Reggae in the United Kingdom

Do you know of Reggae’s impact globally? I thought it useful to share this recently published article on Reggae in the United Kingdom. It was written by Baz Dreisinger, whose writings have made a significant contribution to the understanding of Jamaica’s reggae and dancehall music cultures. Take a read —>

Reggae in the U.K.: A Steady Force by BAZ DREISINGER

Echoes/Redfern/Getty ImagesMusic For ‘Disenfranchised Working-Class Youth’: The British reggae band Steel Pulse formed in Birmingham in 1975. Mykaell Riley is third from the left.

You could hear it on mainstream radio in 1978, courtesy of The Police, and if you’re in Britain, you can hear it on the airwaves today, in the music of Birmingham-born MC Lady Leshurr: reggae’s influence on British music.

“As long as there’s been reggae, there’s been reggae in the U.K., and that influence has played a massive role,” says producer and DJ Ras Kwame, who has worked on BBC Radio for more than a decade.

Lately called “bass culture,” the wide range of music influenced by reggae in the U.K. is as prominent as the rock that was inspired by R&B and blues half a century ago, says Mykaell Riley, the lead singer of the reggae band Steel Pulse, which formed in Birmingham in 1975.

“We look at the impact of it; we look at how it’s changed production; we look at the story of the remix culture, rave culture and the relationship to sound systems; we look at current youth and what they use as a key reference when making popular music in the U.K., and we’ll see that the resonance of the black community in the U.K. has a major contribution that has never been fully recognized,” Riley says.

The contribution began in the 1950s, when Jamaican immigration to the U.K. spiked. By the early ’60s, British sound systems flourished and British ska music by artists like Millie Small topped the Billboard charts.

Where in America, West Indian immigrants could be absorbed into existing African-American communities, in Britain, where there was no real black community to speak of, Caribbean people found themselves isolated. Riley says that reggae became a potent way of dealing with that alienation.

“Disenfranchised working-class youth identified through this music,” Riley says, “which was rebellious, it was anti-state, anti-government, it was very politically charged and very militant, so the black youth were very motivated and socially aware at the time. And all of this came through reggae. It was not present in the schools, on television, in the books, in radio.”

In the 1970s, reggae exploded in the U.K. Bob Marley lived in London. Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones recorded reggae songs, and a soulful British genre known as Lover’s Rock was born. But when U.K. reggae bands like Steel Pulse and Aswad hit the scene, they struggled to be accepted by black audiences who deemed them less authentic than Jamaican-born acts. Instead, these new bands found an unlikely fan base: punks.

“We didn’t care what they looked like as long as they identified with the music,” Riley says. “At the time it meant that we had a chance to grow. We had support.”

But it was a strange kind of support. “We’d be on the way to our gig and we’d see members of our core audience — these punks — walking down the road with a bunch of skinheads, fascists, and we’d see them later and they’d say, ‘Don’t acknowledge us,’” Riley says. “Basically, what they were saying was, ‘We like the music, but when we’re on the street, we’re on the street.’ So there was a level of duality within our audience.”

But it was punks who ended up taking reggae into the mainstream. The Clash famously recorded a cover of Junior Murvin‘s “Police and Thieves” for their debut album. By the 1980s, U.K. reggae had a white face. Labels signed bands like The Police, Culture Club and Madness over black British bands. And just as in America, where R&B turned to rock ‘n’ roll as its performers grew whiter, these “blue-eyed” reggae bands in the U.K. were suddenly reclassified.

“One of the things that happens in the U.K. with underground music is that [at] the point it crosses over and enters the charts, there is a rebranding,” Riley says. “And in that rebranding, there is generally a disconnect with the source or the origins. With regard to reggae we find that the instant it enters the charts it’s suddenly called ‘pop.’”

During the 1990s, reggae influenced a younger generation of British artists coming out of the rave scene. Jungle music was essentially rave music with Jamaican dancehall-style vocals, and the musical hybrids influenced by Jamaican-style bass just kept coming: U.K. garage, drum-and-bass, dubstep and the new mashup dubbed “electro-bashy.”

Producer Res Kwame says the U.K. music scene produces innovative hybrids because it’s less confined by genre than in the U.S.: “Our producers are just doing it in our neighborhood and we have the means of getting it out: pirate stations. Because we’re coming from a culture where radio in the main has not been receptive to black music, we’ve had to find our own way and means of doing things. And that’s led to a creativity at the street level.”

That creativity is bass culture in a nutshell: new music out of old-school roots.

Bob Marley ‘Chronicles’: National Hero, Legend and Film Features

Marley…? National Hero?

While Jamaicans sit back, some debating whether Bob Marley should be given the highest national honour of hero, the rest of the world celebrates reggae and France aggressively creeps toward the status of ‘reggae capital’ of the world. Marley is celebrated in every corner of the globe, and revered for his contribution to a renewed consciousness of human rights, justice, one love and Rastafari as a way of life. Marley is a legend.

