Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large

352 Pages·2004·2.331 MB·English

by  Carolyn Cooper (auth.)

Sound Clash
Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large
Carolyn Cooper
SOUND CLASH
Copyright © Carolyn Cooper, 2004.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-6425-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
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First published 2004 by
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ISBN 978-1-4039-6424-3 ISBN 978-1-4039-8260-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403982605
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cooper, Carolyn, 1950–
Sound clash : Jamaican dancehall culture at large / Carolyn Cooper.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Jamaica—Social life and customs. 2. Music and dance—Jamaica—History. 3. Popular
music—Jamaica—History and criticism. 4. Dance halls—Social aspects—Jamaica. 5.
Women dancers—Sexual behavior—Jamaica. 6. Ragga (Music) 7. Popular
culture—Jamaica. I. Title.
F1874.C663 2004
306.4’846’097292—dc22
2003060161
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by planettheo.com
First edition: September 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Introduction: Word, Sound, and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
O N E
Border Clash: Sites of Contestation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
T W O
Slackness Personified: Representations of Female Sexuality
in the Lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
T H R E E
Lady Saw Cuts Loose:
Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99
F O U R
“Mama, Is That You?”: Erotic Disguise in the Films
Dancehall Queen and Babymother. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125
F I V E
“Lyrical Gun”: Metaphor and Role-Play in
Dancehall Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145
S I X
“More Fire”: Chanting Down Babylon from Bob Marley
to Capleton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179
S E V E N
“Vile Vocals”: Exporting Jamaican Dancehall Lyrics
to Barbados . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .207
E I G H T
Hip-hopping across Cultures: Reggae to Rap and Back. . . . . . . . . .231
N I N E
“Mix Up the Indian with All the Patwa”: Rajamuffin Sounds
in Cool Britannia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251
T E N
The Dancehall Transnation: Language, Lit/orature,
and Global Jamaica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .279
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .303
Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .321
Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .329
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .335
Acknowledgments
My first debt of gratitude is to those of my colleagues at the University of
the West Indies who have variously endorsed and contested my efforts to
locate Jamaican dancehall culture firmly within the academy. Endorsement
confirms value; contestation sharpens wits. I am particularly grateful to
Joseph Pereira, deputy principal, director of the Institute of Caribbean
Studies, and former dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education on
the Mona campus, with whom I first shared the idea of establishing at the
university a center for research and teaching on reggae. His enthusiastic
response provided the impetus to begin the prolonged institutionalization
process. I am equally grateful to Hubert Devonish, my second convert,
whose support for the project was manifested in immediate action. With
evangelical zeal he quickly wrote the first draft of the project document that
delineated the rationale and scope of the proposed center as a multidisci-
plinary enterprise.
Hubert, who is professor of Caribbean linguistics at Mona, has been
a dependable ally not only in traversing the minefield of university politics
but also in helping me refine my argument as the book developed. He has
functioned as an often-cantankerous copilot on my many flights of fancy. It
was Hubert who observed that my provocative representation of female
sexuality in the dancehall as an emancipatory body politics was, indeed, an
acknowledgment of the survival and adaptation of African female fertility
rituals in the diaspora. This distillation of the essence of my argument gave
a new respectability to my transgressive reading of the eroticized black
female body in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture, which other
colleagues had simply dismissed as politically incorrect, if not downright
misogynist.
vi | Sound Clash
I am also indebted to Hubert for permitting me to reproduce here our
joint paper, “A Tale of Two States: Language, Lit/orature and the Two
Jamaicas”; which, as chapter 10, has been somewhat revised and given a
new title more appropriate to its present context: “The Dancehall Trans-
nation: Language, Lit/orature, and Global Jamaica.”1 Collaborative writ-
ing tests the limits of friendship. In this case, writing across disciplines
aggravated the process. Linguistics is an exact science, as Hubert would
have it. Happily, literary/cultural studies is not, despite the scientific
pretensions of the ubiquitous Greco-Latin neologisms. Nevertheless,
Hubert and I managed to negotiate across disciplinary boundaries, and we
are both quite satisfied with the outcome of the experiment.
I especially appreciate the sustained support of Cecil Gutzmore,
lecturer in Carribean Studies at Mona and coauthor of chapter 1, “Border
Clash: Sites of Contestation.” I must thank him for access to his magnifi-
cent library and his extensive collection of dancehall CDs that made it so
very easy for me to research the song texts I document here. Cecil has been
a sounding board for many of the ideas I elaborate here. In particular, he
readily responded to my request that he read the first draft of the paper on
the politics of location that I was preparing for a 1998 symposium entitled
“Partitions/Borders/Statism” at Trinity College, Hartford. Gutzmore’s
critique was so incisive—defining other sites of contestation than I had
initially demarcated; and generously writing them into the text in expan-
sive detail—that it seemed only fair to acknowledge his input as coauthor-
ship. His insights substantially reconfigured the terrain of that draft paper.
I am also indebted to Romae Gordon, then a student at Trinity
