The Rise of West Indian Culture and Influence on Brooklyn Hip-Hop

Hip-Hop music is an outgrowth of the rhythms and toasting traditions of Reggae music. The large Carribean communities in boroughs of New York brought with them the musical stylings of the Islands that they emigrated from. The borough that had the largest concentration of West Indian immigrants was Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Hip-Hop artists benefitted greatly from the influence of Reggae music.

The influx of West Indians into the United States is based, in part, in the Post World War II Immigration laws of Britain. A labor shortage after World War II led many employers to recruit job candidates from former British colonies. By 1948, Britain passed the Nationality Act, which offered British citizenship to all subjects of its colonial Empire. This led to an influx of immigrants into Britain, which included many from the West Indies.

Britain’s economy grew stronger after World War II, with the national income almost doubling by the end of the war. Which the British economy thriving, many Jamaicans migrated to Britain for economic reasons.


The democratic-socialist government of Michael Manley halted the economic growth of Jamaica, stopping its push toward industrialization. While the country tried to decide whether to push forward with industrialization or remain an agricultural society, the economy faltered. Without a distribution of wealth, many Jamaicans were left without access to property. In 1961, the year before independence, 10 percent of the population owned 64 percent of the land and this pattern continued to grow in the 1970s. The standard of living declined due to economic inflation and low salaries. By 1975, unemployment rates in Jamaicans hovered around 25%. The poor economic conditions led to the exodus of nearly half of all Jamaican professional from the island. During this period, Jamaica suffered from a "brain drain," losing perhaps as much as 40% of its middle class.

The mass migration began in the 1960s, after the US government relaxed the strict quota laws that restricted the movement of non-Western Europeans into the United States in 1965. The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act changed the U.S. immigration policy and, inadvertently, opened the way for a surge in immigration from the Caribbean. During the mid to later 1970s, a wave of Jamaican immigrants flooded into New York. This was initiated mostly by the tightening of British immigration laws in the mid 1960s.


As the Caribbean migration to the United States progressed, many migrants settled in large urban settings with the majority settling in New York and Florida. The boroughs of New York became the biggest recipient of West Indian immigrants, which Brooklyn being the largest of all. It was in this setting where the Reggae movement and the Hip-Hop movement meshed and grew together.

Clive Campbell a.k.a Kool Herc, Hip-Hop’s acknowledged founding father, was born in Jamaica on April 16, 1955 and emigrated to the Bronx in 1967. It was Herc’s knowledge of Reggae music that led to his incorporation of breakbeats into the hip-hop scene. Jamaican records are recorded with dub versions, which is an instrumental version of the song. Herc knew that the instrumental break, or rhythm section of a song was the part that people liked to dance to, so he mixed two copies of the same record together to extend the break. So the Jamaican influence of Hip-Hop was evident from the very infantile stages of the music’s roots.

Hip-hop and reggae have a lot in common. Both developed out of a poverty stricken environment. Both created a counter-culture movement that was influenced by the environment it grew out of. Both grew to embrace social maladies that were outgrowths of the social conditions that they were formed in, i.e. drugs, sexual exploitation and violence. Both forms of music were able to grow without a true infrastructure during its infancy, and because of this, they both relied on the underground networks of music sharing and street marketing. Reggae music and Hip-Hop grew in the streets. DJ’s spread the music throughout communities using their mobile sound systems. Both benefited from a mixtape type of music sharing that helped spread the music from community to community.

While many prominent Hip-Hop artists such as KRS-One, Heavy D, and The Fugees have been heavily influenced by Reggae music, the influence of Reggae music on Brooklyn Hip-Hop is also quite evident. Whereas Hip-Hop artists from the Bronx clearly acknowledge the Reggae roots of the music, nowhere is it more apparent in the sound than in Brooklyn. Brooklyn rap artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Shyne, Busta Rhymes, Mos Def, Chubb Rock, Jeru tha Damaja and Special Ed all displayed heavy Reggae influences in their music. Hip-Hop owes a huge debt of gratitude to Reggae music, and nowhere has the contribution of Reggae music to the genre been more apparent than the borough of Brooklyn.