Film is increasingly used as a political tool, and no less in locales such as Jamaica where the film industry is growing steadily. The annual Reggae Film Festival is being staged in Kingston from April 17 to 21. Of interest this year is that Julian Henriques’ film We, The Ragamuffin is being screened, and the highly publicized film Marley will be premiered.  ’There will also be a special Jamaica 50 Programme (marking Jamaica’s 50th anniversary of independence from Britain) that will feature retrospective screenings of early Jamaican films, including the classic The Harder They Come, Life and Debt and short films from Chris Browne, director of Ghett’a Life and Third World Cop.’

But, it is the film Marley which I pause to shed light on. The first film authorized by the Marley family (with co-executive producer Chris Blackwell), Marley features an all-star cast with no less than Bob, his son, Ziggy, daughter, Cedella, and widow, Rita, as well as Bunny Wailer, Lee Perry, Jimmy Cliff, Cindy Breakspeare, Chris Blackwell and Dr Carlton ‘Pee Wee’ Fraser.

Exposing Marley’s life from ‘cradle to grave’, Director Kevin MacDonald had some 13 months to work on the project during which he interviewed family members, friends, lovers and musicians. The 2 1/2 hour long film features concert footage of incredible performances, revelatory interviews with the people that knew him best, and 50 of Marley’s songs, as well as some from other artists.

Organizers of the Jamaican film premiere are expecting a record turnout for the event on April 19 when many will view rare footage from the family’s archives. The film is being released in the United States by Magnolia Pictures In. It will be in theatres and on demand 4.20.2012

I have read about the premiere in Germany’s Berlinale - 62nd International FIlm Festival, Marley’s reception in places such as Curaçao where tickets went on sale and were sold out in four hours (via @sabilkatriumph), and, I am surely looking forward to seeing what is considered the definitive life story of the musician, revolutionary, and legend, from his early days to the rise to international superstardom.

So, ‘all an’ all you see wha’ gwaan’, don’t miss the Jamaica premiere on April 19 at Emancipation Park. See you there!!

One Love.

Dub Invasion Festival Lands On The East Coast

This article was written by Vivien Goldman and I share it here as part of my initiative through the use of this blog to bring attention to reggae and dancehall geographies.
NPR – September 15, 2011With edgy crowds filtering through police searchpoints, their ears blasted by loud motorbikes, Times Square on the eve of Sept. 11 last weekend was an appropriately surreal context for the appearance of diminutive dubmaster, Lee “Scratch” Perry. Despite official warnings to steer clear, crowds of dub fans braved the barricades to get close to their hero. The producer who shaped some of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ boldest tracks, Scratch is adored for his sizzling, mind-blowing soundscapes; he is one of a generation including the late King Tubby whose audio audacity gave birth to to what is arguably the most significant popular music of the 20th century — Jamaican dub. For behold, dub gave birth to hip-hop, electronica, drum’n'bass, grunge, jungle, dubstep and, some would even argue, the great lingua franca of today’s dancefloors: house music.

Scratch’s presence alongside other innovators like the U.K.’s Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor and voices of dub’s new generation like Vienna’s Dubblestandart sound system and dubstep vocalist Jahdan Blakkamoore, gives authenticity to the Dub Invasion Festival which is currently moving between New York and Boston. It is the first such systematic presentation of the thrilling art of dub, which in the 1970s established Jamaica as the pioneering source of all future dance sounds. It was the first music to use the studio as an instrument at a pre-video time when users weren’t able to talk back to their technology.

Francois K is a French house DJ who is participating in the festival and hosts the popular Deep Space parties. In his mission statement, he declares: “Dub has been present in popular music since its early ’70s Jamaican reggae roots, also filtering into dance music in later decades, without ever being widely acknowledged for what it is: a truly groundbreaking conceptual art form equal in significance to other giant aesthetic leaps such as Cubism or jazz.”

To make a dub, an existing track is stripped down to the recording desk’s individual fader tracks of instruments and vocals, then re-assembled differently as a dub version. On the flip side of reggae singles, you expect to get a dub version — the same song, but utterly re-invented. The essence of dub is the unexpected, so you’ll hear elements of the original sound suddenly expanded by quivering reverb, then dramatically silenced, only to return when you least expect them — but always right on time. Dub means adventure.

All dance musics use dub’s studio tricks, its ghostly deployment of echo, reverb and rewind. Nowadays, we expect records to come with a bunch of DJ re-mixes. Dub IS a remix, it’s where it began. You can trace rap and hip-hop back to the African griots’ oral tradition, but really, hip-hop rapping stems from dub. DJs who introduced records at a sound system would often “chat” on the re-vamped riddim, and they soon crossed over to the recording studio. Sampling and use of found sound? In its pursuit of the unexpected, dub started it, throwing anything in from a crying baby to a police siren or idle studio banter.

