Before Missy and Timbaland and the extended Fugee family repurposed reggae idioms to drive hip hop to new commercial and artistic heights. Before Latifah borrowed “U.N.I.T.Y.” from Josey Wales and Method Man channeled Ninjaman to help “Bring The Pain.” Before Snoop flung doggamuffin style on The Chronic. Before dub was disguised as “trip hop.” Before California ska punks took over MTV with a “brand new sound” that was half a century in the making. Before terms like “wicked” and “big up” entered the global vernacular. Before the U.S. President and First Lady greeted one another with rude bwoy fist-bumps.

Keep going. Back before KRS-ONE re-plunked a classic Studio One bassline to create a hip-hop masterpiece called “The Bridge Is Over” (a song that proved the bridges linking Africa, Jamaica, and New York City were actually stronger than ever). Before a “culturally confused” Jamaican expatriate named Shinehead toasted, rapped, and crooned Michael Jackson tunes over rub-a-dub riddims for NYCʼs African Love sound system. Rewind even further.

Wheel it back before 1968, when a young DJ known as Kool Herc relocated from the pressure cooker of Kingston, Jamaica to a promised land known as The Bronx where he and the Herculords would soon rekindle yard-style sound system traditions: ridiculous stacks of speakers in the park, microphone controllers rocking off the headtop until the breakadawn.

Go all the way back and what do you discover? Many of the breakthroughs usually attributed to hip hop were first achieved by mobile Jamaican discotheques competing for dancehall supremacy. Of course American rap producers made giant strides as well—cutting breakbeats and splicing samples into a sonic collage that could set bodies in motion while stopping time in its tracks. But thereʼs no denying that the basic concept of deconstructing a familiar track, and then chatting over this remixed (dub) version to create something new—rap music, by any other name—began in .

Is it any coincidence that so many great MCs—from Slick Rick to Busta Rhymes to Biggie Smalls— trace their lineage to a single Caribbean island thatʼs slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut? To make sense of this, weʼve got to rewind some more. When the English captured Jamaica in 1655, many of them fought with the Spanish who gave them their freedom and then fled to the mountains resisting the British for many years to maintain their freedom, becoming known as Maroons. Jamaican slaves came mainly from West Africa—the Ashanti, Coromantee, Mandingo and Yoruba. In the unquenchable warrior spirit of resistance, drumming was used to send coded messages from plantation to plantation, and despite being banned by slavemasters, the beat still goes on.

Nightfall, Chocomo Lawn, 1950-supʼm. Youʼve tuned to the hitbound sound, Sir Coxsoneʼs Downbeat the Ruler. In sessions with King Stitt the Ugly One pon the microphone center. Big amps and bass boxes thump beneath a Caribbean moon while the white rum sells briskly. “No matter what the people say / These sounds leads the way / Itʼs the order of the day,” cries the man with the twisted features. At the control tower might be Prince Buster or Scratch Perry mixing brand-new musical discs at with a flick of the wrist.

Early toasters like Count Machuki, Sir Lord Comic, and King Sporty set the trend with a blend of improvisation, witty repartee, and repurposing familiar catchphrases drawn both from the Caribbean oral tradition and the live jive of American radio disc-jockeys playing jazz and blues records whose signals occasionally filtered in from New Orleans and Miami radio stations. Pioneering producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd—often referred to as Jamaicaʼs Berry Gordy—got his start as a soundman, making regular trips to the States in search of smokinʼ 45s. The labels got scraped off and the discs were stockpiled like so many sonic ICBMs in an ongoing struggle for dancehall dominance. As the story goes, the rise of rock n roll made it increasingly exhausting and time-consuming to find the right records. So instead of chasing elusive cuts by the likes of Louis Jordan and Ruth Brown, Coxsone and rival soundman Duke Reid decided to cut their own records. They learned how to make the bass fat and round, they knew players of instruments who could match those pounding pianos and horny horns. Why not try a ting?

Long before “King Tim III” and “Rappers Delight” there was something else: music so raw it couldnʼt play on Jamaicaʼs government-controlled airwaves. Tunes so tough people (particularly poor people) couldnʼt live without them. Whether ska or blues, rock steady, reggae, or ragga—you could find it in the dancehall.

Forty years ago, around the time Neil Armstrong was kicking up space dust on the moon, the dancehall became ground zero for a massive cultural blast-off. Leading the way was a 2-year-old Rastafarian welder named Ewart Beckford. He described himself in an early song as “Your ace from outer space,” and when he first recorded his jive talking for posterity it was one giant leap for mankind—exerting a transformative influence on the popular music of Planet Earth. “Did you hear the news?” said the man known to his fans as U-Roy “I canʼt lose with the stuff I use—ya ya YEAH!” Behold the planetʼs first rap star. From his very first recording, a raw duet with Peter Tosh called “Rightful Ruler,” U-Roy had the timing to go with his rhyming. He didnʼt just spit a few phrases here and there. He rode the riddim like a champion jockey from the starting gate to the last furlong. Whenever he held the microphone at one of King Tubbyʼs Home-Town Hi-Fi sessions, crowds felt the delightfully manic energy and responded in kind. Policeman-turned-soundman-turned producer Duke Reid invited U-Roy to commit his dancehall dialectics to wax. The DJ dropped his brilliantly bugged “chick-a-bow” jive into the nooks and crannies of a remixed version of the Paragonsʼ stately “Wear You To The Ball” and the first rap record was pressed in 1969.

