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Has anyone else ever noticed, that the instrumental piece the band used to go into after Axl would call "Gimme some reggae!" on KOHD isn't really reggae at all? Reggae is generally pretty slow, with that signature off beat guitar chord chugging along. What the band actually plays in that bit of KOHD sounds more like Calypso style, double the pace of reggae and with the bongos going wild etc. 

What do you reckon?

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On 26/07/2020 at 11:57 PM, Nice Boy said:

Has anyone else ever noticed, that the instrumental piece the band used to go into after Axl would call "Gimme some reggae!" on KOHD isn't really reggae at all? Reggae is generally pretty slow, with that signature off beat guitar chord chugging along. What the band actually plays in that bit of KOHD sounds more like Calypso style, double the pace of reggae and with the bongos going wild etc. 

What do you reckon?

You're absolutely correct, it has fuck all reggae to it, though not all reggae is slow, 70s reggae was but 60s (SKA) was fast or rather more jumped up and 80s (Ragga/Dancehall etc) was quite fast.  Yeah, that shit Axl was on all steel pans and shit, which is much more in line with Calypso from Trinidad and Tobago.  I don't think Axl and them particularly care for reggae or are capable of musically replicating it even if they wanted to.  Its kinda backward, in a literal sense.  The whole thing comes, that whole beat, from black guys in the 60s in the carribean listing to blues shit and trying to do the 12 bar blues but doing their kinda version of it, on the off-beat.  A lot of non carribeans that try to replicate it tend to fuck it up.  Led Zeppelin for example.  The pure reggae skank is sharp and its on the upstroke and the off beat. 

Reggae in itself is an odd term, its used to encapsulate a lot of different music, Ska is reggae, Dancehall is reggae, Ragga is Reggae, Nyabinghi is Reggae, Dub is Reggae...and they're all quite different.  I guess as a term its kinda like rock, a lot of shit comes under it.  Hip Hop is even a derivative of Reggae, Hip Hop was started by a Jamaican DJ (DJ Kool Herc) who just took to America the shit they were doing in the Sound System clashes in America, just set up huge speakers and two turntables in the park and played famous instrumentals (which was basically what dub reggae was, kinda like the first remixes, take a well known tune, remove the words, add reverb in weird places etc), its just that he hit upon the idea of mixing the two tracks on the turn tables together.  The MCing bit had existed in Jamaica for a while, only they called it toasting, where one MC would talk over the instrumental bragging about how their sound system is better than 'x's.  They got the idea from those old 50s radio DJs that used to rhyme words for their radio stations like 'for stacks and stacks of the best on wax listen to WKFLM!'.

Edited by Len Cnut
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