Jamaican Music, From Reggae to Dancehall, Has an Important Cinematic Legacy

Courtesy Everett Collection

In this essay, writer AJ Morris explores the cultural history of Jamaican music, from reggae to dancehall, and examines how the medium works in tandem with Jamaican film as acts of protest and political commentary.

At its core, Jamaican music culture is a project of self-determination. Reggae emerged in the ‘60s and ‘70s out of political protest, disenfranchisement, and social change in Jamaica. As the Jamaican diaspora migrated overseas to Britain, young artists like Carroll Thompson and Honey Boy, and later, DJs like Shy FX, rebelled against the mainstream musical and societal narratives from which they were excluded, and introduced and developed genres like lovers rock, jungle, and garage.

That same self-determination, that instinct toward rebelling against the establishment, and of course, that inextricable tie to music, is present in Jamaica’s lesser-known cultural export: cinema, which has grown alongside and been shaped by reggae, dancehall, ska, and other Jamaican musical movements. The music created the environment.

Where the island had previously been used as a backdrop or setting for films featuring foreign, non-Jamaican cast and crew — see Dr. No (1962), or Papillon (1973) — Jamaican creators took back the narratives of their culture and life starting in the early 1970s. They used music to do it; Jamaican music as a central theme and sonic storytelling device in film helped push Jamaican culture to the forefront while representing the roots of the genres and culture as seen, told, and experienced by Jamaicans themselves.

The most essential of these films include Perry Henzell’s 1972 crime thriller The Harder They Come, one of the very first Jamaican films. It was lauded as a “landmark cult hit” that brought reggae to an international audience.

The Harder They Come sees iconic reggae artist Jimmy Cliff star as Ivanhoe Martin, a country boy who moves to Kingston upon his grandmother‘s death with dreams of becoming a reggae star. Instead, due to the low-paying monopolies of the Jamaican music industry, he turns to a life of crime, becoming an anti-state anti-hero.

The film’s soundtrack, which includes the title track performed by Cliff himself and musical contributions from legacy acts like The Maytals and Leslie Kong, represents a golden era of reggae.

It initiated the building of a global platform for the genre as the movie spread beyond the island. Where Henzell demonstrates the division between the wealthy, uptown record executives and the artists themselves from Kingston’s ghettos and tenement yards, he also encapsulates the state oppression of the culture through his depiction of a corrupt police force’s subjective persecution of working-class farmers and dealers of the ganja trade.

The film’s 1973 theatrical run also coincided with Island Records’ release of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ album Catch a Fire, which reggae historian Roger Steffens called “an incredible one-two punch that knocked out America for Jamaican music.” This, in turn, set the stage for future reggae cinema, including the 1978 cult classic by Theodoros Bafaloukos, Rockers.

The stylish, dynamic reggae film originally began as a documentary but evolved into a feature-length film about a reggae artist’s standoff with uptown resort-owners, analyzing reggae music, Rastafarian culture, and classism in Jamaica.

Starring reggae drummer Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace as himself, along with a star-studded cast featuring reggae mainstays like Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, and more, Rockers was the first on-screen depiction of Jamaica and its Rastafari that had creative direction, storytelling, and acting by the community themselves.

That agency shows in how the film presents Rastafarian life — a culmination of spirituality, community and cultural purity, centered around a belief in the togetherness of Jah (God) and man, and the fight against the oppressive evils of Babylon, the representation of colonial systems of white and Western supremacy.

Rockers is culture, unfiltered — scripted and performed in full patois, with nothing diluted or revised for an outsider’s eye. The film presents reggae to the world as it began, and in its purest form — the song and cry of the people, or as Cliff himself once put it in an interview with Ramparts magazine, “the frustration of oppressed people… fighting to get out from under that heavy weight.”

Aside from its use as a central theme or an accompanying soundtrack, there are also cinematic instances of Jamaican music being used as a narrative device in and of itself.

In Menelik Shabazz’s 1981 film Burning an Illusion, Pat (Cassie MacFarlane) navigates her relationship with Del (Victor Romero Evenas) in 1970s London, where violent discrimination, economic disenfranchisement, and police brutality consistently dictate their quality of life, and in turn shift the course of their relationship.