In a sense, the media and technology have grown up to shape the sort of multi-sensory world that dub predicted three decades ago. With the motto, “Respect The Foundation,” the Invasion’s organizers, Emch of Subatomic Sound System and Quoc Pham of Sound Liberation Front, are musicians whose mission is to keep awareness of dub’s role alive. They collaborated with Manhattan’s lively dub, DJ and mixing academy, Dubspot, who organized master class seminars with producers, enabling the festival to come at their fan base from all directions, just like a dramatic, sensurround dub mix. Dub aficionadoes can attend the festival workshops online and even participate (classes can be found at Dubstop’s site).

All dub’s shoots have taken wing and flown. But now, Emch and Pham feel, the branches have overshadowed the roots.

Most dance tracks today are done by a solo human and a computer. Back in the day, to cut a dub, though you might have one auteur producer (like a Lee Perry), equally often the mix would be improvised by several sets of hands dancing round each other over the mixing desk faders. Pushing up one instrument, pulling another out for a crucial two bars then dropping it back in; making a crooned vocal blur then swoop in a wicked flange of ambient sound, then come back sweet as a bird, singing the same phrase three times, getting quieter with each repeat. The original track would be dismantled and re-assembled in a deliberately off-kilter way that would keep the dancers guessing. Dub is dependent on a human element, our rhythm, hands, heart and ears, that a computer can only be programmed to replicate, never feel.

Says Emch, “We want to make the connection. Kids today are hardly playing drums and guitars, it’s all drum machines and laptops. It’s fine to use computers but it’s important to understand where the music comes from. There’s so much soul and culture in reggae. Injecting your soul into a laptop is harder than it is with a guitar.”

With its fractured sensibility, the frisson of never knowing where a track will go next, dub captured the edgy, fractured sensibility of the ’70s. The old order was crumbling to make way for a newly multiracial reality At the time of dub’s first wave, punk was yowling in the streets; America was still recovering from the national double vision of hippies vs. Vietnam; unemployment was high in Britain and Jamaica and their left-wing governments were seeing if socialism could stave off the system’s collapse — only to be replaced by the right before the results were fully in. Sound familiar?

Dub still resonates with our society today. More than a genre, it is a state of mind that involves enjoying life’s ride and being ready for anything. Staunchly individual, the outstanding producer Adrian Sherwood has kept on recording and releasing dub music since the early ’70s, building a community around his On-U Sound label. (Full disclosure: I sang with the original On-U Sound studio collective, New Age Steppers.)

A fixture at international dub and reggae events, Sherwood has seen the world of dub expand from basement “shebeen” parties in squats to events like the Dub Invasion and the recent Rototom Reggae Festival in Spain which attracted more than 200,000 attendees. “Dub has more space and tone and encompasses and inspires all sorts of music,” says Sherwood. “But at the heart of everything related to dub, whether its old or new, is the original Jamaican stuff. It was really saying something.”

[Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/09/15/140481477/dub-invasion-festival-lands-on-the-east-coast?sc=ipad&f=124289519

A Solid Review of DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto

Beyond Boundaries: Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s DanceHall

Erin MacLeod

Sonjah Stanley Niaah, DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010); 232 pages; ISBN 978-0-77660-736-8 (paper).

During the day, Kingston, Jamaica, is bustling, alive with commerce in the markets and conversation on the corners. At night, the city is no less alive, its soundsystems and street dances ring out through the darkness. This is dancehall, and its music, according to Sonjah Stanley Niaah, is “creating space through rhythm” (119).

In her new book, Stanley Niaah explores these spaces, tracking their development throughout history, from “the slave ships through plantations and colonial cities” (17) to “the gully bank or street” (27) of the ghetto, all through the perspective of what she refers to as “performance geography” (28). With a focus on space, Stanley Niaah quite literally charts her own course in the discussion of a cultural form that “occupies marginal spaces and is simultaneously central to [Jamaican] national identity” (16). DanceHall presents a new and innovative approach that is different from Norman Stolzoff’s ethnographic work on soundsystem culture. It’s also different from Carolyn Cooper’s literary approach to dancehall, which takes the lyrics as focus, and Donna Hope’s political and historical perspective, which charts dancehall’s rise from the watershed 1985 moment of digital music production characterized by King Jammy’s Sleng Teng riddim.

Visual and subcultural approaches are taken into account, and Stanley Niaah has a clear love and appreciation for the music. But her intervention is differentiated by a “social ecological perspective” (3) that attempts to further broaden the field by returning to the space of the dancehall, taking account of the phenomenon as an embodied event. Combining performance studies with cultural geography, Stanley Niaah illustrates the ways in which performance practices transform or create identities for various spaces. Dancehall, for Stanley Niaah, is not simply a genre of music but a space that is created by dancehall participants and performers themselves. Establishing performance geography as an organizing concept, Stanley Niaah presents a focus that is at once spatial and embodied, historicizing dancehall, mapping the Pan-African onto the local of Kingston, Jamaica.

After describing her innovative approach, Stanley Niaah begins to plot out the city of Kingston through the dance—as she puts it, “blocking the dancehall stage” (53). She moves through the history of venues in Kingston, classifying and mapping those both official and unofficial, with specific focus on marginalized communities from whence the music of dancehall originated. “Who are these people and what is the condition of their everyday life?” asks Stanley Niaah. “What are the spaces and habitus of their creativity?” (40). It is via such questions that Stanley Niaah constructs her performance geography.

