Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sound Systems

2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07402775-6894768

1936-0924

Kwame Dawes,

Music History and Culture

In “They Don’t Know,” one of his most intimate songs, the Jamaican roots-reggae artist Chronixx bares his soul. In his signature style, which combines singing with tumbling dancehall chanting, Chronixx delivers a litany of woes in uncompromising Jamaican patwa. He listens to his father, the dancehall singer Chronicle, complain about poverty; he talks about dealing with an unrighteous music industry, and how even though people see him brilliantly conquering the stage, they don’t know that he has little to show for his success:But dem never know seh a one shirt mi have Mi haffi wash it and, mi haffi sun it, ohChronixx is a roots man, and the face of Jamaica’s “roots revival” movement. The “revival,” as it were, combines dancehall with traditional roots music, and is characterized by use of the one-drop reggae beat, which stresses the third of a four-bar rhythm. In the production studio, it has meant the reemergence of the band, and a return to rhythms derived from older reggae songs. Roots reggae’s international breakout moment came in 2014, when Chronixx performed on The Tonight Show. The artist is only 25, but he possesses the confidence of somebody who speaks the truth. When his songs take on broad political issues, such as colonialism or poverty, he tackles them with impressive clarity and intelligence. Like many members of the new wave of artists who are leading the revival, Chronixx has had to develop his poetics around issues of suffering and justice—and he’s had to do so from a position of relative privilege.Jamaican music has historically been associated with the revolutionary power of the lower classes, yet for the most part, the roots-revival artists are middle-class young people who come from a musical lineage. The most famous of this set would be, of course, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley—one of the tribe of Marleys who have been making and selling music as a birthright. (Even Damian Marley’s mother, Cindy Breakspeare, has had a modest musical career following her triumph as Miss World, and her husband Rupert Bent is one of Jamaica’s most gifted guitarists.) Chronixx gets his name from his father, Chronicle, and it is clear that reggae music was formative in the younger artist’s upbringing. Protoje, another member of this group, is the son of one of reggae’s great singers of the 1970s, Lorna Bennett, and his father was a successful calypso singer from the eastern Caribbean. Reggae scholar Dutty Book-man has called this moment a “reggae revival,” and though some might quibble at the accuracy of the label, the artists associated with this movement do consider themselves part of a long tradition of reggae music. Indeed, reggae culture is nothing if not rooted in deep respect for tradition and the importance of influence.The music industry is, and has always been, one of the most remarkable forces for developing talent and promoting economic improvement in Jamaica. Although music remains one of the country’s most important cultural exports, it has always targeted the domestic market first. When reggae music exploded on the world scene in the 1960s and 1970s, it defined the international perception of Jamaica and complicated the country’s class dynamics. While apprehensive middle and upper classes viewed the movement as crude, associating it with poverty and low culture, it was increasingly clear that reggae was going to be big. The 1970s saw the use of influential reggae “politics songs,” which sang the praises of particular candidates. When the democratic socialist Michael Manley ran for prime minister in 1972, he made a pronounced effort to include reggae music as a central piece of his People’s National Party (PNP) campaign rallies. With the help of musician and “chief songwriter” Clancy Eccles, Manley and the PNP went on to win a landslide victory. Manley understood that reggae explicitly represented the dreams and ambitions of poor and working-class Jamaicans, and that it did so by speaking to them in their own voice. By default and design, reggae has continued to be identified with the poor, even if its musicians go on to great success.Decades before “street cred” was the litmus test for authenticity in hip-hop, roots reggae was built on the “sufferah” credentials of its proponents. Being from the ghetto was important to defining a poetics of resistance in the face of oppression and persecution. Indeed, when Bob Marley sang, “Darkness has covered my light / And has changed my day into night,” in his song “Concrete Jungle,” he was describing the dangerous and difficult world of Jamaica of the early 70s. At that point, political violence had started to morph into intense street and criminal violence as politicians began to rely on the support of organized crime and powerful neighborhood gangs. Additionally, conditions were increasingly dire for the growing number of urban poor. Rural Jamaicans had been migrating to Kingston for decades, though the city lacked the jobs and housing to properly accommodate them. Marley grew up in this environment, and he never lost sight of that. Even in the mid-60s, the Wailers adopted