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Lush green Jamaican countryside with tropical vegetation and misty Blue Mountains in the distance
Music Video Travel Guide

Smile Jamaica by Chronixx
Experiencing the Real Jamaica

In 2014, a young artist from Spanish Town released a song that was less a single and more an invitation — to see Jamaica as Jamaicans see it. This is a travel guide to the Jamaica that tourists rarely find: the communities, the countryside, the mountains, and the people that Chronixx celebrates.

Read the Guide FAQ

Smile Jamaica by Chronixx was filmed across multiple locations throughout Jamaica — Kingston communities, countryside roads, coastal villages, and rural landscapes — presenting a panoramic love letter to everyday Jamaican life. Released in 2014, the song became an anthem of the Reggae Revival movement, a generation of young Jamaican artists who reconnected with roots reggae consciousness while bringing contemporary energy and production to the music. Chronixx, born Jamar McNaughton in Spanish Town, St. Catherine, is the son of Chronicle, a roots reggae artist, and grew up steeped in the musical traditions that his generation is revitalizing. This guide uses Smile Jamaica as a lens for experiencing the Jamaica that exists beyond the resort strip — the real communities, local markets, mountain roads, and coastal towns where Jamaican life unfolds in its full, unpackaged complexity. It is a guide for travelers who want to see the island the way Chronixx sees it: beautiful, resilient, and worthy of celebration.

The Music

The Song: Smile Jamaica (2014)

A roots reggae anthem that sees beauty where others see deficiency — and invites the world to look again.

A Love Letter in One Drop

Smile Jamaica is built on the classic one-drop reggae rhythm — the bass and drums establishing a groove that is simultaneously relaxed and purposeful, while Chronixx's voice floats above with a warmth that feels like the Jamaican sun itself. The song celebrates Jamaica not as a tourist destination but as a homeland: the smell of food cooking in a kitchen, the sound of children playing in a yard, the feeling of community that sustains people through hardship. There is no bravado in Smile Jamaica, no anger, no political manifesto. There is simply love — deep, specific, unsentimental love for a place and its people.

The lyrics move through images of everyday Jamaican life with the attention of someone who has truly seen what he is describing. This is not the Jamaica of tourism brochures — there are no pristine beaches, no luxury resorts, no carefully staged cultural performances. Instead, there are real people in real communities doing real things: cooking, talking, walking, living. The song's genius is in its specificity — by showing Jamaica in its ordinary beauty, Chronixx makes a more powerful case for the island than any marketing campaign ever could.

The Music Video as Travel Document

The Smile Jamaica music video functions as a kind of travel document — a visual guide to the Jamaica that most tourists never see. Director Xtreme Arts captured scenes across the island: children in school uniforms walking through Kingston communities, vendors at local markets, farmers in countryside fields, fishermen at coastal harbors, elderly people on their verandas watching the world pass. The camera treats every scene with equal dignity, finding beauty in the mundane and significance in the everyday.

For the culturally aware traveler, the Smile Jamaica video serves as both inspiration and instruction. It shows you where to look (community life, countryside, markets, churches) and how to look (with warmth, with respect, with genuine interest rather than touristic curiosity). The people in the video are not performing for the camera — they are living their lives, and the camera's respectful observation of that life is a model for how visitors should approach the communities they visit. If you watch the video before traveling to Jamaica, you will arrive with a better sense of what you are looking for than any guidebook could provide.

The Reggae Revival Context

Smile Jamaica arrived at a pivotal moment in Jamaican music. By the early 2010s, dancehall had been Jamaica's dominant popular music form for nearly three decades. While dancehall produced extraordinary artists and music, some younger Jamaicans felt that the genre's commercial orientation had come at the expense of the spiritual, political, and cultural depth that had characterized roots reggae. A loose collective of young artists — Chronixx, Protoje, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, Jah9, and others — began making music that reconnected with roots reggae consciousness while maintaining contemporary relevance.

This was not a rejection of dancehall — many Reggae Revival artists respected and were influenced by dancehall. Rather, it was a reclamation of a space within Jamaican music for the kind of conscious, roots-oriented expression that had been marginalized by commercial pressures. Chronixx's Smile Jamaica became one of the movement's defining songs because it embodied the Revival's core values: love for Jamaica, respect for roots traditions, modern production quality, and a message of cultural pride that resonated with both Jamaican audiences and the international reggae community.

