aftermath of colonization. By examining the literature, language, and culture of societies settled and run by Europeans from the sixteenth century to today, postcolonial studies tries to make sense of the hybrid civilizations left behind. The second of these Web pages is a more detailed guide to postcolonial studies and the Caribbean islands.

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