The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of Rastafarianism on contemporary music. The plan of the research will be to set forth the popular-culture origins of Rastafarianism as a mode of religious and cultural expression and then to discuss the musical influences and implications of that can be identified with and/or traced to Rastafarian adherents, enthusiasts, and stylists.
The linkage between Rastafarianism and contemporary music can be connected first and foremost to the linkages between Africans and Anglo-Europeans in the New World, particularly as mediated by the popular culture of modern Jamaica. The origins of Rastafarianism were religious. They go back to the 1930s in Jamaica, when the first meaningful wave of Jamaican emigrants began to move out of the Caribbean and into America and England (Murrell, Spencer, and McFarlane passim) and, within Jamaica, to otherwise respond (negatively) to the centuries of British colonialism. A charismatic Jamaican preacher named Leonard Howell has been credited with being a major voice of the principal tenets of "Rasta" belief in the early period: anticolonialism, repatriation of Africa, nonviolence, and the special connection to Ethiopia and the Emperor Haile Selassie, who was considered divine (King 47). Selassie was crowned in Ethiopia in 1929 as Ras (Prince) Tafari (Ethiopia); he was hailed by the American black leader Marcus Garvey, associated with the back-to-Africa movement in the US.
An important feature of the back-to-Africa ethos was the view, shared by Garvey and Howell, that the enslavement and forcible transport of blacks from Africa amounted to the creation of a Diaspora comparable to the exile of the Jews in Babylon (Dolin 59). Though Selassie claimed to descend from the biblical Solomon and Sheba, Garvey, for one, did not consider him divine: In 1929 slavery was a standard feature of Ethiopian society (Hong 18). Babylon, explains King (43), was and remains...