Her accounting of venues presents a “geography of refuge,” illustrating how this refuge is created through dance as a “ritual of protection” (48) that is significantly both “personal and communal” (50). Each and every rite of dancehall is accounted for—all the “names, times, themes and purposes” (92)—and differentiation is made between the formal stage and dancehall street. Her choice case studies are Passa Passa and Bembe Thursdays, relevant even though neither presently exists in the manner described by Stanley Niaah. Bembe has run its course, and Passa Passa, as an all-night event, has been on indefinite hiatus since May 2010’s incursions into neighboring Tivoli Gardens. The fact that both of these ritual, celebratory venues are now defunct serves to support Stanley Niaah’s argument that dancehall transforms and creates space. Without the performance of dancehall, the spaces cease to serve the same purpose.

Stanley Niaah then moves to analysis of the performances that create the spaces she has outlined. Taking historical Pan-African traditions of adornment, dance, and hierarchy as her starting points, she draws connections to the style, movement, and status of dancehall participants. From the male and female patrons who indicate their participation with flashy, unique fashions, to the dancers and kings and queens who have translated their skills and abilities in the dancehall space into economic capital, Stanley Niaah reads these all as performances.

For instance, Stanley Niaah describes the foreign interest in dancehall queen competitions and touches on the existence of dancehall in Japan—perhaps its most significant international audience. She sees dancehall’s pinnacle of international fame and “journey across boundaries” (166) in the form of Usain Bolt, who transformed the Olympic track into a dancehall through his celebratory performance after breaking the World Record for men’s 100 meters in Beijing. The ubiquitous dancehall cameraman is also a topic for Stanley Niaah, as she addresses how the video light showcases and captures dancehall performances as they happen and how these recordings are then circulated within Jamaica and beyond. The book ends with a chapter-length discussion of international sites of boundarylessness, comparing dancehall in Jamaica to kwaito in South Africa and reggaeton in Puerto Rico. Returning to her analysis of performance geography, Stanley Niaah demonstrates the relevance of her approach: local musics that manifest themselves in the street are powerful forces—each one creating spaces through performance.

And although DanceHall discusses Buju Banton’s transnational positioning as individual dancehall performer and takes into account Stone Love and Tony Matterhorn’s worldwide soundsystem performances, there is room left to further analyze and describe the international impact of dancehall. Swatch International and Bass Odyssey are but two of many extensively well-traveled sounds. Stanley-Niaah’s “rubric of multiple spacialities” (163) is especially evident when soundsystems advertise abroad; for instance, promoting Passa Passa in London, or in New York or beyond.

In particular, the book’s focus on the dance in dancehall is noteworthy. “The portrayal for dancehall as only or mainly a matter of music misses the important role that dance movement plays, not only in the playing of sounds but the playing on sound,” writes Stanley Niaah (124). Hence, she tracks the rise of specific dances, providing an interesting comparison of dances to riddims (145). There is also a discussion of dancers—like the late Gerald “Bogle” Levy—who have made use of dancehall as not only a source of personal and financial empowerment but also a “process and means of connecting to a higher self as well as the community, outside the everyday routine of survival” (130). In keeping with previous work by critics like Cooper and Hope, Stanley Niaah challenges facile assumptions about gender identity in the dance, describing dancers’ challenges to traditional male and female ideals both in clothing and movement choices: “Performers define, project and re-engineer their identities, contesting prescribed categories, and delegitimating, expanding, reinventing or absorbing them as desired” (116). In addition, commenting specifically on dress and style, Stanley Niaah not only provides an explanation of dancehall dress but also reveals the acceptance and celebration of a wide range of female bodies in the dance.

This level of acceptance is an example of the potential of dancehall spaces. And, for Stanley Niaah, it is not necessarily about what dancehall means, but what it actually does. Its ability to create spaces and community has, as Stanley Niaah explains in the penultimate chapter, allowed for dancehall to travel beyond the boundaries of the island of Jamaica, existing in a state of “boundarylessness,” while still limited by its marginal form. However, it is this paradox or liminality that allows for dancehall to be simultaneously celebrated and spurned, existing in ghetto, restricted, garrison spaces while central to the national identity of Jamaica.

In DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, Stanley Niaah presents a valuable, unique approach to the study of a particularly Jamaican cultural form, while providing extensive connections through history and space. The book also, especially in the final two chapters, provides a wide range of fruitful sites for continued research—“signposts for the next traveller” (xix). As Stanley Niaah sees it, dancehall is not about the construction of a specific identity or a specific space but about movement and process. Her work sheds light on these movements and processes, demonstrating both the importance of the dancehall and her work as part of a growing field.

Ghetto Geographies: Reviewing DanceHall

Did you know that reviews of academic texts are rare? Well that’s my reason for using this post to big up those who have done reviews of my book DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. The first review of DanceHall was done by Karine Blanchon and published in the journal Africultures.  Those who speak French can access it by clicking it here: Africultures.

