Reggae in this directory covers a family rather than a genre: roots reggae, dub, dancehall, ragga and ska all sit under or beside the tag, and they span sixty years of Jamaican music plus its diaspora.
The chronology is worth having, because stations tend to specialise by era without saying so. Ska came first, fast and brass-led, in the early sixties; it was revived in Britain by the 2 Tone label at the end of the seventies and again by American ska-punk bands in the nineties, giving the genre three distinct waves that sound quite different. Roots reggae slowed the tempo and brought Rastafarian themes to the front through the seventies. Dub took the same recordings and rebuilt them as studio pieces, stripping vocals and drenching the remains in reverb and delay, which makes it one of the first electronic music traditions. Dancehall and ragga moved the music onto digital rhythms from the eighties onward.
Dub and dancehall are the most bass-dependent formats in this directory alongside drum and bass, and they are the worst served by low bitrates. If a reggae stream sounds thin, check the bitrate before blaming the station; at 64 kbps the bass line that carries the entire arrangement is largely gone.
