I recently had a birthday, and a lot of my friends on Facebook noticed. Amongst the many birthday wishes, a number of people noted that my age on FB is 96. I explained to them that my age on Facebook is listed in reggae years, not calendar years.
Of course, the next question I got was, “How do you calculate your age in reggae years?” I had never thought about it before, but it was an excellent question. So I reverse engineered Facebook’s calculations and came up with the result.
Here’s the formula. The year you started working in reggae is your reggae birth year. The current calendar year minus your reggae birth year equals your bass age. (This assumes that a) you are still working in reggae and b) that you have worked continuously in the field; no extensive detours into other idioms like gospel or R&B.)
Now multiply your bass age by the Alms House Coefficient or AHC of 2.027027. (The AHC represents the difference between the amount of aging that takes place in a year in reggae versus the amount of aging that takes place in a non-reggae year.) The product of the bass age and the AHC is your reggae adjusted correction (RAC) in years. Now add your RAC to your age when you started working in reggae; the sum of the two is your age in reggae years.
For the math-challenged, here’s an example: You are currently 40 years old according to your driver’s license. You started playing reggae professionally at 25. So your bass age is 15 (40-25). Multiply 15 x the AHC of 2.027027. This gives you a RAC of 30.4. Now add your age when you started working in reggae (25) to the RAC (25 + 30.4) to get your age in reggae years. Congratulations! Thanks to the magic in the music, you’re now 55.4 years old! Praises!
Ska, however, keeps this sax player young!
Does this apply to Reggae Selectors too ?
I’m not sure! I don’t have enough data to do the calculations.
Wow , is this why I grayed prematurely ? Andy ,this Reggae Age/Years is some funny stuff !
You see I’m either 91 Yrs. old or 98 Reggae Yrs. old . I feel as if I started working in reggae , the minute I got my first Bob Marley lp ” Live” & Toots & The Maytals “Funky Kingston”. It took work to have friends listen to it when I was just 15yrs. old back in 1976 . But then when I became a volunteer at a local radio station at age 24 , hosting a 6 hour Reggae program , that’s when I think I can say the real work started , that & trying to promote concerts of regional reggae bands, and an international act once in awhile !
I tease my wife, who I happen to meet at the radio station , that Reggae is my first real girlfriend, first love. She completely understands , although at times I don’t !
Good on the missus!
D@mn you Andy! You just made me 115 years old! A wha do yu?
Although, every so many years, I get sick and tired of the sharks, predators, dilettantes, hangers-on etc. in the reggae scene and ‘retire’ from it all, which makes my wife very happy…for awhile. Problem is, if I’m not playing music, I start getting more & more miserable (one of the symptoms of reggae withdrawal) until my wife finally says “why don’t you go jam with some of your friends? You’re being too much of a b!tch around here!” So I get together with a couple of musician friends, and afterwards we’ll listen to the recording of the jam and say “hey! That sounds pretty sweet! We ought to really do something with this”…and the whole infernal cycle begins once again…
Herb, I can testify with authority that this is true. Let’s play before we get old…