It may be played on repeat in tourist bars across Vietnam (and much of SE Asia) but reggae music has yet get traction in the local market. Hanoi-based journalist, Marianne Brown recently talked to artists such as JGKid who are looking to change this trend and put a Vietnamese stamp on the most prolific music genre to come out of Caribbean in the past 50 years.
Hip Hop, metal and house music have penetrated the Vietnamese music scene over the past few years but reggae music has, by enlarge, failed to garner the same popularity among the current generation of young, international-minded Vietnamese.
According to JGkid, the tonal Vietnamese language is not doesn’t lend itself well to reggae beats. But with a solid hip hop background (a genre which was spawned in part by reggae) the transition was fairly easy.
Listen to the full interview where JGkid and others talk about political sensitivities (reggae, at its core, has a tradition of social criticism) surrounding the genre and why they continue to leave their comfort zones to master it.
[Photo via Spyros Papaspyropoulos]
