Why buying a vinyl player was a question my friend asked me! Honestly, I had no idea about the difference as I was growing up in the era of the cassette. Later on, CDs entered the scene and now everyone is streaming everything online. Maybe I am what people would call – old school, I told him that I want to hear the real sound as it was recorded and to proudly own a huge collection of records like many people had done for years and experience my favourite reggae music in a deeper level. So, later that day I found myself searching for more information about Vinyl records and Digital.
The vinyl is mirroring the original sound waveform and is analogue, while CDs, online streaming are all digital and some sounds might get lost and you could get easily surprised on how much you’ve missed, especially on old but gold classics. Even the original recordings of musicians, which may have been recorded on tape or digital methods, are sometimes re-issued on vinyl. All sounds are just vibrations in the air, but the vinyl sound is richer and, in my opinion, it makes you feel more connected to the artist.
Since the 1940s the phonograph, in its later forms also named a gramophone, has been known and called a record player or turntable. In its essence, it was a device for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. It was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, lots of advancements were made on it in the years to follow. It used to have phonograph cylinders instead of flat discs and the devices were gradually getting smaller and smaller in size. You can learn more about the rich history behind it here.

Choosing a Turntable

I believe there was some decline on record sales before, but If you go to a music store now, you can see people of all ages buying vinyl. Just a few months ago I was in one of those big stores and I remember how pleasantly surprised I was at seeing so many young people, at my age and even younger, going through the records. It is true that streaming is the much more affordable option nowadays, but for a true music lover the experience is what matters!
And now, the question is what kind of turntable to buy, there are so many different options out there, that at first, I am honestly confused, I do not know what to search for. My parents grew up with vinyl, but they had those huge ones, that take a whole lot of space and I have seen in stores these days much more compact, colourful options and so on. There are too many brands available, different models and at a different price range. I understand that some turntables perform better than others and my biggest fear is to own a valuable and rare record and to get it ruined at the end by playing it on a bad player. For me this as a hobby and I don’t really need the most expensive kind with too many features, at the same time the cheapest models seem like too good to be true, so the medium-priced ones are probably the best option in my case. So that’s it, it is decided!

Caring for those Records

But of course, having a record collection requires some knowledge and care as it has certain disadvantages. For example, mould could grow on vinyl and it could spread from one record to another and that is why they must all be stored in a humidity-controlled environment. Another problem is that they could easily get damaged during playback and this is going to compromise the sound quality. Because we all want to be able to enjoy our precious collections for a long time, hopefully life-long, I have gone through all the information I could possibly find. The first thing is to always store them in a vertical position and in their sleeve and covers, in order to avoid much access of the records with air and dust. A record sleeve can be made of paper, cardboard, rice paper, polypropylene etc., can be acid-free or anti-static and also contain an inner liner. If the sleeve that the record came with is too basic and doesn’t seem like big protection, there are some cost-effective sleeves sold wildly. Cleaning is also a must, especially if you bought used record. Another important thing to get used to, while taking them out if their sleeves, is to avoid touching any part of the record that contains a playable groove as the natural oils from our skin doesn’t do good with the surface of the vinyl.
It all looks like too much trouble maybe for some, but for me, it is all worth it, because listening to albums like Catch A Fire and Kaya by Bob Marley & The Wailers, Ska Boo-Da-Ba by Skatalites, Heart Of The Congos by The Congos, Funky Kingston by Toots And The Maytals, Trenchtown Mix Up by The Gladiators and albums of some of my all-time favourite reggae artists, on a vinyl is a whole other experience and I can imagine myself browsing through them while sitting on the couch, choosing the right one and getting lost in the sound. Seems cool, doesn’t it?

Wah gwaan, bredren? As we say in Jamaican Patois or “What’s going on, friends?” to all you English-speaking world. Two weeks have passed since my last update and, boy, do I have exciting news for you!

First of all, my co-worker Cate did like the reggae dare and we’re kinda dating now. Obviously, she didn’t want to tease me so much as she wanted to explore our common grounds. You know, I had an interest in her for months but never made my move. Luckily, she did. We’re all good now, so good that we’re planning a long weekend away – we’re flying to Barbados! Yes, people, turns out Cate is a Rihanna fan and you know that Barbadian superstar has her musical roots deep into reggae, dancehall and soca. Rihanna says Bob Marley is one of her major influences and she even has a shrine in her Los Angeles home to pay respect to the artist who, in her own words “really paved the way for every other artist out of the Caribbean”.

Second, I liked roulette so much that I never stopped playing it. If anything, I got better at it. I accepted the foreign language challenge with the French bets and learnt some phrases in the language of love. I wanted to see where roulette would get me. It got me somewhere alright. Someplace awesome, too. Get this: our long weekend in Barbados is paid in full by my roulette winnings! How cool is that? Not only do I get all the thrill of playing online roulette but it’s already making my life better.