Now here’s the latest review:

Ghetto geographies

By Nadia Ellis

DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, by Sonjah Stanley Niaah (University of Ottawa Press, ISBN 978-0-7766-3041-0, 260 pp)

DanceHall Cover

I’m pretty much convinced by Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s concept of performance geography, as explored in DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. By which I mean that I find the necessity of its articulation utterly compelling, I am intrigued by its various theoretical propositions, and find its resonances with other accounts of history and performance useful. Whatever questions remain are only of the sort that accompany a fresh articulation: answering them wouldn’t be the point. The point is to prompt the questions in the first place.

And so Stanley Niaah argues that we can think about Jamaican dancehall in relation to black performance practices ranging from the limbo on the deck of the slave ship to the juke joints of the American South and raucous parties in post-Apartheid South African townships. What these spaces have in common is their intense compression and their literal and figurative marginality in the landscapes of oppressive regimes. Dancehall participants’ relationship to space teaches us about black people’s ability to create out of confinement. The geographic course that dancehall charts from Kingston to Africa to Europe to Asia and back again teaches us about the new circuits of the Black Atlantic, which were never so unidirectional as we imagined them to be, anyway. Performance becomes place-making: a street becomes a stage because Sadiki and Bogle dance on it. The echoes of performance spaces across black cultures settle here on the ghettos most prominently, but Stanley Niaah’s interest in the ritualisation of dancehall performance leads to evocative images beyond the city streets:

“Kingston Harbour operates as an aquatic drum on which the sounds from the inner city are amplified and sent out to the world. While this is a figurative rendering of how reggae music and later dancehall spread globally, it is also a visual representation of the sacred drum, the echo chamber that Kingston Harbour has become for Kingston’s sound systems. Kingston, with its backdrop of mountains overlooking the natural harbour, is both physically and metaphorically the amphitheatre in which daily life is performed for both the self and the world as its spectator.”

Dancing about architecture — which, by the way, is what one of dancehall’s queens, Stacey, is known for: mounting edifices of speaker towers, traversing ceilings like a super-hero, claiming space with her body, and so making a dance of architecture, embodying the interface between the body and the building. Limning the surface of the built environment, marking her supremacy over these structures while also drawing attention to the cruel effectiveness of the city’s planners. This is one of the things Stanley Niaah reminds us of when she tells us about Stacey dancing on the rafters at the British School Uniform party in 2003. (Really, how to summarise dancehall’s traversal into kitsch? See Rex Nettleford on Creole fancy dress parties; cf. dancehall’s tipping point from the fanciful into the queer.)

But what to make of these claims of dancehall’s rituals? We all believe them, certainly. We know in our bones that what’s happening in these streets constitutes something meaningful beyond play or dance. And we know for sure that there was a dance called the limbo on the slave ship that ritualised the trauma of crossing, and that in the late 1990s and again in the early 2000s a dance called the limbo was created for the dancehall by Bogle (R.I.P.). We know that music and dance have long been the material accompaniments to spiritual ritual, the evidence of the unseen, the maker of the unseen, what brings it into being in the first place. But one does ask while reading Stanley Niaah’s text whether, really, the cramped quarters of a downtown Kingston neighbourhood are “just like” the holds of a slave ship. Whether the nighttime dances held on any given day of the week in Kingston are “reminiscent” of nighttime meetings held by slaves to plan revolt. How exactly?

Stanley Niaah’s choice of words here — “reminiscent,” for example — is telling. Was she there? Yes and no, right? This is the thing about trying to document the historical resonances of contemporary black practice. The gaps in the archive mean that at some level it’s about being transported; it’s about, in a sense, faith. We don’t have enough in the documentary material to go on. What we do have on paper is mediated — the Dutch writer John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 account of Surinamese slave culture comes up a few times, for instance. What we have in the body, Stanley Niaah’s terrain, becomes a separate archive, a repertoire of history, the etchings of which must always at some level be mysterious.

Stanley Niaah’s knowledge of the elements of dancehall over the last two decades, however, is firsthand and encyclopaedic. Much of the value of this book is to be found in the way it documents the details of a culture so swiftly moving that it can seem impossible to document at all. Precisely because of dancehall’s pace, aspects of the culture from only a decade ago take on the quality of artifacts. In collecting these, Stanley Niaah becomes an archivist of the contemporary, making certain all those flourescent red, green, and gold posters advertising the latest bashment don’t just get papered over into oblivion. She lists, for instance, all of the major street dances to be attended on a weekly basis in 2004. These are different from the list of street dances to be attended in the summer of 2007. And not the same, of course, as the dance moves themselves invented by the likes of Bogle and more recent dance crews like Ravers Clavers — these are listed, too.

