reggae recommendations

Language is made of sounds. If your brain is unfamiliar with those sounds, they all sound the same. For example, if a person doesn’t know Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, or Hebrew. To that person’s ear, they would not even know WHAT language is being spoken if the hear any of those languages. They wouldn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese, or Spanish and Portuguese. But those languages are DEFINITELY different and distinct from each other. If the person hears someone speaking Farsi or Hebrew, they may not even know where one word ends and the next one begins.

BUT, if that person spends enough time learning the language, and HEARING the sounds that make up the language, those sounds and thus the language become more distinct and understandable.

I had a very similar experience when I first started listening to jazz. Couldn’t make sense of any of it. But the more I listened, the more I understood. The same thing happened with hip-hop for me.

The key is to find a “Rosetta Stone” for whatever music genre it is that you want to explore, and use it as a launching off point for the rest. For me, the album Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis was my “Rosetta Stone” for jazz. It opened up the entire vocabulary of jazz for me. That’s not to say that all jazz sounds like that album, but that the album gave me the basic vocabulary to go out, listen to more jazz, and HEAR it.

For reggae, Bob Marley’s album Legend is that sort of “Rosetta Stone” album. It’s no wonder that it’s often the ONLY reggae album that a person owns or knows. The same is true for Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue.

I can’t remember what album was my entry into hip-hop, but I’m sure it was connected to the Beastie Boys or the Roots. Which makes sense, because those two groups both use live instruments, so it was easier to connect to them, because my brain was more familiar with those sounds.

By the way, there are people for whom all rock music sounds the same. Some can’t even distinguish it from country music.