The Mediation of Reggae During its ‘Golden Age’ in the British Music Press

This article examines the mediation of British reggae culture in the 1970s in Melody Maker and Black Music. In Melody Maker, rock critics come to terms with this new music culture in real time. Black Music comes into being in 1973, orienting itself around this new British reggae market. This analysis explores each publication’s discursive construction of itself, its audience, and crucially, this new Jamaican form of popular music, in the context of their common ownership by IPC Magazines Ltd. The analysis of reggae in the British music press reveals the editorial and discursive strategies employed by Melody Maker to make sense of reggae. In this context, the reportage of reggae journalist Carl Gayle in Black Music provided an important counter to the dominant narratives mediating black British music culture. This article contributes to debates about black British music culture, and on the larger phenomenon of European writers addressing popular music cultures of the black Atlantic in the twentieth century.