Fresh from winning the 2023 Grammy for executive producing Kabaka Pyramid’s “The Kalling,” Damian “Junior Gong” Marley says his Welcome To Jamrock Cruise Is A Statement for reggae. Speaking with Penta the “youngest veteran” says,
“It’s a statement for the genre.” The music themed Cruise has been sailing the Caribbean Sea since 2014 with sold out cabins with live performances by some of the top reggae acts. “Over the years there weren’t a lot of people who thought it was possible, a lot of people questioned whether or not we we’d be able to pull out such an event even based on wondering if fans of reggae music would spend that kind of money to go to an event like that,” Damian says.
Damian also spoke about the state of reggae music which has been the subject of much debate in Jamaica.
“I think that the genre is in an innovation phase right now, you have a lot of young artists and producers who are trying new things,” the certified Gold selling artist says.
The 44 year old youngest son of Bob Marley stated that, “I don’t necessarily think that they have fully found themselves or a new sound that’s really going to resonate on a really wide-scale scale, but I think they’re experimenting. There needs to be a balance of us still giving a platform to the original cultural style of reggae music, the orthodox style.”
Dancehall pioneer Clevie of the producer duo Steely & Clevie has also questioned whether the new dancehall music coming out of Jamaica has any staying power to add to his long legacy of making global hits.
Speaking at the JAMMS Business Of Music Seminar on Tuesday, the legendary producer said, “the real question is, has it worked?”
“Are we failing? are we losing on the returns that we once had?” DJ Snow Cone, producer of Sean Paul’s Temperature can be heard answering him with “we are failing.
Clevie started making music in 1973 along with his producer partner Steely they made ‘Sweet Reggae Music,’ a track for Nitty Gritty. he told WMV that the track, “went straight into the British Charts and that cemented our view that what we were doing could work and we formed a team there (at Jammyz) for his production camp an all out songs became hits.”
The duo has since produced some of the biggest hits in dancehall music laying the foundation for future producers.
Last August, Clevie’s mentee and Grammy winning producer Di Genius, produced the song Run Run which was supposed to be the lead single for Shenseea’s Alpha album with a production style that is similar to Steelie and Clevie’s 80s dancehall beats
“I feel like all of the different time periods are equally important, just like how I coulda bring back that with a modern artist like Shenseea. For me, they always say you haffi know where you come from to know where you going so to me personally you haffi listen to those kinda things cause it is important to me to form new ideas. It’s also the history, it is the foundation of what we are on. If it wasn’t for people like Steelie And Cleevie, Gussy and Donovan Germain and all those people who know the sound probably wouldn’t be pushed to where it is right now,” Mcgregor told World Music Views.
“Cleevie tell me to, most of the older producers use to say ‘where unuh a go with this, computer riddim and blah blah blah, same evolutionary thing that people take a time fi accept, and them pushed the envelope and that was like the newest thing at the time,” he continued.
Trap dancehall artist Skeng’s debut Trap Dancehall Ep. “Beast Of The Era” peaked on day 1 at No. 1 on the Reggae iTunes Chart. The album didn’t record enough to be counted the U.S. for the first week of sales according to Luminate (Formerly MRC Data). Skeng’s top songs Protocol and Gvnman Shift however, are the two most streamed songs on YouTube of all time.
Skeng scored a Nicki Minaj feature Likkle Miss (Remix) last year. The two filmed the video in New York City at the end of August as they met in the big apple face to face for the first time.
