On reggae, resistance, and what gets lost when the music travels further than the meaning
The bass came first.
Low. Patient. Certain.
It settled into the room the way memory does—without asking permission. A small winery in New York, packed tight with people who had shown up not just to hear music, but to honour something that had survived fifty years.
Steel Pulse.
Fifty years of reggae.
Fifty years of holding a line.
There was something tender about the night. No stadium gloss. No distance between stage and body. Just people leaning into the sound, letting it carry them. Heads nodding. Shoulders rolling. That slow, collective sway reggae teaches you—move too fast and you miss it.
Steel Pulse began in Handsworth, which still feels improbable to people who want their resistance to arrive neatly packaged, sun-soaked, and island-born. But Handsworth makes sense if you know the conditions: policing that lingered too long, jobs that never came, racism that pressed daily against Black bodies trying to breathe. Reggae arrived as response.
From the beginning, Steel Pulse made music that named things plainly—state violence, surveillance, the fragility of Black life under white authority. Songs that were not metaphor or suggestion. Songs that said: this is happening to us.
Which is why Hands Up, Don’t Shoot still lands in the body before it lands in the ear. The phrase is now globally recognisable, folded into protest chants and headlines.
As my friend and I swayed—quietly, respectfully, letting the rhythm do what it does—I noticed an older white man drifting through the crowd. Smiling. Dancing. Arms lifted high above his head, singing “don’t shoot” with the ease of someone for whom the words had never carried consequence.
He meant no harm.
That’s what made it heavy.
The hook had reached him.
The meaning had not.
For many Black people—especially Black men—that stance is not playful. It’s muscle memory. It’s fear stored in the shoulders. It’s instruction passed down without ceremony. Watching him move so freely through the room, I felt that familiar tightening—the moment when resistance becomes costume.
And my mind kept circling back to how often this happens. According to recent data from England and Wales, Black people are arrested at more than twice the rate of white people — about 20.4 arrests per 1,000 Black people compared to 9.4 per 1,000 white people. In the United States, Black Americans — who make up roughly 13 % of the population — account for a disproportionately high share of arrests and incarceration, with Black individuals arrested at much higher rates than white Americans and representing around 37 % of the prison population.
How many people sing “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”—a line popularised by Bob Marley—without ever pausing to ask what mental slavery is and what decolonising of self actually demands. What must be confronted. What lies have to be unlearned. What comfort has to be disturbed.
The melody carries us.
The politics fall behind.
This is what I mean by sanitised resistance.
Reggae was born from struggle—shaped by Rastafari philosophy, anti-colonial consciousness, and the material realities of poverty, state neglect, and racial violence in Jamaica and across the Black diaspora. Artists like Peter Tosh and Burning Spear didn’t write songs to soothe systems. They wrote songs to confront them. Reggae was education. Warning. Nonviolent protest carried on basslines.
But somewhere along the way, it was softened.
Repackaged as vibe.
Filed under world music.
Sold as sunshine and good energy.
The industry lifted the sweetness and left the sting behind. Now reggae travels the world more easily than its politics ever did. You hear it in football stadiums and festival fields—thousands of voices singing in unison, bodies moving together, harmony achieved for a few minutes at a time.
How many of those voices carry the song beyond the chorus?
How many leave the venue and write to their local representative?
Show up to a peaceful protest?
Even pause long enough to name injustice in Sudan, in Congo, in places where suffering is inconvenient, complex, or far from the spotlight?
Enjoyment has replaced engagement.
And to be clear, this isn’t an argument against joy. Reggae has always known how to hold joy and grief in the same breath. But joy without responsibility becomes erasure. Beauty without context becomes consumption.
That night reminded me of something I already knew but needed to feel again: resistance music does not automatically produce resistant listeners.
Reggae can still wake us up—but only if we let it.
Only if we allow it to unsettle the room, not just soundtrack it.
Only if we remember that these songs were never meant to be harmless.
They were meant to move us.
Not just side to side—but somewhere else entirely.
And I don’t doubt that we still need this kind of resistance.
This fire.
This slow-burn insistence that reaches places policy briefs and political speeches never touch.
But what I keep turning over, long after the last note fades, is this:
How do we carry that fire out of the room?
How do we translate basslines into backbone, chorus into consequence?
How do we make sure the music doesn’t stop at feeling—
but becomes practice, risk, refusal?
If reggae taught us how to survive,
what will it take for us to let it teach us how to move forward?