The space between the list of dances and what it feels like to be at the dances themselves is often where this book lives. This is true, arguably, of any academic project on dancehall. Through deep and careful study, Stanley Niaah is able to bring the details of the culture to academic scrutiny. But isn’t the point of dancehall in part its inconvenient repudiation of responsibility, at least as responsibility is constructed by local arbiters of decency, or tourist boards, or a whole heap of the ideals of Western liberalism? Surely, as Stanley Niaah is able to show, the whole apparatus that we call dancehall — the production system, the DJs, the dancers, the sound systems and selectors, and the relationship of all of these to political and economic systems in Jamaica, and in the vast and varied touring markets of North America, Europe, and Japan — is complex and, yes, disciplined in its own right. But it is dancehall’s tendency to break out just at the moment when it seems to be getting a foothold on political respectability. Buju will refuse to apologise. Vybz will start bleaching. It is precisely dancehall’s refusal to make nice that keeps it compelling; it is the perennial prodigal, beloved in its waywardness.

Which is why when we take it up in academic discourse there’s sometimes a strain. An example:

“. . . in his single “Likkle and Cute” the DJ Frisco Kidd (1997) chastises a woman who has not taken enough care to maintain the health and strength of her vagina and advances a discourse about the “good body gyal” who has no need to use alum to reduce the elasticity of her pudenda, as those who engage in too much sexual activity do.”

For a certain portion of Stanley Niaah’s readership, as soon as the words “Likkle and Cute” appear on the page, a beat will start thumping in the brain. A whiny voice will jump on top of the riddim. A whole other time and place will emerge fully formed in the brain. Wrenching us back to the slightly less revelrous task at hand are words like discourse, chastise, and — let’s face it — vagina. Anatomically correct, and yet: when is the last time anyone heard female sex organs referred to in dancehall by a word not beginning with p? (And no, the Latin pudenda doesn’t count.)

I’m not suggesting there is any easy way to discuss Frisco Kidd’s admonishments about vaginal elasticity. Indeed, I recognise and affirm Stanley Niaah’s moves here. She circumvents (hysterical) tendencies in discussions of sexually explicit dancehall lyrics by situating the lyrics in a larger network of other discussions about sexuality. She avoids complicity with sexist imperatives by refusing to reproduce the language of their terms. And she walks a linguistic tightrope, conforming to the academic conventions to which her book is accountable while giving space to a set of discourses not generally scrutinised with the imprimatur of the university press. All of this is necessary. But I linger here just to gesture at the inherent challenges of writing about dancehall. Writing a book about this recalcitrant strain of popular culture means yoking words to incommensurate registers; sometimes the writing feels the strain. (To be clear, I experience this strain all the time, not least on the occasion of this very review.)

But these moments of disjunct are perhaps necessary, part of the displacements which Stanley Niaah describes, as dancehall continues its career, moving far beyond the spaces of its birth. And in any event they are repaid by the exhaustiveness of Stanley Niaah’s account, the capaciousness of her theoretical investments, and the moments of ethnographic detail. There is a sense that we’re in the company of someone who can really show us what’s been going on, can introduce us to many of the major players, can stay up later than we can, can navigate the streets with smarts, wit, and respect. She’s a great guide down dancehall’s many side streets.

                                           •••

The Caribbean Review of Books, January 2011

Nadia Ellis is from Jamaica. She teaches literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Buju Banton | Prophet. Believe it or not!

Too Bad! For those who don’t know (I don’t know how you couldn’t know), I am a Buju Banton fan. Unequivocally so. Albeit the recent Banton trials, now a feature on the Jamaica Gleaner’s online site.

Buju Banton aka Mark Myrie

The journey with Buju as an artist began (before I knew the word ‘groupie’) in a moment of deep respect and appreciation when I felt compelled to introduce myself to the artist backstage at Superjam 1994 after his spellbinding performance. Where did dis yout’ come from, with such raw passion and an embarrassment of talent? I am still to answer that question in a profound metaphysical sense, but were I to give the quick ‘off the cuff’ response, I would say he’s Made in Jamaica. His meteoric rise to dancehall prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s holding such records as most number one hits on the Jamaican charts, or touted as the next Bob Marley with his Til Shiloh release are just some of the fruits of his labour of love. This is an artist with profound contradictions in his experience: so much positive has been said of him, so many people love him, yet so many negatives abound and so many have come to question their appreciation of his talent. A so life go….mi nah sell out mi frien’ dem or mi artist!

Well, it was an October day in 1995 that the telephone in my room rang, on the other line a voice I immediately recognised. The husky cooner travelled into my world in a real way: I can say now it was ‘Destiny‘. I livicate this blog posting to Buju, my favourite DJ and fellow traveller on the reggae dancehall life path. As I matured, I became witness to the maturation of Jamaica’s popular indigenous music with DJs such as Tappa Zukie, Yellow Man, Shabba Ranks, Little Lenny and Buju Banton as some of my contemporaries.

