a Rastaf tag for all manner of social and political oppression, and eventually even of aesthetic oppression, a point to which this research will return.
Over the course of the next several decades, Rastafarianism became increasingly secular and increasingly associated with one major form of expression: music. It is linked to the emergence of hip-hop music in the US urban youth culture, but more important is its origin in the species of pan-Africanist ethos that grew out of attempts to mediate the colonialist/ghetto experience in Jamaica. Indeed, the expression of that ethos has been connected to reggae, which in many (but not all) respects overlaps and converges with Rastafarianism. Grundmann (30) says that Jamaican Reggae, which was a production of Jamaica's lower-working-class culture, had a "historical function and political heritage [] to emancipate its people." It had affinities with the Jamaican musical rhythmic pop-music form known as ska, which emerged in Jamaica in the late 1950s and which was the basis for several isolated international top-40 hits, such as "My Boy Lollipop" in 1964 (King 43). However, Rastafarianism, with its didactic roots, exerted emphasis in a way that distinguished Rasta reggae from the root musical forms.
Acknowledgment and critique of, as well as resistance to the culture of oppression were identified with Jamaican Reggae, in ways that may have overlapped with Rastafarianism but that were distinct from it. Chude-Sokei says that in Jamaican culture, which historically marginalized African-origin experience, "the meanings of Africa . . . are adapted to fit the local notions of black identity and cultural survival" (Chude-Sokei 81). Rasta rhetoric made a specific connection to Africa and things African that remains a core element of discourse about Rasta reggae (Hong 18).
A certain momentum was gained in both Rasta culture and reggae music (and the melding of the two) during the 1970s and 1980s. ...