How reggae and dub influenced your favourite music genre

Across history, various forms of cultural production have expanded by virtue of integration or fusion. In music, this practice is commonplace: genres evolve by blending extrinsic palettes, instruments, or sonics into their reservoirs, and at the same time, influence the creation of sounds that follow.

In his interrogation of dancehall, Sean Paul attributes part of its success, on a technical level, to its ability to inform future movements. “Dancehall itself has influenced all these genres: reggaetón, Afrobeats, soca and even pop is integrating it now.” Among the UK-founded Afroswing — a variant of Afrobeats — you’ll find UK hip hop, dancehall, and at times, grime, all alongside the father-genre afrobeats. Political activity, and movements in and around art has also come to inform an array of musicians and artists. America’s civil rights movement, for example, influenced Bob Dylan’s brand of protest folk — as seen in the likes of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, as well as Sam Cooke’s soul and R&B infused ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, both speaking to African Americans insurgency, through varied musical palettes, both also expanding the realms to which a genre can exist within and what it can speak to.

In a similar fashion, dub and reggae have helped to bridge the foundations of successor sounds, mighty in both of their construction, public resonance, and cultural expression. “Dub was the first electronic music,” iconic engineer Scientist proclaimed to the Recording Academy. Similarly reggae has both managed to stay its course, living through contemporary artists like Lila Iké, Jesse Royal and Chronixx, but also running adjacent to early conceptions of genres such as hip hop.

Like these Black-originating genres or practices, the Black diaspora communicate with one another in a similar fashion, oral traditions across continents, food and past-times are crucial pillars of the countries they migrate to — take rice and peas in England, for example, and its undisputed influence on Brits, West Indians, and Black diasporans nationwide — and so on. Music, cultural production and people aren’t rigid, humans talk to one another, culture continues to adapt by the second, thus rendering its products — be it music, film, and other forms of media — ever-changing. Reggae and dub have continued to communicate, inspire, and direct since their 1960s and early ’70s beginnings. Here are five direct examples of their prowess, power and pioneering impact across music.