For at least several decades, a handful of clichés were understood to be generally representative of the American college experience: binge drinking, frat parties, all-nighters, pretentious lit students, and so on. And to these one might add being unable to traverse public spaces without hearing Bob Marley’s Legend blaring from a dorm room window.
I come not to bury Legend—a fine compilation of songs by a truly major artist. But consider for just a moment how strange its success is. For with 25 million copies sold worldwide, it remains one of the best-selling albums ever, while at the same time being the sole representative of its genre for the majority of its owners. Nothing comparable exists for gospel, jazz, or blues—much less zydeco, Tropicalia, cumbia, or calypso, to name a few.
Even those who do venture further into reggae (as they should) rarely extend their investigations to other Jamaican music forms: ska, dancehall, but above all rocksteady. This is noteworthy, not just because Marley himself—along with the other members of the early Wailers group— was once a purveyor of rocksteady songs, but because rocksteady remains one of the most purely pleasurable genres of recorded music anywhere.
For those unfamiliar—rocksteady was kind of bridge between ska and reggae that saw a brief but brilliant peak between 1966 and 1968. The casual listener could be forgiven for perceiving greater continuity than difference across the three genres, but rocksteady’s distinctions, once pointed out, are unmissable: reduced horn sections, slower tempos (an apocryphal story attributes this to a particularly hot summer in ’66), more prominent basslines, gentler rhythms, and above all the elevation of harmony and melody.
Rocksteady’s distinctions are unmissable: reduced horn sections, slower tempos (an apocryphal story attributes this to a particularly hot summer in ’66), more prominent basslines, gentler rhythms, and above all the elevation of harmony and melody.
And what melodies! The Cables’ “Baby Why”, Stranger and Patsy’s “Down the Train Line”, Alton Ellis & The Flames’ “Cry Tough”, Dave Barker and the Upsetters’ “Set Me Free”, the Uniques’ “My Conversation”—one could go on ad almost infinitum.
As with ska, rocksteady was heavily influenced by American R&B, and it is not incidental that it flourished during a high period for soul and Motown. A host of classic rocksteady songs actually began life as American soul tunes, and rocksteady performers manifested a particular gift for imbuing even lesser-known tracks with unexpected grandeur: “Queen Majesty”, “I’m Your Puppet”, “We Must Be in Love”, “La-La Means I Love You” (the Staple Singers would later return the favor by lifting the titanic bassline for “I’ll Take You There” from a rocksteady instrumental). Due to the remarkable vocal artistry on display, along with the fact that rocksteady’s emphasis on the “one drop” drumbeat is more subtle than reggae’s, these rarely come off as novelty covers.
Perhaps owing to this American influence, rocksteady’s predominant lyrical themes concerned romantic love, both its joys and its agonies. This stands in marked contrast to the political and religious focus of so many reggae tunes, though it has contributed to the genre’s enduring appeal, much the way that where-did-our-love-go Motown songs remain immortal while contemporaneous protest songs are largely forgotten.
And yet, for all its timeless qualities, rocksteady is still somewhat underrated, for reasons that I suspect have something to do with its status as a singles genre amid a critical prejudice for the album format. It feels strange to say this today upon its senescence (if not death), but the idea of the rock album has exerted a certain tyranny over popular music—above all, in our approved conception of what popular music is meant to be. This should come as no surprise, seeing as modern music criticism is largely coextensive with the rise of the album. Pretentious criticism couldn’t exist without the idea of the album as artistic statement, and virtually all of the most important musical artists since the mid-1960s are associated with full-length albums, which then duly make appearances on the inevitable best-of lists that still circulate every other year or so. But we shouldn’t forget that the great monument of popular recordings was built upon the single. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, James Brown—singles artists all, and that didn’t stop them from basically inventing American music.
For all its timeless qualities, rocksteady is still somewhat underrated, because of its status as a singles genre amid a critical prejudice for the album format. But we shouldn’t forget that the great monument of popular recordings was built upon the single. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, James Brown—singles artists all.
In any case, the brevity of rocksteady’s greatest songs, in conjunction with the brevity of the genre’s overall peak, has lent it an aura of ephemerality. But what did you think pop music was? Indeed, it is partly thanks to its preference for the single that we possess such an almost absurd abundance of astonishing rocksteady music. The arrangement was both highly exploitative and weirdly democratic: talented producers like Bunny Lee, Sonia Pottinger, Coxsone Dodd and others opened their studios and house bands to anyone who had a song to play, paying them a pittance for their trouble, and pressing and releasing their singles in a matter of days (this process would continue into the reggae era, as documented in The Harder They Come).
One has the sense that total unknowns were walking into Kingston studios to lay down deathless tracks before earning brief fame or returning to immediate anonymity. Given that the total population of Jamaica at the time was under 2 million people, the island may well have then featured the greatest per capita concentration of musical talent anywhere.
If rocksteady has one defining singer, it would likely be Slim Smith, whose astonishing falsetto could convey operatic extremes of heartbreak and ecstasy within the span of a two-minute track, as he did on hit after hit with The Uniques, The Techniques, and as a solo artist.
Possessed of his own demons, Smith spent time in mental institutions, and one fateful night he returned to his parents’ home to find the door locked, smashing the window to gain entry. He badly cut himself in the process and bled out, thus silencing perhaps the most beautiful male voice since Sam Cooke. He did not much outlive the genre he dominated—like him a brief, but potent, addition to the legacy of recorded music. It lasted scarcely two years, but it is for the ages.
