Snoop even changed its name!
Reincarnation of Snoop Dogg will not last long! The former rapper is now an ex-reggae singer since Snoop Lion has recently transformed into Snoopzilla, referring to the song "Bootzilla" Bootsy Collins. For the new style of Snoop, the funk. An album titled "7 Days Of Funk" is also planned in collaboration with Dam Funk, a size of modern funk USA. Beyond changes in regular names that make up the buzz and attract the most scathing criticism, Snoop is just music and proves that his influences are many. And for us, there will always be Snoop Dogg! What's His Name? Snoop Dogg told you!
The news is scarce around Tanya Stephens . It is with pleasure that we find in the video for "Broken People", a beautiful song full of hope.
Damian Marley is hitting the high seas. The reggae artist and son of Bob Marley
has teamed with Norwegian Cruise Lines for the "Welcome to Jamrock
Reggae Cruise," a five night event featuring Damian, Stephen and Julian
Marley, Sean Paul, Shaggy, Etana, Tarrus Riley, Jah Cure and more.
Marley and the Welcome to Jamrock Reggae Cruise are also getting a hand
from the Jamaica Tourist Board, who are endorsing and getting behind the
event themselves.
Damian Marley's Favorite Bob Marley Tracks
Reggae fans will have to be patient, though. The Jamrock Reggae Cruise will set sail on October 20th, 2014 from Miami, make stops in Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, Jamaica, before returning on October 25th, 2014.
Tickets go on sale today. For more information, visit the Welcome to Jamrock Reggae Cruise's website.
Damian Marley's Favorite Bob Marley Tracks
Reggae fans will have to be patient, though. The Jamrock Reggae Cruise will set sail on October 20th, 2014 from Miami, make stops in Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, Jamaica, before returning on October 25th, 2014.
Tickets go on sale today. For more information, visit the Welcome to Jamrock Reggae Cruise's website.
Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley was born on July 21, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica to reggae legend Bob Marley and 1976 Miss World, Cindy Breakspeare. As a teenager, Damian
performed
with the Shepherds, but worked with his older brother Stephen on his
first album, "Mr. Marley." Damian’s commercial breakthrough was the
2004 single “Welcome to Jamrock.” He's won two Grammy awards and lives
in Miami, Florida.
Singer, songwriter, producer. Born on July 21, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica. Only two years old when his father, reggae legend Bob Marley died, Damian Marley has explored his musical roots to become of today’s hottest performers. He is nicknamed “Jr. Gong,” which comes from his father who was known as “Tuff Gong.”
Marley started his own journey in the music business at an early age. As a teenager, he performed with the Shepherds, which also included other reggae progeny, Shiah Coore whose father is Cat Coore of Third World and Yashema McGregor whose mother is Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes. While the band had some success in Jamaica, Marley eventually decided to strike out on his own. He worked with his older brother Stephen on his first album, Mr. Marley (1996). The two co-wrote many of the album’s tracks together. Embracing his musical ancestry, Marley announced to the world “Me Name Jr. Gong.” But the album’s upbeat dancehall style failed to connect with some listeners.
With Stephen producing much of his next effort, Halfway Tree (2001) brought Damian more critical praise and attention for combining dancehall and hip-hop styles. The recording won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album with both Damian and Stephen taking home awards for the project. Unfortunately, all of the kudos did not translate into big record sales. Still he accomplished something that his famous father was never able to achieve - winning a Grammy Award. The award category for reggae music was not added until the mid-1980s.
Damian’s real commercial breakthrough came from the single “Welcome to Jamrock” released in 2004 by Tuff Gong. Tuff Gong is an independent record label started by Bob Marley in the mid-1960s and is still in the control of the Marley family. Set to a mesmerizing rhythm, the track explored the real-life hardship and political strife facing the people of Jamaica.
Working with Stephen as a co-producer, Damian put out his biggest album to date. Welcome to Jamrock (2005) incorporated elements of reggae, hip-hop, and R&B, and it reached the top or near the top of all of the charts for those genres. Another testament to its universality was its success on the Billboard Top 200 album, reaching as high as the number 7 spot. The title track earned Damian another Grammy Award - this time for Best Urban/Alternative Performance. For the second time in four years, Damian and Stephen won the Grammy for the Best Reggae Album.
Singer, songwriter, producer. Born on July 21, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica. Only two years old when his father, reggae legend Bob Marley died, Damian Marley has explored his musical roots to become of today’s hottest performers. He is nicknamed “Jr. Gong,” which comes from his father who was known as “Tuff Gong.”