The Locations

The Jamaica of Smile Jamaica

A guide to the places and experiences the video celebrates — from Kingston's communities to the Blue Mountains.

Kingston Communities

The Kingston shown in Smile Jamaica is not the Kingston of the Bob Marley Museum or the Devon House mansion — it is the Kingston of everyday life in the city's residential communities. The video captures the rhythms of community existence: gates opening in the morning, vendors setting up their stalls, children heading to school, elders occupying their customary spots on the veranda. This is the Kingston that over 600,000 people call home, and it is accessible to any visitor willing to step outside the tourist infrastructure.

Visiting Kingston's communities requires intention and respect. You cannot simply wander into residential neighborhoods and observe — this is not a safari, and the people who live there are not exhibits. Instead, engage with Kingston through its public spaces: its markets (Coronation Market is the largest), its parks (Emancipation Park, Hope Botanical Gardens), its restaurants and cookshops, its churches, and its cultural events. If you want a deeper community experience, hire a local guide who can facilitate introductions and ensure that your visit contributes to rather than extracts from the community.

The Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains, rising to over 2,200 meters (7,400 feet) east of Kingston, are one of Jamaica's most extraordinary natural landscapes and a world away from the beach-oriented tourism of the north coast. The mountains are home to some of the world's most prized coffee (Blue Mountain Coffee), lush cloud forests, endemic bird species, and small communities that maintain agricultural traditions stretching back generations. The hike to Blue Mountain Peak — Jamaica's highest point — is one of the island's most rewarding experiences, typically undertaken in the pre-dawn hours to arrive at the summit for sunrise.

The Blue Mountains represent the Jamaica that Chronixx celebrates in Smile Jamaica — not the Jamaica of resorts and beaches but the Jamaica of mist-covered mountains, terraced coffee farms, and communities where life moves at a pace determined by the land rather than by tourism schedules. Visiting the Blue Mountains requires planning: the roads are steep and winding, accommodation is limited, and the weather can change rapidly. But the reward is an encounter with a Jamaica that most visitors never see — a Jamaica of extraordinary beauty, agricultural heritage, and mountain community life that has its own rhythms and traditions entirely distinct from the coastal areas.

Portland Parish

Portland, on Jamaica's northeastern coast, is often described as the island's most beautiful parish — and it is one of the least developed for mass tourism. The parish's landscape combines dramatic coastal scenery (the Blue Lagoon, Frenchman's Cove, Reach Falls) with lush rainforest that climbs into the John Crow Mountains. Port Antonio, the parish capital, was Jamaica's original tourist destination in the late 19th century but has since been bypassed by the development of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, leaving it relatively unspoiled.

Portland represents the kind of Jamaica that Smile Jamaica invites visitors to discover: a place of natural beauty that has not been packaged for mass consumption. Boston Bay, where jerk cooking is said to have originated, offers some of the most authentic jerk pork and chicken in Jamaica. The Rio Grande river rafting experience (on bamboo rafts, not inflatable boats) was pioneered by Errol Flynn, who lived in Portland in the 1940s and 1950s. The Maroon community of Moore Town, deep in the interior, maintains the traditions of the Windward Maroons — descendants of enslaved people who fought for and won their freedom from the British colonial regime centuries ago.

Local Markets and Countryside Roads

The markets and countryside roads of Jamaica are the connective tissue of Jamaican life — the places where food is grown, sold, and shared, where community relationships are maintained, and where the island's agricultural traditions continue to function. Coronation Market in Kingston, Mandeville Market in Manchester parish, May Pen Market in Clarendon, and countless smaller markets across the island offer experiences that no resort can replicate. These are not "authentic experiences" staged for visitors — they are the actual commercial and social infrastructure of Jamaican communities.

Jamaica's countryside roads, winding through parishes like Clarendon, Manchester, St. Elizabeth, and St. Ann, pass through landscapes of extraordinary beauty: rolling farmland, small villages, roadside fruit stands, churches, schools, and the ordinary scenery of Jamaican rural life. Traveling these roads — whether by route taxi, rental car, or organized tour — gives you access to the Jamaica that exists between the tourist hotspots. Stop at roadside vendors for fresh mangoes, coconut water, or roasted corn. Pull over at a cookshop for lunch. Talk to the people you meet. This is how you experience the Jamaica that Chronixx is singing about.

