Heavyweight ReggaeHeavyweight Reggae

Heavyweight Reggae joined SomaFM in 2020, alongside Vaporwaves and n5MD Radio, twenty years after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station in February 2000. It remains the only reggae channel the network runs. SomaFM has taken listener donations and carried no advertising throughout, which is what lets a channel stay this far inside one tradition instead of broadening out. Nothing here is a crossover cut.

The rotation is foundational Jamaican music played without rush — Alton Ellis and The Heptones for rocksteady, Johnny Clarke and Yabby You for roots, Lee Perry and The Upsetters for dub, U-Roy and Lone Ranger toasting over the top of it, and Linton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry. It favours the original recordings over everything that came after.