No, he wasnʼt rhyming over “Good Times” or “Impeach The President.” The musical flavor was rock steady, a romantic, clean-cut precedent to the hungry-belly reggae made famous by Bob Marley and the Wailing Wailers. But something profound happened when the singer assumed a supporting role while the man talking over the track became the star. U-Roy was that man. His first three singles for Reidʼs Treasure Isle label shot to Nos. 1, 2, and 3 on the Jamaican charts, holding those positions for six solid weeks. Suddenly “DJ music” seemed like the only sound that mattered.

Now, forty years since Y-Roy declared “This station rules the nation,” his words have proven more prescient than he couldʼve ever imagined. Rapping on the mike has become a billion-dollar worldwide industry and a sort of global youth Esperanto, helping “distant relatives” all over the world to communicate the joys and pains of life on planet rock. Even as under-rated Jamaican pioneers roam shoeless through the streets of Kingston, peddling scratchy 45s from cardboard boxes.

“The people who do the work never get pay,” U-Roy said wistfully during a 1994 VIBE interview. “Right now the money that I see some young youths gettinʼ—what I used to get is nothing comparing to these guys. But I no really have time to grudge these youths. I have my fair share of stardom, which I appreciate. I have my little house, I have my family, and everything cool. I been eatinʼsome food and I know Iʼm not the worst. Hey! Whatever happens for me is just… just love. This dancehall thing been going on for years. I really like rap—especially the more cultural side of hip hop. Itʼs still a form of DJ, but they call it rap. Singers come in and sing, rapper come in and say something—you know? It no different. Hey—I love it because it make it look like what I was doing wasnʼt something stupid .

” Far from it. But the time has come to respect the architects.

Distant Relatives traces the direct line from U-Royʼs breakthrough moment to Run D.M.C. and Yellowmanʼs groundbreaking collaboration “Roots Rap Reggae” through Supercat introducing Biggie Smalls to the world on the “Dolly My Baby” remix and Shabba Ranks and KRS-One joining forces on “The Jam” right up through Damian Marley and Nasʼs double-Grammy-winning “Road To Zion.”

Distant Relatives is an album created by two great artists to explore and celebrate the correlations and deep-rooted connections between reggae and hip hop, tracing both sounds back to the African motherland that is both the cradle of humanity and the wellspring of mankindʼs music. Unlike all previous collaborations between Jamaican and American artists, Distant Relatives is neither a remix nor a featured guest spot on a single track but a fully collaborative effort filling an entire album, opening new avenues of musical expression. Plans for a tour, documentary film, and symposium are also in the .

And who better to fulfill this long-overdue mission? The youngest son of the legendary Bob Marley, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley garnered his own place in music history when he became the first ever reggae artist to win a Grammy Award outside of the Reggae category, taking home an award for Best Urban/Alternative performance for his smash 2005 single “Welcome To Jamrock.” The acclaimed breakthrough album of the same name also won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album.

A hip-hop icon since his immortal guest verse on Main Sourceʼs 1991 “Live At The Barbeque,” Nas burst out of from the Queensbridge housing projects, a hotbed of rap artistry since the early ʼ80s. The son of jazz trumpeter Olu Dara, Nas has since gone on to sell over 20 million albums worldwide over the span of his legendary career, and has acted as an ambassador for hip-hop culture throughout the .

“When we first started working, I was thinking about what direction we should go in,” Nas explained during a recent discussion at the Grammy Museum. “Cause itʼs all kinda like the same—reggae, rap. But it went to its own thing… We had a few concepts. All basically around empowerment in a way, cause if weʼre talking about Distant Relatives weʼre talking about the human family”

“I didnʼt want it to sound like something that would be typical of me, neither typical of Nas,” said Damian Marley, who produced much of the album. “But something where you can still see how thereʼs a middle ground in the music. But where you can still hear something that is reminiscent of either of us… Itʼs been really fun. Cause weʼve been going in the booth together. Especially as a lyricist, itʼs really like iron sharpened iron. You canʼt slack off right now. Itʼs a great experience. And a learning experience for me too.” And the learning experience extends to young listeners who will surely be enlightened and educated about the shared cultural legacy of Africa, America, and the Caribbean. “The whole process is gonna be fun,” Nas adds. “I think we can have fun helping people. When I think about things we wanna do with this album, itʼs just limitless.”

© 2009 Rob Kenner All Rights Reserved.