The Artist

Chronixx: Son of Spanish Town, Voice of Revival

Born into reggae, raised in Spanish Town, he became the leading voice of a generation determined to keep roots alive.

Spanish Town Roots

Jamar Rolando McNaughton was born on October 10, 1992, in Spanish Town, St. Catherine — the same city that would later produce Koffee. His father, known as Chronicle, was a roots reggae artist, and young Jamar grew up in a household where music was not entertainment but identity. He began writing songs as a child and was recording by his early teens. His stage name, Chronixx, is a variation on his father's name — a deliberate acknowledgment of lineage and continuity that extends beyond personal family into the broader generational transmission of roots reggae culture.

Spanish Town shaped Chronixx much as it later shaped Koffee — it gave him an understanding of Jamaican life that was grounded in community reality rather than music industry mythology. Spanish Town is not Kingston. It does not have Kingston's concentration of studios, labels, and industry infrastructure. Growing up there meant that Chronixx's relationship to music was communal and cultural before it was commercial — he learned to make music in the context of community, family, and spiritual practice rather than in the context of the music business. This foundation is audible in everything he creates.

The Rise of the Revival

Chronixx's emergence in the early 2010s coincided with the broader Reggae Revival movement. His early singles — "Start a Fyah," "Here Comes Trouble," "Smile Jamaica" — announced a young artist with a deep understanding of roots reggae tradition and the charisma to make it relevant to a new generation. Unlike some revivalists who slavishly copied the production styles of the 1970s, Chronixx incorporated modern elements — hip-hop-influenced rhythms, contemporary production techniques, and a vocal style that felt as indebted to R&B as to roots reggae — creating music that honored the past without being trapped by it.

His debut album, "Chronology" (2017), was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album and cemented his position as the leading voice of the Reggae Revival. The album's range — from the hard-hitting "Likes" to the spiritual "Skankin' Sweet" to the deeply personal "Majesty" — demonstrated an artistic maturity that belied Chronixx's youth. He has since become one of the most internationally recognized Jamaican artists of his generation, performing at festivals worldwide while maintaining his connection to the Jamaican community that shaped him.

Keeping Roots Alive

Chronixx's significance extends beyond his personal artistry. He represents a generation of Jamaican artists who are actively working to ensure that roots reggae remains a living tradition rather than a museum piece. Through his music, his public statements, and his lifestyle — he is a practicing Rastafarian who lives according to the faith's principles — Chronixx demonstrates that roots consciousness is not a marketing strategy but an authentic way of being in the world.

For visitors to Jamaica, Chronixx's existence is both an invitation and a challenge. The invitation is to engage with Jamaica's living musical culture — not just the legacy of Bob Marley and the golden era but the contemporary artists who are carrying the tradition forward. The challenge is to do so authentically: to support the Reggae Revival by attending concerts, purchasing music, and engaging with artists' communities rather than simply consuming their output on streaming platforms. If you visit Jamaica, seek out live performances by Revival artists. Attend Reggae Month events in February. Engage with the community that sustains these artists. The Reggae Revival is not a product to be consumed — it is a cultural movement to be participated in.

Travel Guide

How to Experience the Real Jamaica

Practical advice for traveling Jamaica beyond the resort strip, inspired by the Jamaica Chronixx celebrates.

Breaking Out of the Resort Bubble

Jamaica's tourism industry is designed to keep visitors within a carefully managed infrastructure: all-inclusive resorts, organized excursions, and tourist-oriented attractions. This system generates significant revenue for the country but also creates a version of Jamaica that bears little resemblance to how Jamaicans actually live. The Jamaica of Smile Jamaica — the communities, the countryside, the markets, the mountains — exists just outside this bubble, accessible to any visitor willing to step beyond it.

Breaking out of the resort bubble does not require recklessness. It requires planning, awareness, and the right local connections. Stay at a guesthouse instead of a resort. Eat at cookshops instead of hotel restaurants. Use route taxis instead of chartered buses. Hire local guides who know the communities you want to visit. These choices do not just give you a more authentic experience — they ensure that your tourism dollars flow into local communities rather than into international hotel chains. The economic justice dimension of travel choices is something that Chronixx's music implicitly addresses: whose Jamaica are you experiencing, and who benefits from your visit?

