Jamaican music has historically manifested an extraordinary global impact through the genres that were created on that Caribbean island—from rocksteady and ska to reggae, dancehall and dub—but also through the defining influence those styles and genres have had on hip hop, rap, jungle, drum and bass, grime, dubstep, dub techno and minimal.

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The developments of these sound styles and their origins in gospel and Christian music practices are well documented, but at the root of the genesis of this wide spectrum of interconnected genres lies the attempted colonial erasure of shared memories, oral histories and performance traditions originating in Africa.  

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Over two centuries, around a million West and Central Africans were brutally uprooted and enslaved to live on and sustain Jamaican sugarcane plantations. Some of those who resisted and escaped these plantations initiated free societies and traditional governance in maroon settlements, taking refuge and forming communities in the hills and subsequently in the cave systems of the Blue Mountains. In these interconnected cave systems, one imagines the resonance of struggle music and memory circuits, upright guerilla fights and lullabies sung by women. The listening ear would store riddim philosophies of Africanity, fugitive yet free. Shrines and ceremonial forces emerged in these dense environments, such as the goddess figures and the tale of Nyabinghi, the fierce mother spirit of abundance, merging with legends of rebellion against the oppressor. Encoded memories of the transatlantic ‘Middle Passage’ later inspired the myths of Drexciya, as echoing beats moving from ground to aquatic fields. These visual and sonic imaginaries continue to resurface as acoustic maps, dreams, and souls seeking return. The pulse is momentum of homeland, a warning call against colonial evil, connecting across generations so that those separated from the island and now floating in diasporic avatars may be found once more.

Later in the early twentieth century, due to a partial erasure of languages, gods and stories, these expressions reinterpreted the stories of the oppressors and used the language of the Bible to reframe and interpret their own situation. This led activist and unionist Marcus Garvey to announce the imminent rise of a black messiah that would lead his people back to the holy land: Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, who claimed direct ancestry to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and was the only African royal to successfully resist the Italian colonial invaders, was seen as the messiah and thereby became the central figure of worship in the new religion of Rastafari. 

From the 1920’s when slavery was abolished and subsequently replaced by waves of indentured labour, as numerous bonded workers were uprooted and transported from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, this music began to incorporate South Asian influences and lived experience. From melodies to instruments, dreadlocks and thick ganja clouds, African, South Asian, and Christian elements form the ‘cultural compost’ out of which Reggae and its different offshoots began to grow.

The Repropriation Riddims Project strives to complement this amalgamation of influences by adding subtle South Asian and digital elements into this 2026 rendition of these foundational riddims.