No abstract

Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries.

The Jamaican system of recording and performance, from the 1950s to the present, constitutes a distinctive approach to notions of composition, originality and ownership. Emerging from a tradition of live performance practice mediated by (and informing) sound recordings, the relative autonomy of riddims and voicings in the Jamaican system challenges conventional ideas about the integrity of a song and the degree to which international copyright law applies to local conceptions, as enshrined in decades of practice, of musical materials as public domain. With the spread of the ‘riddim method’ to the sites of Jamaican mass migration, as evidenced by similar approaches in hip hop, reggaeton, drum'n'bass and bhangra, reggae's aesthetic system has found adherents among artists and audiences outside of Jamaica. This paper maps out, through historical description, ethnographic data, and musical analysis, the Jamaican system as a unique and increasingly influential approach to music-making in the digital age.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.