#2503 - Eric Weinstein

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Where'd jazz come from? Where'd blues come from? Well, it came from here and here. No, reggae 100% came from Kingston, Jamaica.

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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The concept of sampling in the hip-hop community is actually — a lot of that comes from this kind of mindset that reggae was born out of. It was like, 'I like this, so I'm going to use this.'

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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DJs, now that they had widespread electricity, could set up these mobile discos. They were called sound systems. And the DJs developed this toasting — a musical style where they would speak and sing over the recorded music. And that directly led to stuff like, you know, rap.

Chuck

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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You had like a really rich, complex album, like with really cool themes in it. Marley to Martin Luther King Jr. and Tosh to Malcolm X. So Marley made the Wailers universally palatable, and Peter Tosh inserted like that, that kind of militant, political bent that is also like a big part of reggae too.

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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There might have been a Wailers at one point, but we probably wouldn't know of them because Joe Higgs taught them most of what they know about music.

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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2 days before, he was shot. He was shot, Rita was shot, 2 other people were shot in his home. And after being shot in the chest and the shoulder, he still went on and played that show.

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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This is in the lead-up to their eventual freedom from the colonizers and the white supremacist sort of system that they had been living under that they called Babylon. So that's why you hear Babylon a lot in the songs.

Chuck

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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He knew that Peter Tosh had money because he had gotten out of prison, and Peter Tosh gave him a place to stay, fed him, took care of him to help him get back on his feet. And that's how Lepo Lobin repaid him, by murdering him.

Josh

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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In 1979, Bob Marley played in Auckland and it kind of — he kind of caught a fire there and Māori musicians sort of adopted reggae for a while. And, you know, they brought their own thing.

Chuck

Reggae: Kingston’s Gift to the World

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