But, let’s back off a little. Remember that I wasn’t impressed with RNG roulette. Well, I obviously hadn’t tried the right game software because I have since then seen quite a number of well-built roulette games and just as many that were a complete waste of time. I have a strong preference for games developed by NetEnt and Playtech but I’m also open to new experiences. I still like me a game with a live dealer – those ladies are not just hot (hope Cate doesn’t get to read this!) but they sure know what they’re doing. I still generally turn the sound off and listen to my reggae but there’s this dealer Tatjana – I think she’s with Evolution Gaming – I love her melodious voice so much that it haunts me in my dreams.

Now, if you, too, would like to play online roulette and win real money and maybe go to Barbados or elsewhere, you should read what the experts have to say about playing roulette for profit. It’s a lot of fun, especially when you’re winning, but can really go sour if you don’t take the necessary precautions. I’m not going to go into detail because that cool site I gave you is like a roulette bible, so head over there right now and start winning cash to fund your next getaway. And don’t forget to turn that reggae up – that just might be the good luck charm that you need.

I’ve mentioned a link between reggae and casinos in a previous post but now I’ve got an example that’s kinda personal. It’s a rather curious personal story but this is my blog and, try as I might, I can’t escape getting personal from time to time.

You see, about a week ago, I got dared by a co-worker, Cate’s the name, to play some roulette. She said she’d agree to give reggae a chance (as you might guess, I’ve been trying to get her to listen to reggae) if I gave her hobby a try as well. Happens so that her hobby is playing online roulette. Just like me, Cate has quite a commute to work but she doesn’t spend the time listening to relaxing music. Instead, she plays roulette on her mobile.

“How hard could it be?” I thought, “I’d spin the wheel a couple of times and be done with it”. But Cate wouldn’t let me off the hook that easy. “Get into the game and then we’ll discuss what roulette and reggae have in common. Yah, mahn!” She added the last part in the stereotypical Jamaican accent. Cheeky sod! By the way, if you’d like to learn how to speak Jamaican Patois, there are plenty of videos on YouTube and some of them are really funny.

I had, of course, played roulette before, at a casino, but wasn’t too excited about it. Now, slots are a different story. With the enchanting music and the amazing graphics, slots wouldn’t have been a problem. But, roulette I had to prepare a bit cause I didn’t know enough about online roulette to make a point if Cate confronted me. I needed a refresher on the game rules, you see.

Since I know she’s playing on her smartphone, I did a search for mobile roulette games and got to a nifty site. On this page, I found everything I needed to know – the most popular roulette games, the best bonuses and the casinos to play at. I tried all the roulette variants presented there and found the live dealer roulette a lot of fun. Especially the Immersive Roulette – try that with the sound off, listening to “The Best of the Wailers”, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I gave French and American RNG roulette a try but found them both boring. Thought the French bets kinda nice, though, once you know which is which, of course. I really enjoyed Pinball Roulette – that’s what I call a game of chance! However, I quickly saw how the game could be improved. Imagine a game, in which a jukebox replaces the pinball machine! A Jukebox Roulette would be sweet! Yah, mahn! Naturally, it would have to play reggae.

I don’t know what Cate has found out about reggae yet. We haven’t seen each other for some time now. But I found out roulette, like reggae, has deep historical roots and can be loved by people even if they don’t understand its language completely. I’m thinking the Voisins and the other French names might sound like Jamaican Patois to some. And they’re both a great pastime when you have an hour of commute every day. Actually, I’ll keep on playing roulette cause it doesn’t get in the way of listening to reggae.

We all may come from different walks of life, but one thing that I truly believe in is that talent, perseverance, hard work and believing in yourself can take you a long way. This is why I love hearing about the success stories of people and learning from them. Today, I will present to you the ‘rags-to-riches’ stories of three of the biggest names in pop culture which I am sure you’re all too well familiar with. I hope they are as inspiring to you as they are to me.

Bob Marley

How can you not love music that is all about unity, love, equity and positivity? And how can you not respect the man who has moved the world and literally stopped wars with his music? Bob Marley is one of our biggest icons in modern times and the contributions that he made to our society far outreach his short time on this planet. This man single-handedly brought reggae to the whole world and introduced us to the Rastafari philosophy and lifestyle. His story becomes even more unbelievable when you think about where he came from.

Robert Nesta Marley was born in 1945, in a small village in the Saint Ann Jamaican parish, called Nine Mile, where he also spent the first 12 years of his life. The rural life might have not offered him commodities like electricity but had a profound influence over his philosophy, identity and music. At the age of twelve, his mother moved with him to Trench Town, a neighbourhood in Kingston which is as dangerous, poor and violent as it is culturally-rich and talent-loaded. Though Bob went to bed hungry many times during his teenage years, he valued extremely his life and experience in Trench Town which provided him with endless inspiration for his future career. Even when he got rich and famous, he didn’t forget his humble roots and continued visiting the neighbourhood.