Marley started his own journey in the music business at an early age. As a teenager, he performed with the Shepherds, which also included other reggae progeny, Shiah Coore whose father is Cat Coore of Third World and Yashema McGregor whose mother is Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes. While the band had some success in Jamaica, Marley eventually decided to strike out on his own. He worked with his older brother Stephen on his first album, Mr. Marley (1996). The two co-wrote many of the album’s tracks together. Embracing his musical ancestry, Marley announced to the world “Me Name Jr. Gong.” But the album’s upbeat dancehall style failed to connect with some listeners.
With Stephen producing much of his next effort, Halfway Tree (2001) brought Damian more critical praise and attention for combining dancehall and hip-hop styles. The recording won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album with both Damian and Stephen taking home awards for the project. Unfortunately, all of the kudos did not translate into big record sales. Still he accomplished something that his famous father was never able to achieve - winning a Grammy Award. The award category for reggae music was not added until the mid-1980s.
Damian’s real commercial breakthrough came from the single “Welcome to Jamrock” released in 2004 by Tuff Gong. Tuff Gong is an independent record label started by Bob Marley in the mid-1960s and is still in the control of the Marley family. Set to a mesmerizing rhythm, the track explored the real-life hardship and political strife facing the people of Jamaica.
Working with Stephen as a co-producer, Damian put out his biggest album to date. Welcome to Jamrock (2005) incorporated elements of reggae, hip-hop, and R&B, and it reached the top or near the top of all of the charts for those genres. Another testament to its universality was its success on the Billboard Top 200 album, reaching as high as the number 7 spot. The title track earned Damian another Grammy Award - this time for Best Urban/Alternative Performance. For the second time in four years, Damian and Stephen won the Grammy for the Best Reggae Album.
Bob Marley
Bob Marley, in full Robert Nesta Marley
(born Feb. 6, 1945, Nine Miles, St. Ann, Jam.—died May 11,
1981, Miami, Fla., U.S.), Jamaican singer-songwriter whose thoughtful,
ongoing distillation of early ska, rock steady, and reggae forms blossomed in the 1970s into an electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that made him an international superstar.
Marley—whose parents were Norval Sinclair Marley, a white rural
overseer, and the former Cedella Malcolm, the black daughter of a local custos
(respected backwoods squire)—would forever remain the unique product of
parallel worlds. His poetic worldview was shaped by the countryside,
his music by the tough West Kingston
ghetto streets. Marley’s maternal grandfather was not just a prosperous
farmer but also a bush doctor adept at the mysticism-steeped herbal
healing that guaranteed respect in Jamaica’s
remote hill country. As a child Marley was known for his shy aloofness,
his startling stare, and his penchant for palm reading. Virtually
kidnapped by his absentee father (who had been disinherited by his own
prominent family for marrying a black woman), the preadolescent Marley
was taken to live with an elderly woman in Kingston until a family friend rediscovered the boy by chance and returned him to Nine Miles.
By his early teens Marley was back in West Kingston, living in a
government-subsidized tenement in Trench Town, a desperately poor slum
often compared to an open sewer. In the early 1960s, while a schoolboy
serving an apprenticeship as a welder (along with fellow aspiring singer
Desmond Dekker), Marley was exposed to the languid, jazz-infected shuffle-beat rhythms of ska, a Jamaican amalgam of American rhythm and blues and native mento (folk-calypso) strains then catching on commercially. Marley was a fan of Fats Domino, the Moonglows, and pop singer Ricky Nelson,
but, when his big chance came in 1961 to record with producer Leslie
Kong, he cut “Judge Not,” a peppy ballad he had written based on rural
maxims learned from his grandfather. Among his other early tracks was
“One Cup of Coffee” (a rendition of a 1961 hit by Texas country crooner
Claude Gray), issued in 1963 in England on Chris Blackwell’s Anglo-Jamaican Island Records label.
Marley also formed a vocal group in Trench Town with friends who would later be known as Peter Tosh (original name Winston Hubert MacIntosh) and Bunny Wailer (original name Neville O’Reilly Livingston; b. April 10, 1947, Kingston). The trio, which named itself the Wailers
(because, as Marley stated, “We started out crying”), received vocal
coaching by noted singer Joe Higgs. Later they were joined by vocalist
Junior Braithwaite and backup singers Beverly Kelso and Cherry Green.
In December 1963 the Wailers entered Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One
facilities to cut “Simmer Down,” a song by Marley that he had used to
win a talent contest in Kingston. Unlike the playful mento music that
drifted from the porches of local tourist hotels or the pop and rhythm
and blues filtering into Jamaica from American radio stations,
“Simmer Down” was an urgent anthem from the shantytown precincts of the
Kingston underclass. A huge overnight smash, it played an important
role in recasting the agenda for stardom in Jamaican music circles. No
longer did one have to parrot the stylings of overseas entertainers; it
was possible to write raw, uncompromising songs for and about the
disenfranchised people of the West Indian slums.
