Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

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Then there’s the misogyny question. There have been people like Carolyn Cooper; she’s a Jamaican professor of English who is really one of the pioneers in studying dancehall. She, as a literary critic, started looking at song lyrics and developed a thesis, a really counter-intuitive thesis, that dancehall is a place that celebrates women’s sexuality and a place that overturns the middle-class prudish ideologies about the role of women and their sexuality.

I think that the dancehall is a place about sexuality, so I agree with her to that extent, and it is a place that focuses on women’s sexuality, but I have a slightly different take in that it isn’t necessarily only about liberation. Again, there’s a spectrum of meanings. I think it’s primarily a place about women as sexual objects and men as sexual agents who are the authors of these narratives about their own power of conquest. The songs that are more graphic are referred to as slackness.

Slackness has a long history as well. Yellowman was singing slackness back in the early 80s and was king of the dancehall. Before that there were people like General Echo. Before that there was Derrick Morgan. It goes back to ska then back to Mento. This overturning social norms with irony, parody and play is really a part of the Afro-Caribbean tradition.

People say the lyrics coming from the 1960s had innuendo, so what’s different about the 80s and 90s is that the slack tunes are graphic. There’s a violent component in that. I try to show that there’s a debate within Jamaican society about these lyrics. Within sound system culture, there was a movement to clean up the lyrics and sound systems were saying that they were only going to play culture lyrics. Then they would go off to dance and they would have to compete and give the fans "what they wanted."

I think Lady Saw is one of the most compelling figures in this whole debate because she’s a woman who has taken the position as the author of slackness. First of all, there are hardly any women deejays and there are only a handful of popular women deejays. Lady Saw, in the mid-90s, was really the queen of dancehall deejaying and had some quite graphic lyrics that were just reversing the male perspective from a female point of view. I saw her at Sting or Sunsplash in 1994 and she came out and she had some God lyrics, some culture lyrics. The crowd was fairly receptive and then she asked them, "Do you want to hear some slackness?" and the place went crazy. She got four encores based on her slackness. This is not an entertainer shoving slackness down people’s throats. There’s a real kind of subversive thrill in hearing these lyrics.

LG: You’ve attended many of the dancehall clashes in Jamaica. What constitutes a good clash?

NS: A good sound system consists of three things: excellent equipment, from the speaker boxes to the amplifiers and the way the system is strung up, the way it’s put together. The second is the selection of records. What records do you have in your collection? The collection consists of 45s, albums and dub plates. And third, how good are the selectors? "Selectors" is a confusing word for Americans because we would tend to call them disc jockeys, whereas the deejay in Jamaica is the rapper, or "toaster." Those three things make up a good sound system.

A good clash is similar to what makes a good sporting match. First of all, you need two good teams. If it’s a mismatch, it’s not as good. Just like you wouldn’t really be excited watching two crappy teams. What’s really excellent is if they have a history of rivalry, right? The Lakers and the Celtics–there’s a history of combat against each other. So good sound systems that are evenly matched and have some history between them make a good clash. Then, you need a good venue. There are certain clashes that happen every year and they’re a big deal–big dances that will draw a big crowd and a lot of excitement…

The crowd, in most instances, is the final arbiter. In some of the formal events like World Clash in Brooklyn, they’ll have a referee, but he’ll be judging based on the crowd response. Usually there is no referee or judge, just the crowd. So it’s not infrequent that after a dance or the next day out in the streets you’ll hear different reports. If there’s not a definitive knockout (they call it "locking off the sound") then there’s sometimes debate about who won. But usually it’s pretty clear one way or the other.

LG: When you go down to Jamaica now, do you feel like a local or more of an outsider?

NS: After living a year down there (1994), I certainly started to feel like an insider. I became a part of the family, and I now have a Jamaican godmother who I’m very attached to. I really felt like I was becoming a part of the society. It’s a gradual process. It’s like any immigrant… You start to be familiar with the culture, understand the language and you feel attached.

As a student and researcher, you crawl and dig out things that people there take for granted. I don’t explore Marin, unless people come to visit me. In some ways, I’ve explored things that many Jamaican people haven’t. But when I haven’t been there in awhile, I feel disconnected to what’s happening on a daily basis. And the society is so dynamic that things are constantly changing, especially in the popular culture where every 6 months there’s a whole new crop of performers with hot tunes. And there’s all the new lingo that you’re not familiar with. But usually within a week, I can pick up where I left off, like a soap opera! [laughs] Once you know the basic characters, and the story line you can basically pick up where you left off!