College, who insisted that I attend that important Hartford symposium
and persuaded her teachers to invite me. Romae felt it imperative to
include a Jamaican perspective in the deliberations. Indeed, I must
acknowledge the input of the various audiences who have responded so
thoughtfully to presentations of these papers at academic conferences.
Their helpful comments have sharpened my argument. The international
conference on African Diaspora Studies, convened in 1998 at the Univer-
Acknowledgments | vii
sity of California, Berkeley, by Percy Hintzen, then director of the African
American Studies Center, was an excellent occasion on which to present
an expanded version of the Trinity College conference paper. At that
important panafricanist conference I met many colleagues who continue to
affirm the integrity of the borderline guerrilla scholarship in which I am
engaged.
Outstanding among them is the Nigerian sociologist Oyeronke
Oyewumi, whose iconoclastic book, The Invention of Women: Making an
African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, like the online jendajournal
she coedits, rereads globalizing western feminist discourses on gender
through the lens of jenda—culture-specific African/diasporic ideology and
livity, to use a Rastafari neologism, meaning way of life. That apparently
idiosyncratic spelling “jenda” does represent accurately the way in which
many global African speakers pronounce the colonized English word
“gender.” The phonetic spelling thus signals particularity of meaning and
the localized politics of representation, issues that preoccupy me in my
work on Jamaican popular culture. Ronke was instrumental in arranging
for me to visit the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I
presented in 2001 the paper “‘Mama, Is That You?’: Erotic Disguise in the
Films Dancehall Queen and Babymother.”
That paper, reproduced here as chapter 4, has been much presented. I
am committed to the ecological principle of recycling and firmly believe that
no good academic paper should be performed only once. Each audience
hears/reads the text differently and provides new contexts for its elaboration.
I must acknowledge the graciousness of Professor Kofi Anyidoho and Dr.
Aloysius Denkabe of the University of Ghana, Legon, who welcomed my
offer to present the paper there in 2000, where it resonated with a wide range
of scholars in literature and theater arts. Both films were screened and
generated a lively cross–cultural dialogue about the representation of the
black female body in public discourses in Africa and the diaspora.
I must thank Charmaine Warren, dance scholar and a demanding
teacher—I took classes with her one summer at the College of the Visual
viii | Sound Clash
and Performing Arts in Jamaica—for introducing my work on Jamaican
popular culture to Sally Sommers, formerly of Duke University and now
professor of dance at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Sally invited me
to participate in the July 2000 international conference, “Dancing in the
Millennium,” which brought together practitioners and theorists on dance
from a wide range of academic institutions and dance organisations. At
that conference I presented an early version of chapter 3, “Lady Saw Cuts
Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall,” on a panel that examined
club dancing. This border crossing into dance scholarship was a most
illuminating experience. Coming from literary studies and feeling embat-
tled in my attempts to take dancehall culture seriously, I was gratified to
meet other scholars similarly engaged in researching the popular. Further,
many of the familiar “postcolonial” issues surrounding the representation
of the body, for example, manifest themselves most acutely in the corpus of
dance theory and practice. I was subsequently invited to deliver the
keynote address at the 2001 Dance Conference of the University of
California Graduate Students, convened at the Davis campus.
I particularly value the local Jamaican/Caribbean audiences who, over
the last decade, have responded so passionately to the readings of dance-
hall culture I have offered at academic conferences and, more widely, in the
electronic and print media. I must acknowledge the following broadcast-
ing houses in Jamaica and elsewhere for having amplified my voice: the
morning radio talk show The Breakfast Club, hosted by Beverley Ander-
son-Manley and Anthony Abrahams; Television Jamaica’s Entertainment
Report, hosted by Anthony Miller; Perspective and Man and Woman
Story—the latter program I cohosted with psychologist and self-styled
“change agent” Leachim Semaj; CVM Television’s Question Time and
Impact; KLAS FM’s My Place; FAME FM’s Uncensored and Mutabaruka’s
Cutting Edge program on IRIE FM; the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s
Talk Caribbean Television program; various BBC, Channel Four, and
Black Audio Collective programs on Caribbean culture; Germany’s new
up-market reggae/dancehall magazine, Riddim, published by the Munich-
Acknowledgments | ix
based Piranha Media, with a circulation of 40,000. These media houses
have afforded me numerous opportunities to participate in public debate
on a host of contentious social issues such as language politics, gender,
and, especially, Jamaican dancehall culture.
My weekly newspaper column written for the Jamaica Observer
between 1993 and 1998 provided a valuable medium for me to test at the
popular level a number of the “academic” issues that I explore here. In its
very naming, “(W)uman Tong(ue),” the column signaled bilingualism and
thus contested the myth of a monolingual Jamaican national identity
articulated exclusively in English. This issue is fully addressed in chapter
10. All those hostile letters to the editor, attacking me for using the
Jamaican language on the editorial page of a national newspaper and for
making “controversial” statements about Jamaican popular culture, do
have their important place. Indeed, my detractors, even more so than my
sympathizers, have compelled me to pay close attention to the details of my
argument for which I am most grateful.
I gratefully acknowledge the Gleaner company for permission to
reproduce photographs and edited captions from its archives and I
especially thank Ms. Sheree Rhoden, research assistant, for her painstak-
ing work to identify appropriate images.