Michael Jackson

I doubt there is a person in the world that hasn’t heard that name. Yet, I’m sure that not all of you know the story of how Michael Jackson became the most popular person on the planet and created a cult-like following that can only be compared to the Beatlemania.

Michael Joseph Jackson was born in 1958 in Gary, Indiana, and was the seventh out of the nine children of Katherine and Joe Jackson. The whole eleven-member family lived in a small two-bedroom house and had to take turns for the one bathroom. For the most part, Katherine was a stay-at-home-mom, while his father worked at the steel mill. When Joe realised that his children were musically-gifted, he saw in their talent an escape from the poverty and started rehearsing his five oldest boys every night. Soon after, the group was travelling in the nearby states, winning competition after competition and opening for artists such as Gladys Knight, James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the O’Jays until they finally got noticed by Motown. The rest is history…

Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones might not be a name as popular as Bob Marley’s or Michael Jackson’s, but trust me when I say that this is one of the most important figures in music of our times. His has worked as a composer, arranger, conductor and film producer, but he’s most famous for his work as an album producer with some of the biggest names in music: Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and, of course, Michael Jackson. He’s also composed the scores of some very famous movies and TV shows: The Color Purple, The Wiz, Roots and produced one of the most successful and funny TV series of the 90’s – The Fresh Prince of Bel Air – therefore, giving Will Smith his first major role. And this is only a small part of what Quincy has achieved as you can see on his Wikipedia page. Incredible, taking into account where he came from…

Quincy was born in 1933 in Chicago. When he was little his mother suffered a mental breakdown, after which she was committed to a mental hospital. His father took Quincy and his brother to their grandmother in rural Kentucky where they lived for a year. The place was extremely poor – no water, no electricity, no heat… According to Quincy’s words, there were times when they’d eat rats for lack of anything tastier to put their hands on. Not that life was much easier when they got back to Chicago – the black ghetto wasn’t the safest place to grow up. His only escape was music which became his life. He tried all possible instruments in school until he settled on the trumpet. He soon joined a band and the success wasn’t slow to follow.

The Zika virus, while not nearly as serious as other viruses that spread recently, such as ebola, can still cause a whole lot of trouble in a person who gets infected. The symptoms include fever, rash and fatigue (so basically like a typical Tuesday for me) and they usually clear up in a week, but the worst part, which is what has made health authorities everywhere go on high alert, is that if a pregnant woman gets infected with Zika (or Zik V, as it’s sometimes referred to), her baby might be born with an otherwise extremely rare birth defect known as microcephaly. To put it simply, babies with microcephaly have underdeveloped brains and a smaller head, and I don’t need to be a doctor to tell you precisely why this is bad. While the Zika virus is of little danger to the mother, it can potentially destroy her child’s life, which is why health authorities everywhere have banded to raise awareness of the virus and give tips on how to reduce the chance of infection.

We’ve all seen the instructional videos in which a boring doctor explains to us that we should exchange the water regularly to prevent it from stagnating and handle our garbage properly to avoid attracting bugs, and according to studies conducted by yours truly, those videos, while informative, are not particularly fun to watch. The government of Jamaica seems to entirely agree with me, as it has decided to forego the boring instructional videos entirely. How, or how, would they inform Jamaicans in a language that they would understand? By using the power of reggae, of course! In a brand new 45-second PSA released and officially condoned by the Ministry of Health, a reggae singer quickly and efficiently takes us through the steps of minimizing the chance of a Zika outbreak, and while he might be a little bit hard to understand at times if you’re not used to the particular pronunciations of Jamaican English, especially in the context of reggae, the overall message is pretty clear.

As of the time of this writing, the video has about 20,000 views, which isn’t bad for a channel with only 26 subscribers! Spreading not only across Jamaica, but also all over the Americas, the clip has reached the status of a minor meme due to how light-hearted and funny it is for something that’s coming directly from the government. As I mentioned above, most PSAs (or Public Service Announcements) are fairly dull even when they attempt something different. A special shout-out should be given to the numerous anti-drug PSAs that ran in several countries across the 80s and 90s, some of which were so bad that they’re still remembered fondly even today (“Where did you learn this stuff?” “You, alright? I learned it by watching you!”), so kudos to the Jamaican Ministry of Health for choosing to do something different.