When Del is wrongfully incarcerated for a fight with a plainclothes cop, Pat is launched into a journey of political awareness and radicalization that challenges her previously-held moderate beliefs of Black life and liberty in Britain — a shift that’s narrated not only by Pat herself, but by the film’s Jamaican soundtrack.

As Pat’s beliefs evolve, the soundtrack’s subject matter dictates her awakening, using reggae and the British-born lovers rock to illustrate her political transition. Featuring music from Judy Mowatt, Ras Angels, and even a cameo performance by Janet Kay, the film uses the music to build the social context in which Pat exists as a Black British-Jamaican woman, and in turn reflects the context in which lovers rock — a soulful genre borne as an act of radical love in South London’s Caribbean community — exists.

Just as Pat struggles with her political beliefs and emotions, lovers rock represents the politics of vulnerability, love and loss of the Black Caribbean women of 1970s Britain.

Read More: Why Are Caribbean Accents Still So Bad on Film and TV?

Director Steve McQueen builds on this legacy in his 2020 film Lovers Rock, a warm, sensual portrait of a night at a vibrant Jamaican house party in 1980s West London, starring Micheal Ward (Top Boy) and Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn. Throughout the film, which debuted as part of McQueen’s Small Axe film series on Prime Video, McQueen uses the musical score to convey the sanctity of the soundsystem; the party is an environment of instinct, in which the attendees are engaged in a cathartic, communal release under the selector’s spell.

The music emboldens and frees them, creating sacred spaces of total vulnerability and intimate physicality as the listeners build and release tensions through explosive “skanking” (reggae dancing) and slow, close couples grinding — a duality reflected in the contrast between the explicitly radical roots reggae and its lovers rock offspring.

Then came dancehall: a bold and provocative genre originating in late 1970s and early 1980s Kingston as a working-class rebellion against conservative Jamaican society and popularized in the global mainstream by icons like Beenie Man, Lady Saw, Vybz Kartel, Spice, Sean Paul, Popcaan and more.

With dancehall came an opportunity for Jamaican women — who, despite some exceptions, were largely backup singers in other popular Jamaican genres — to claim visibility at the forefront of the genre, leading to the creation of a rebellious, autonomous female figure known as the “dancehall queen.”

These women, including the likes of Sister Nancy, Shelly Thunder, Patra, and more, would take to the stages with verve and grit, “breaking down barriers, and celebrating Jamaican female sexuality and empowered identity from the grassroots,” as Dr. Donna P. Hope writes in her book, Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion.

This rise was captured in the movies. Babymother (1998) — known as the first Black British musical — and Dancehall Queen (1997), lay bare the struggles of dancehall queens. Both follow the stories of women who engage in dancehall as an empowering escape from the suppression of their day to day lives, subverting the notion of reliance on men as necessity and embracing the attitude and style of the dancehall as a mode of self-actualization.

Featuring the extravagant and trend-setting fashions and hairstyles of the dancehall queens, along with cameos and soundtrack appearances from artists like Beenie Man, Peter Hunningale, Wayne Marshall, and more, the films pay tribute to the culture of dancehall, both in Jamaica and the U.K. respectively, while contrasting the economic and structural complexities of living in Jamaica and abroad as a part of the diaspora.

Jamaica’s musical and cinematic histories are deeply intertwined, as intertwined as they are with the country’s political and social histories and its global impact.

August 6 is Jamaican Independence Day, a day that celebrates the island’s separation from the British empire, and the formation of a sovereign, Jamaican state. Independence represents another layer of the spirit of Jamaican self-determination from which these cinematic storylines are derived, and the resilience and creativity of the people they represent.

These stories are still very much in progress, musically and beyond. Sonic movements like the reggae revival of the 2010s and the introduction of the hybridized “dancehall trap” genre stand as examples of the continuing evolution of Jamaican sound and culture, and how it persists as a vehicle for the frustrations and desires of the Jamaican people.

Jamaican music and movies work in tandem, building on themes of spirituality, working-class revolution, youth rebellion, culture, and community. Ultimately, they stand as a testament to the culture-shifting power of Jamaica and its diaspora’s push to define its identity on its own terms. From the soundclashes on the streets of Kingston to the dancehalls of Notting Hill, it’s Jamaica, as told by Jamaicans, to di world.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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