A Smile Jamaica Itinerary

Day 1-2: Kingston. Start in the capital. Visit Emancipation Park, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and Hope Botanical Gardens during the day. Eat at a local cookshop — Scotchies on the waterfront or any community restaurant recommended by your accommodation. Walk through Half Way Tree and experience the pace of Kingston life. In the evening, attend a live music event if one is happening — check for performances at venues like Dub Club, Usain Bolt's Tracks and Records, or community events listed in local media.

Day 3: Blue Mountains. Drive or arrange transport into the Blue Mountains. Visit a coffee farm to understand Blue Mountain Coffee's production process. If you are physically fit, consider the pre-dawn hike to Blue Mountain Peak for sunrise. Stay overnight at one of the small guesthouses in the mountain communities — Strawberry Hill, Lime Tree Farm, or community-based accommodations in Section or Hagley Gap.

Day 4-5: Portland Parish. Travel to Portland on the northeast coast. Base yourself in Port Antonio. Visit Boston Bay for jerk cooking, Reach Falls for one of Jamaica's most beautiful waterfalls, and the Blue Lagoon. Take a bamboo raft trip on the Rio Grande. Eat at local restaurants in Port Antonio. Explore the Maroon heritage at Moore Town if the community is receiving visitors.

Day 6-7: Countryside. Drive through the interior parishes — St. Ann, Clarendon, Manchester, St. Elizabeth. Stop at roadside markets. Visit Treasure Beach in St. Elizabeth for a community-based coastal experience that is the antithesis of resort tourism. Eat at Jack Sprat or another local restaurant. Stay at a community guesthouse or villa. Experience the pace of rural Jamaica — slow, connected to the land, and deeply different from both Kingston's urban energy and the north coast's tourist infrastructure.

The Reggae Revival Experience

If you want to engage directly with the Reggae Revival, timing matters. February is Reggae Month in Jamaica, with concerts, lectures, and events celebrating the genre across the island. Major festivals like Rebel Salute (January), Reggae Sumfest (July), and the Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival feature both established and emerging artists. Smaller events — community stage shows, sound system dances, album launch concerts — happen throughout the year and offer more intimate encounters with the music and its community.

Follow Revival artists on social media to track their performance schedules. Attend concerts at Kingston venues. Purchase music directly from artists or from Jamaican music platforms rather than relying solely on international streaming services. If you meet artists or members of their community, treat them as people first and celebrities second — the Revival community is relatively small and personal, and genuine human engagement is valued more than fan worship. Bring respect, bring curiosity, and bring economic support. That is how you participate in the Revival rather than merely consuming it.

Cultural Context

The Jamaica Beyond the Brochure

Understanding the gap between tourist Jamaica and real Jamaica — and why crossing that gap matters.

Two Jamaicas

There is a persistent gap between the Jamaica presented to tourists and the Jamaica where Jamaicans live. Tourist Jamaica is beaches, all-inclusives, organized excursions to Dunn's River Falls, and carefully managed interactions with "Jamaican culture." Real Jamaica is communities, markets, churches, schools, rural villages, urban neighborhoods, and the daily negotiations of life in a developing Caribbean nation. Both are real, but only one generates significant tourism revenue, and only one is reflected in Chronixx's music.

This gap is not accidental. Jamaica's tourism industry was designed, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, to insulate visitors from the island's socioeconomic realities. The all-inclusive resort model — where visitors pay one price and rarely leave the compound — was explicitly marketed as a way to enjoy Jamaica without encountering Jamaica. This model generates foreign exchange for the country but concentrates the economic benefit in international hotel chains and their immediate supply networks, while the communities that surround resorts often see little direct benefit.

Community-Based Tourism

A growing movement within Jamaica is working to develop community-based tourism alternatives that channel economic benefits directly to local communities. Treasure Beach in St. Elizabeth parish is the most developed example — a coastal community that has built a tourism model based on small guesthouses, local restaurants, community-organized activities, and genuine interaction between visitors and residents. The Treasure Beach community has used tourism revenue to fund local schools, health clinics, and environmental conservation programs.