Sadly, while reggae still has a whole lot of fans out there (hello, world!), it’s far from the most popular musical genre out there. Certain genres, such as rap, rock, pop and, as of a few years ago, dubstep and electronic, have always been the more popular options when it comes to what the people prefer. Still, that’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse for obvious reasons – less fans means less tracks being made, and less tracks being made means less exposure, and less exposure means less fans, you get the idea. But it’s a blessing because the low exposure makes the reggae sound very unique. Now, of course, we all know that reggae sounds unique in general, but so do the other music genres – metal, for example, is also quite different, and yet since it’s so popular and used in so many products of media people have grown desensitized to it. Reggae, on the other hand, can be used to craft moment that define the entire experience.

Let’s turn the clock back to 2012, when a game called “Far Cry 3” was released. Far Cry 3 is about a young man named Jason who, after a skydiving accident, ends up imprisoned by pirates cooped up on an island alongside his friends and brothers. Managing to break free, Jason meets up with the Rakyat – a tribe of indigenous people who train him in the ways of the warrior. Slowly, he turns from an ordinary young man into a desensitized killer, turning on the pirates and going on a quest to not only save his friends, but to take revenge on the guy who put them in this position. But the more Jason fights, the more he finds the joy in fighting. Remember – he’s just an avatar for the player, and he feels what the player is feeling. While he’s killing hundreds of people, Jason starts finding that fun and exciting, and nowhere is this more prominent than in the best mission in the game.

One of the pirates’ main source of income is growing marijuana on the island and selling it to whoever is willing to buy it. Armed with a flamethrower, Jason sets out to annihilate the marijuana fields, but suffice to say the smoke gets to his brain a bit. As a result, the reggae song “Make It Bun Dem” by Damian Marley starts playing in the background, representing Jason’s descent into insanity. It’d take me a long time to explain just how perfect the song is, but suffice to say, not only is it a very fun-sounding song to match Jason’s predisposition (he repeatedly exclaims how much fun he’s having while burning people to death), but it also fits the game’s themes. Remember – Damian Marley’s father, Bob Marley, believed that marijuana should be used for religious purposes. Meanwhile, the Rakyat’s religion is precisely the myth of the warrior. And what happens when Jason gets high with the marijuana fumes? He unleashes the warrior within him. Just like that, a reggae song managed to tie the themes of the entire game together. And it was awesome.

My All-Time Favourite Reggae Artists

In the welcome post of my blog, I said I wouldn’t bother you with too many details about myself, but when I started doing a research for an article about the greatest reggae artists and songs, I changed my mind. The reason for this is that I saw that I cannot contribute much to what’s already out there. If you google-search ‘greatest reggae artists’, you’ll find more than enough great articles rankings pretty much the same singers as the top 10 in the genre: Bob Marley always at the top (duh!), then Toots, Gregory Isaacs, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Tanya Stephens, Burning Spear and so on. On top of that, on Wikipedia you can find a pretty exhaustive list of notable reggae musicians which can help you expand your reggae horizons by exploring the music of artists you maybe haven’t heard of before. In this case, only sharing my personal story of how I got hooked on reggae music, which are my favourite reggae artists and which are the reggae songs that are closest to my heart would have any value to at least some of the visitors. So that’s exactly what I will write about in this article. Here it goes.

The Beginning

I was in my early teens and those were the times when it wasn’t that common for a household to have more than one TV, one stereo system and one computer. And them being in pretty much the same room, you had to choose something that fits everyone’s taste. Not an easy task when one family member listens to folk, the other – to pop, the third – to rap, and the last one – to heavy metal. We had countless fights as to what music we should play and it was almost impossible for everyone to be happy at the same time. Until one day I randomly put Bob Marley on. Not a single complaint! Everyone went about their business humming and with a dancing step. Same happened a few days later with UB40. This is pretty much how I started listening to reggae regularly and discovered that I simply love the genre.

From Reggae to Ragga and Dancehall

Since these early days of my journey in exploring reggae music, I’ve fallen in love with countless reggae artists – be it the classic or the more contemporary ones – and their songs. Every time I hear Tanya Stephen’s It’s a Pity I immediately start singing. In my playlist, you will always find Black Roses by Barrington Levy, Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs, Don’t Break My Heart and The Earth Dies Screaming by UB40, Shaggy’s Oh, Carolina, Murder She Wrote by Chaka Demus & Pliers, Why Am I a Rastaman by Culture and many more. Whenever I hear Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam or No No No I cannot stop myself from dancing. I can’t help myself but love Boom Bye Bye by Buju Banton even though I’m not exactly OK with what the song is about. Other songs from him that I will always like are Champion and Wanna Be Loved. I simply adore 54 46

by Toots which, by the way, has an awesome cover by Sublime who were, obviously, heavily influenced by reggae music. I also started listening to reggae’s subgenres ragga and dancehall and its precursor – ska. There are so many great artists in those genres – Beenie Man, Mr Vegas, Elephant Man, Capleton, Sizzla, to mention but a few. But no matter how many great artists there are in the genre, there will always be one name that will outshine them all. Guess who!