In an unqualified facebook post over the past weekend, I stirred a discussion on Buju, asserting his status as a prophet. Afterall, for those who know his music and have moved beyond the Boom Bye Bye saga, statements about Buju Banton being a prophet might not stir any outrage. This was my Facebook post: “Buju Banton is one of the biggest prophets to have walked the earth. ‘Supporting him in his struggles….”. And, these were some of the responses: ”Define big, just curious”; “Predicting in lyrical content many of the events in his life is big, major, huge…. Or another way to look at it is that his prophesying has been big…has had big impact for all the world to see”; “I only know one Buju song, ‘Boom Bye Bye,’ and I hope that one is not a prediction”;  “We will soon find out”; ”Truth – a prophet indeed”; “I thought he did some atrocious things to a woman AND was arrested for drug possession. AND, the one song I remember most starkly is Boom Bye Bye. Prophet?”; “After all is said and done, what did he do that is so different from those who went before? Maybe he is keenly aware that he hasn’t walked a different path at all, just did so in a different moment”; “Really? A prophet?”; “Everyone has lessons in life to learn, some more publicly than others. The reach of his life is what makes him and his actions or lyrical contributions recognizable. His lyrics have shown the major plots in his life. Listen and you will hear. Its not enough to make a comment based on a lack of knowledge on the subject or based on propoganda. I have listened and have documented my listening. He has prophesied about his own demise and the rise that will come based on his transformation(s). We are lucky to be witnesses”; “I guess that we are conditioned to associate the word “prophet” with a religious figure, especially one that espouses the tenets of morality as construed through Judeo-Christian lenses. I suppose that we can view the term ‘prophet’ within a different context and apply it to Buju (or perhaps even the same context). To be honest, I don’t know enough about him personally to have an opinion either way. All I know are the songs I have heard him perform. He has never been a figure that has ever had any significant influence over my thought process, nor have I ever aspired to be like him in any way but I will definitely acknowledge his reach and influence not only in Jamaica but worldwide. My question is: If he is truly a prophet, is HE aware of this? Also, would you consider other musical figures such as Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, or even Bounty Killer prophets as well?”; ”WOW! What a rash statement without putting thought to it…..Prophet???????…I think not….”; “I am as liberal as they come, but I wish the energy that was put towards Buju being freed was put towards pressuring the government(S) of Jamaica to do the right thing. Coke? DESTRUCTION.”

I ended the facebook discussion by imploring those who were joining the discussion in the middle to read my comments carefully before passing judgement since it was easy to miss the quotidian sense in which I was using the word prophet; sort of removing it from its esoterical place in the sky living among saints beatified or pardoned by the Pope to apply it to local contexts among our immediate ancestors and even our peers. You can tell me what you think after really listening to his lyrics. For now, the fact is Buju Banton’s life has been an open book through which any walk through the colourful lyrics will reveal profoundly impacting life lessons. Buju’s lyrical walk through issues of love, deportation, safe sex, drugs, curfews, life changing experiences, supreme creator, Rastafari, touring and many many more, have made indelible marks on many a man and woman. Personally, Banton has taught me a lot, and my book DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto could easily have been dedicated to him. In lieu of my book I here today offer this poem as I pay homage to my DJ. Stay tuned for an excerpt from my book about the Gargamel on Tour.

For the (real) DJ…

‘Long time mi nuh have nuh nice time’
is the tune playing in my heart
for my love sponge from eternity.
Hey, I wanna dance with somebody,
that DJ that saved my life
who makes me sing
‘I’m fascinated by your love boy’.
Can you play my song tonight,
fill me up, … give me love
make me feel like a virgin?
I wanna see your true colours
shining in my eyes,
create magic and mystery,
for I am your lady
until you say goodbye,
and if a loving you want
a loving you gwine get
right here in the middle of the day
when birds are awake to join in my song.
Mr DJ, wake me from sleeping,
this must be a dream…
a daydream of love -
an’ if loving was a crime
dem would haffi incarcerate mi,
and then, you’ll have to play me a lullaby
like ‘don’t worry be happy’
when I hunger for your touch
and need your love.
You see, the thought of you
does things to me
can take away all my sadness,
there’ll always be sunshine when I look at you
Yes! Sun is shining, and suddenly I’m melting into you.
Take my hand mi say, my whole life too
‘cause from the first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
carrying your spirit of calm intensity
round the universe all the way to me.
Well right yah now,
you put mi inna trance and
mek me want to sing,
but even though I don’t know much
I know seh you inna mi heart Mr DJ,
play your tunes in my world.

©Sonjah Stanley Niaah 2008

Embodied Dancehall Geographies – ‘Dance wi a dance an’ a bu’n out a….’?

 ”Who is looking at the ecology of dancehall?” That was the question my first friend from the African Continent Bibi Bakare Weate asked which set me squarely on the dancehall track. It catapulted me into a series of personal memories, dancehall ruminations and interpretations. That question led me to consider performance language, the stage and acts as essential ingredients for living. Afterall, the world’s a stage, and the dancehall world no less so. The stages are various: streets, shacks, shrubs, lawns, halls, abandoned or unoccupied lots, school rooms, and clubs.

The typical dancehall platform

On such platforms consenting adults seek entertainment, economic, and social fulfilment. Most of all, on these platforms, many enact their beings, live other sides of themselves and gain status.  The dancehall world, its stage, habitus,  citizenry and ecology are all at the heart of the research I published in DanceHall: From Slave ship to Ghetto.