Similar community-based tourism initiatives exist in Portland parish, in the Blue Mountains, in the Maroon communities, and in various rural areas across the island. These are not polished tourism products — accommodation may be basic, transportation logistics may be complicated, and the experience will not be curated for your comfort. But they offer something that resort tourism cannot: a genuine encounter with Jamaican life, direct economic contribution to the communities you visit, and relationships with real people rather than with service staff performing hospitality roles.

Chronixx's Smile Jamaica points toward this kind of engagement with Jamaica. The song does not invite you to a resort — it invites you to a community. It does not sell you an experience — it shares a reality. Traveling Jamaica in the spirit of Smile Jamaica means choosing community over resort, authenticity over comfort, and connection over consumption. It means being willing to be uncomfortable, to be challenged, and to be changed by what you encounter.

Young Artists Keeping Roots Alive

The Reggae Revival is not just about music — it is about the survival of a cultural tradition that carries profound spiritual, political, and social values. The roots reggae tradition, built on Rastafari spirituality, Pan-African consciousness, and a commitment to social justice, is one of the most significant cultural contributions of the Caribbean to world civilization. Without artists like Chronixx, Protoje, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, and Jah9, this tradition risks being reduced to a nostalgic commodity — Bob Marley t-shirts and "One Love" coffee mugs stripped of their revolutionary content.

The Revival artists are not merely performing roots reggae — they are living it. Many are practicing Rastafarians. Many are involved in community development work. Many use their platforms to advocate for social justice, environmental protection, and cultural preservation. Their music is an extension of their values, not a product manufactured for market consumption. Understanding this distinction is essential for anyone who wants to engage with the Revival meaningfully — it is not enough to listen to the music. You need to understand the worldview that produces it and engage with that worldview respectfully.

For Jamaica, the Revival represents hope that the country's most important cultural export will not be frozen in the 1970s but will continue to evolve and remain relevant. For visitors, it represents an opportunity to engage with a living culture rather than visiting a musical museum. The Jamaica of Smile Jamaica is not a destination to be consumed — it is a community to be respected, a culture to be learned from, and a tradition to be supported.

Common Questions

Smile Jamaica & Reggae Revival: Visitor FAQ

Answers to the most common questions about experiencing the real Jamaica and the Reggae Revival movement.

Smile Jamaica was filmed across multiple locations throughout Jamaica, capturing everyday life in Kingston communities, countryside roads, coastal areas, and rural villages. The video does not focus on a single location but presents a panoramic view of Jamaican life — from urban neighborhoods to lush hillsides, from local markets to seaside communities. This deliberate range reflects the song's message of celebrating all of Jamaica, not just the tourist-facing version.

The Reggae Revival is a musical and cultural movement that emerged in Jamaica in the early 2010s, led by young artists reconnecting with roots reggae while incorporating contemporary influences. Key figures include Chronixx, Protoje, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, Jah9, Lila Ike, and Koffee. The movement offers a conscious, spiritually rooted alternative to dancehall's commercial dominance, using modern production values to make roots music accessible to contemporary audiences globally.

Chronixx (Jamar McNaughton, born 1992) is a Jamaican singer, songwriter, and producer from Spanish Town, St. Catherine. The son of roots reggae artist Chronicle, he became a leading voice of the Reggae Revival movement. His debut album "Chronology" (2017) was nominated for a Grammy. Songs like "Smile Jamaica," "Here Comes Trouble," and "Likes" have made him one of the most internationally recognized Jamaican artists of his generation, blending roots consciousness with contemporary production.

Step beyond the resort strip. Visit local markets where Jamaicans shop. Eat at cookshops and roadside vendors. Travel by route taxis. Visit the Blue Mountains, Portland parish, and countryside parishes. Attend community events or local sound system dances. Hire local guides and stay at guesthouses rather than all-inclusives. Spend money in the communities you visit. Visit during Reggae Month (February) for cultural events. Approach Jamaica as a student, not a consumer, and let the island reveal itself on its own terms.

Key Reggae Revival artists include Chronixx, Protoje, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, Jah9, Kelissa, Iba Mahr, Raging Fyah, Lila Ike, Sevana, and Koffee. These artists share a commitment to roots reggae consciousness, respect for the genre's spiritual traditions, and the use of modern production techniques. Many collaborate frequently and support each other's careers, functioning as a community of artists rather than isolated competitors.

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