The latter half of the 1960s brought rocksteady and with it more serious subjects addressing the reality of Jamaican history and the state of its people. These songs as well as parodies of American songs to fit the cultural context "made available in the musical language of Jamaica key terms of loss and pain, hope and longing of a diasporic consciousness" (Lecture 1). As these subjects became more widely communicated, the Jamaican people began to develop a voice independent from foreign sources, one that represented their culture and rebellion in the form of a social and political movement and set to a new genre of music. That is Rastafari and its reggae counterpart.
Forced into slavery by European colonizers and removed from Africa, the Jamaican people have been displaced from their home for centuries. Arrival on the island had meant serving the elites as members of the lowest tier of a social hierarchy established through British imperial rule, a rule that reigned up until 1962. Despite independence, Jamaican citizens were still at a loss for identity as they had been stripped of their home and exiled to "Babylon." In desperate times, when "79 percent of the population [was] classified as lower class," they needed a way to take power into their own hands (Waters 47).
This power came adorned in dreadlocks and the colors of the Ethiopian flag and carried with him the weight of someone who had lived through poverty and violence from an early age. Bob Marley represented the struggling natives as he spoke out against their strife and proposed alternative utopian lifestyles of peace, love, and community. He lived by the words of Jah, their God, and led this movement to the soundtrack of reggae, a term adopted from Toots and the Maytals' song "Do the Reggay," making it the global genre that it has become.
