STORY · GLOBAL
Is it still reggae? A living genre argues with itself
Well supported
As fusion, revival and trap reshaped the sound, the authenticity question came home.
The authenticity-versus-evolution debate across reggae's modern forms - the Reggae Revival, fusion, and trap-inflected dancehall.
A genre built on mutation
Every era of Jamaican music was once the new, suspect thing: ska gave way to rocksteady, rocksteady to reggae, reggae to dub and dancehall. Against that history, purists still hold that roots reggae - one-drop, conscious, Rastafari-rooted - is the authentic core, while others argue fusion is simply the tradition continuing.
Revival, and a word its own artists reject
The 2010s Reggae Revival brought Chronixx, Protoje and their peers back to live playing and lyrical depth. Yet Chronixx himself has resisted the label, and warned against branding all Jamaican music as 'reggae' when it also holds ska, dancehall, mento and more - a caution about how the world names the island's music.
Trap comes to the dancehall
At the other pole, trap-dancehall - 808s and melodic auto-tune from producers like Rvssian, deejays like Skillibeng and the later Vybz Kartel - is heard by some as the sound's natural next step and by others as a dilution of its riddim-and-selector craft. The question 'is it still reggae?' has no settled answer, only a living argument.
A music that stopped changing would have a clearer definition - and a smaller future.