Rocksteady
| Rocksteady | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Mid-1960s Jamaica |
| Typical instruments | |
| Derivative forms | Reggae |
| Fusion genres | |
| Reggae fusion | |
| Other topics | |
| Music of Jamaica | |
Rocksteady is a music genre that originated in Jamaica around 1966. A successor of ska and a precursor to reggae, rocksteady was performed by Jamaican vocal harmony groups such as The Gaylads, The Maytals, The Heptones and The Paragons. The term rocksteady comes from a dance style that was mentioned in the Alton Ellis song "Rock Steady". Dances performed to rocksteady were less energetic than the earlier ska dances. The first international rocksteady hit was "Hold Me Tight" (1968) by the American soul singer Johnny Nash; it reached number one in Canada.
Rocksteady uses some of the musical elements of rhythm and blues (R&B), jazz, ska, African and Latin American drumming, and other genres. One of the most easily recognizable elements, as in ska, are offbeat rhythms; staccato chords played by a guitar and piano on the offbeats of the measure. This offbeat can be counted so that it falls between each count as an "and". Example: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. The perceived tempo became slower with the development of rocksteady than it had been in ska and this led to a number of changes in the music. The guitar and piano players began to experiment with occasional accents around the basic offbeat pattern. This can be heard throughout Jamaican recordings in subsequent years.
Rocksteady, even more so the early reggae that followed, was built around the "one drop" drum beat, characterized by a heavy accent on the second and fourth beat of every bar (or the third beat if one counts in double time), played by the bass drum and the snare together. The snare drum often plays a side stick "click" rather that a full snare hit; an influence from Latin music. This differs markedly from the drumming styles in R&B and rock and roll, which put the bass drum on the first beat (the downbeat) and almost never on the second and fourth beats). Jamaican musicians sometimes refer to the second and fourth beats as the "afterbeat". All the Jamaican styles of kit drumming since ska have incorporated a mixture of influences, including African burru percussion, American jazz and R&B, and Latin rhythms. The slowing in perceived tempo that occurred with rocksteady opened the door for drummers to explore these influences more. With the advent of the drum machine and computer in the 1980s, Jamaican popular music i.e. "dancehall" began to draw on other rhythms such as Kumina and to a lesser extent, American hip-hop so that recent music from Jamaica bears little resemblance to the rhythms and beats of classic ska, rocksteady and reggae.
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