Three Shoes Posse Reggae Jam

I’ve always enjoyed reggae but I confess I don’t know much about it. (Somehow I don’t think smoking grass and listening to Bob Marley counts as much of a musical education.) When The Wine Commonsewer sent me this video earlier today and asked if I knew who it was, I was stumped. He answered his question before I could. I remembered learning some time ago that reggae’s history was in gospel and politics so I looked up the roots of the music and learned this:

Rasta forms the base of reggae music, the vehicle that artists such as Bob Marley used to spread Rasta thought all over the world. This indigenous music grew from ska, which had elements of American R&B and Caribbean styles. It also drew from folk music, Pocomania church music, Jonkanoo fife and drum bands, fertility rituals, adaptations of quadrilles, plantation work songs, and a form called mento. Nyahbingi is the purest form of music played at Rasta meetings or grounations. It uses three hand drums of different sizes, the bass, the funde and the repeater. (An archetypal example of nyahbingi is the three LP set from Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari.) “Roots” reggae explores the themes of the suffering of ghetto dwellers, slavery in Babylon, Haile Selassie as a living deity, and the hoped-for return to Africa.

After Jamaica’s independence in 1962, the lack of political improvement and the Black Power movement in the U.S. led to a big Rasta resurgence.

Given that short explanation of the music, it seems appropriate that a reggae band from the Austin area is supporting Ron Paul. After all, this country is in dire need of political improvement.

Three Shoes Posse was named Justice Through Music’s “Artist of the Month” for November 2006, and their website is here. Music found earlier at Bands4RonPaul.

~ by Miche on May 21, 2007.