Last week I  decided to begin my class (Identity and Conduct in Jamaican Dancehall, UWI) with my ruminations on the ‘ecological question’ and how it led me to look at embodied geographies which tell us a lot about the socio-cultural context that makes Jamaica Jamaica!  Do you really know what dance moves and names reveal about dancehall and Jamaican social life? Have you ever considered the cross-cultural implications of dance? Check out this video from dancers among the African community in South America. Does it look like anything from the Jamaican dance repertoire?

The dance is a distinguishing feature of the dancehall space. In dancehall dancers and other patrons take on the toil of ridding their mind of daily troubles, becoming enslaved devotees, not (solely) in a capitalist sense that renders them as pawns, but in a somatic and kinaesthetic sense.  As if they were ‘slaves to the rhythm’ that beat around them and inside them amidst the social ills of everyday Jamaica, the exerting body on the contemporary dance floors of Jamaica literally and symbolically replaces those on the plantations that preceded them. In this sense slavery and freedom are inextricably linked into mechanisms of law, identity and liberties.  Here is the body that, through contestation, exploitation, discrimination and oppression, has preserved itself through performance to tell the tales of history, while dance venues become de-localised for just a moment when they transcend time and produce the power to transform lives.  

The dancehall platform has seen many dance moves. Such dance moves tell stories about gender, history, and identity. Let’s look at one of the most popular female dance steps. The butterfly was the most popular dance in 1992.  It depicted the form of a butterfly with the movement of the dancer’s outspread legs and arms.  The ‘butterfly’ is danced with bent knees, a characteristic feature of African and diasporic movement patterns, with the feet flat to support the dynamic displacement of the hips, shoulder girdle, and legs. The knees, which open and close fluidly on a horizontal axis, mimic the flapping of the butterfly’s wings in flight. While the butterfly has clear connections with the Charleston, its North Atlantic cousin which has roots in an Ashanti ancestor dance, with its quick spreading and crossing of hands on the knees, there are differences.  For example, the forward and backward thrust of the hip which supports the opening and closing of the legs allows for increased degrees of variation on the movement style. 

Well, as with the musical rhythms — punawny, taxi, sleng ting, rampage, old dawg, diwali, fiesta, wicked, nine night, tai chi, military, red bull and guinness, and anger management — dance moves have names which tell stories.  These include stories of cross-fertilization, identification with characters, vibes, phenomena, globalization, contemporary and historical Jamaican and African traditional forms, body parts, as well as the valorization of local culture.  For example, the jerry springer and erkle moves present interesting names for an analysis of dancehall within the text of two television characters originating within the social milieu or melee displayed in America’s visualscape.  Jerry Springer is a talk show named after its host.  The show is known for high levels of controversy and public display of interpersonal feuding.  The identification with Jerry Springer – one of the most explosive talk shows in which guests openly displayed private controversies, contests and physical fights – within the bodily movement repertoire of the Jamaican space, says something about the identities within both spaces and the kinds of practices that they produce. The erkle, on the other hand, is named after a nerd from the series Family Matters.

Some of the messages to be read from the dance moves include tangible socio-cultural and anatomical scripts.  For example, some dances comment on social ills. These include the curfew and drive by. 

The movement in ‘curfew’ presents policemen carrying guns while searching for criminal elements in innercity communities that come under attack from gang warfare and/or warring political factions.   With the characteristic bent knees, sometimes to very low grand plié levels, the dancer walks in a forward motion with hands mimicking the shape of a rifle while looking forward and backwards.  The get flat dance popularized by the Bloodfire Posse band through a song of the same name is a forerunner of the curfew.

The ‘drive by’ represents two things.  First it comes into common Jamaican usage because of the ‘importation’ of drive-by shootings from North America, as a sign of more complex criminal activity in Jamaica.  Added to this, however, is the representation of the actions involved in driving a car.  The dance moves through a sequence of actions such as steering, gearing down, turning left, indicating, braking, and parking.  The influx of reconditioned cars in the late 1990s, gave the middle and working classes in Jamaica increased access to motor vehicles and one could argue that the ‘drive by’ represents the ‘coming of age’ of car culture in Jamaica.

Information technology introduced concepts such as the internet and ‘logging on’ which are reflected in the internet and log on dance names.  Alongside such imports as cars, and technological advancements as it were, there are others such the log on dance whose movement and description in song are not stictly related to the technology.  The lyrics by Elephant Man instruct the dancer to “log on an’ step pon chi chi man, dance we a dance an’ a burn out a freakie man”, with a lift of the leg followed by a twist to the side before stepping down.  In the 1970’s, the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett popularised the term chi chi bus which refered to the popular mode of transportation in the island. In the 1990s the term was used to refer to the homosexual male whose sexual orientation was and still is strongly denounced within dancehall.



(This piece was abstracted from the book Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, by Sonjah Stanley Niaah, University of Ottawa Press 2010, now available at Amazon.com).