Reggae
reggae, style of popular music that originated in Jamaica
in the late 1960s and quickly emerged as the country’s dominant music.
By the 1970s it had become an international style that was particularly
popular in Britain, the United States, and Africa. It was widely
perceived as a voice of the oppressed.
According to an early definition in The Dictionary of Jamaican English (1980), reggae is based on ska, an earlier form of Jamaican popular music, and employs a heavy four-beat rhythm driven by drums, bass guitar,
electric guitar, and the “scraper,” a corrugated stick that is rubbed
by a plain stick. (The drum and bass became the foundation of a new
instrumental music, dub.) The dictionary further states that the
chunking sound of the rhythm guitar that comes at the end of measures
acts as an “accompaniment to emotional songs often expressing rejection
of established ‘white-man’ culture.” Another term for this distinctive
guitar-playing effect, skengay, is identified with the sound of gunshots ricocheting in the streets of Kingston’s ghettos; tellingly, skeng
is defined as “gun” or “ratchet knife.” Thus reggae expressed the
sounds and pressures of ghetto life. It was the music of the emergent
“rude boy” (would-be gangster) culture.
In the mid-1960s, under the direction of producers such as Duke Reid
and Coxsone Dodd, Jamaican musicians dramatically slowed the tempo of ska, whose energetic rhythms reflected the optimism that had heralded Jamaica’s independence from Britain in 1962. The musical style that resulted, rock steady, was short-lived but brought fame to such performers as the Heptones and Alton Ellis.
Reggae evolved from these roots and bore the weight of increasingly
politicized lyrics that addressed social and economic injustice. Among
those who pioneered the new reggae sound, with its faster beat driven by
the bass, were Toots and the Maytals, who had their first major hit with “54-46 (That’s My Number)” (1968), and the Wailers—Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and reggae’s biggest star, Bob Marley—who recorded hits at Dodd’s Studio One and later worked with producer Lee (“Scratch”) Perry. Another reggae superstar, Jimmy Cliff, gained international fame as the star of the movie The Harder They Come
(1972). A major cultural force in the worldwide spread of reggae, this
Jamaican-made film documented how the music became a voice for the poor
and dispossessed. Its soundtrack was a celebration of the defiant human
spirit that refuses to be suppressed.
During this period of reggae’s development, a connection grew between the music and the Rastafarian movement, which encourages the relocation of the African diaspora to Africa, deifies the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I (whose precoronation name was Ras [Prince] Tafari), and endorses the sacramental use of ganja (marijuana). Rastafari (Rastafarianism) advocates equal rights and justice and draws on the mystical consciousness of kumina,
an earlier Jamaican religious tradition that ritualized communication
with ancestors. Besides Marley and the Wailers, groups who popularized
the fusion of Rastafari and reggae were Big Youth, Black Uhuru, Burning
Spear (principally Winston Rodney), and Culture. “Lover’s rock,” a style of reggae that celebrated erotic love, became popular through the works of artists such as Dennis Brown, Gregory Issacs, and Britain’s Maxi Priest.
.In the 1970s reggae, like ska before it, spread to the United Kingdom,
where a mixture of Jamaican immigrants and native-born Britons forged a
reggae movement that produced artists such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, UB40,
and performance poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Reggae was embraced in the
United States largely through the work of Marley—both directly and
indirectly (the latter as a result of Eric Clapton’s popular cover version of Marley’s “
I Shot the Sheriff” in 1974). Marley’s career illustrates the way reggae was repackaged to suit a rock market whose patrons had used marijuana and were curious about the music that sanctified it. Fusion with other genres was an inevitable consequence of the music’s globalization and incorporation into the multinational entertainment industry.
The dancehall
deejays of the 1980s and ’90s who refined the practice of “toasting”
(rapping over instrumental tracks) were heirs to reggae’s politicization
of music. These deejays influenced the emergence of hip-hop music in the United States and extended the market for reggae into the African American
community. At the beginning of the 21st century, reggae remained one of
the weapons of choice for the urban poor, whose “lyrical gun,” in the
words of performer Shabba Ranks, earned them a measure of
respectability.
Asha's 55 foot dreadlocks on set
'I've got the world's longest dreadlocks'
For most people the story of Rapunzel and her legendary long locks
is simply a fairytale, but for American Asha Mandela, the record holder
for the world's longest dreadlocks, it's a reality.
Asha, 47, has been growing her dreadlocks for the past 25 years.
Measuring up to a whopping 55ft in length - that's the height of three
buses - and weighing over two and a half stone, Asha says her hair is
her life.
Having to carry the extra load in a baby sling on her back, it takes
Asha two full days to wash and dry her dreadlocks, and despite doctors'
advice that keeping her hair so long could paralyse her, she refuses to
go for the chop. She joins us today to tell us why...
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