In other ways, I will always feel an outsider in Jamaica. Being white. No matter how many people know me, or how much they consider me a part of things, all I have to do is go to the neighborhood next door where no one knows me and I’m a tourist again. And I have to go through the process all over again. There’s a lot of repeating the process that I think even local, white Jamaicans have to go through. But that’s the thing: they weren’t trying to mix in the same circles I was trying to mix with, so they live their separate lives.

LG: What has been the biggest obstacle with this book?

NS: Other than convincing a granting agency to give me money to go to Jamaica? I think that was the first huge obstacle! Then there were a myriad of minor obstacles in terms of actually carrying out the research. I think one of the reasons it hadn’t been done before was because it wasn’t an easy thing to do. There was nothing that was insurmountable though. I had to work my way into the culture–it was grueling.

I think the biggest challenge was coming home and figuring out what story to tell with all of the interviews, videotape and experiences that I had. How was I going to do justice to the vibrancy and dynamism, complexity of the culture?

I’m trying to bring the lyrical production into reception. How do people themselves take in lyrics? They may not be analyzing from a critical/ethical point of view… Since I felt that there wasn’t really anything that had looked at dancehall comprehensively, I would have to sacrifice some of the depth surrounding other issues. It took me 6 months of just transcribing tapes and thinking before I even mustered up the courage to write about this. The sacrifices that were inevitable were the biggest challenge.

LG: Why do you think dancehall music has become so popular, over roots or lovers’ rock?

NS: To me, dancehall is lovers’ rock, and it is roots. This may be the most controversial part of my book, but I say that dancehall is a culture, and it’s a space and a type of event. And there isn’t one type of music that’s dancehall music. Dancehall music is the music played in Jamaican dancehalls. So Bob Marley is dancehall. Burning Spear is dancehall. Yellowman and Shabba Ranks are dancehall.

Since the 1980s, there was a style of music that started to be called dancehall music. Before that it was called "Reggae inna dancehall style" with people like Sugar Minott, Cornell Campbell, and so forth. There’s always been a dancehall style, but lately, it’s been called dancehall music with Beenie Man and certain kind of riddims. I’m not a purist that way. I think you can talk about certain dancehall styles that are popular at a given time, like in the mid-90s when you had people like Bobby Digital who were making interesting riddims that weren’t based on the Studio One sounds of live musicians playing certain kind of drum and bass patterns. So, yes, there have been many different stylistic changes and these are referred to as dancehall music.

I think that every generation in Jamaica seeks to innovate and make up a sound that is unique to them and not their parents’ music. The whole dancehall culture is so central, the voice of the people, the outlet for young people (primarily boys) to make a name for themselves and it speaks to all of the issues. It is like a soap opera–sexuality, gender relationships, politics, religious meaning. Buddy Goodison said, "It’s a theater of life." It really is a people’s theater. It’s incredibly vibrant. It has its ups and its downs. It has its international fame, so I think it’s incredibly powerful. And I think the music is very compelling, which is why it’s ultimately popular.

LG: Lastly, if you had all of the resources and time in the world, which aspect would you want to explore further?

NS: I’d really like to do something with video, like a documentary to bring the visual to an audience. So I think that medium is the next area I’d like to go in. I think it’s like a kid in a candy store and that’s part of the problem–there are so many things that really haven’t been explored and choosing is difficult [laughs]! I’d like to do some more biographical work. This book is somewhat sociological, looking at the larger social structure. I do some biographical portraiture, but it’s minimal, so part of me is compelled to look at some of the personalities and people.

With his determination and drive, Stolzoff will no doubt be on the cutting edge with whatever he does next. Whether it’s a documentary on the Killamanjaro sound system with whom he traveled in Jamaica, or teaching anthropology to undergrads, Stolzoff can be proud of the work he’s done so far. He has documented significant cultural and oral history on paper and has both raised and answered questions to further understand sound system culture. Now there is a benchmark of scholarly material from which to work. Check out his book, "Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica" (Duke University Press) at your local bookstore or internet bookseller or visit www.wakethetown.com for further reviews and excerpts from the book.