their name because, according to Bunny Wailer, they were wailing in the face of suffering. These musicians were “rude boys” singing about a kind of thug life long before it became a part of the currency of hip-hop: “dem a loot/dem a shoot/dem a wail/a shanty town” (“007” by Desmond Dekker and the Aces).From the start, roots reggae was synonymous with a certain kind of class consciousness. To this day, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell likes to recount, with slightly misplaced cockiness, the story of his first meeting with Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Bob Marley in early 1971 as the moment in which he recognized he was dealing with charismatic tough guys, dangerous guys, guys who meant business. The songs these emerging reggae artists sang were about being the “dregs of society,” the “downtrodden,” the oppressed. The speed with which the Jamaican record industry was able to put out their albums made reggae an immediate source of aspirational social commentary, even in the early years. But for those who did not come from poverty, there was another way to enter the fraternity of the sufferahs: Rastafarianism.In the 1970s, Rastafarianism was regarded by the predominantly Christian population and especially by the middle and upper classes as a scourge on society, a heresy associated with the poor, the violent, and the drug users. Yet by the mid-60s, Rastafari had become the de facto spiritual center of reggae music, imbuing it with a cosmology and moral code based on rejecting middle-class, Western, and “Babylonian” values, celebrating Africa, and defending the poor and black. Indeed, even young, middle-class men could earn genuine credibility by embracing the reggae movement and being rejected by family and “respectable” society. Through conversion and lifestyle, they could instead join the working class and the sufferahs. So, for instance, when the reggae band Third World was formed in 1973, most of the members were from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and in a few instances, from the elite. During the Manley years, lead guitarist Cat Coore was playing revolutionary songs with Third World while his father, David Coore, was deputy prime minister. The younger Coore was a rastaman, a middle-class youth who had abandoned respectability and joined the presumed “dregs of society.”In many ways, the tradition of coding class politics in music continued into the dancehall era. While dancehall existed before the 1980s, prior to then, the genre essentially supported singers and musicians. The vocal “toasters” and lyrical goaders of that early period eventually morphed into DJs who sang over rhythm tracks, relying on braggadocio and threats while competing before live audiences. These DJs formed a thriving subculture, one inextricably tied to sound systems and record producers. By the 1980s, after the conservative Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) had ousted the PNP under the leadership of former record producer Edward Seaga, dancehall DJs were the new stars of Jamaican music. Dancehall is generally understood to be a form of reggae, but its ambitions are different, and formally, it is more Africanized than roots reggae. Many of its core rhythms are derived from indigenous pocomania drumming, and its musicians are defiant about their use of Jamaican patwa. Moreover, when chanting or speaking into the mic, dancehall artists directly address a pat-wa-speaking Jamaican audience. While roots reggae was for the most part performed in a Jamaicanized standard English, one accessible to international English speakers, the world has had to learn patwa in order to understand much of dancehall. (Artists like Chronixx and Protoje tend to lean toward patwa in the way of dancehall, but on some tracks, standard English does creep in.)Even as roots revival gains momentum, it’s clear that dancehall remains the music of the “underprivileged” as its practitioners tend to speak on behalf of the poor and oppressed—though not always for purposes of political resistance. There are clearly some exceptions, but for the most part, dancehall musicians are quite comfortable giving the people what they want, even if this means misogynistic and homophobic lyrics (which, incidentally, have virtually disappeared from dancehall over the last few years), and the celebration of bling and gun culture. While delivering a lecture to university students in Kingston a few years ago—before his conviction and imprisonment for murder—the dancehall star Vybz Kartel proposed that his songs were as dangerous, revolutionary, and controversial as the rude boy and rebel songs of Marley and Tosh had been back in their time. He observed that their music, having entered the realm of “vintage,” was now being used to sell Jamaica in tourist ads.In many ways, he is correct. But there are differences: The lyrics of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer and Judy Mowatt, were aspirational and religious. Dancehall, on the other hand, has embraced an ethics of materialism, hustle, and party. As Jamaica struggles with rates of crime and violence that rank among the highest in the world, dancehall lyrics have become increasingly secular, moving between nihilism and defiant iconoclastic energy. (The Gleaner, Jamaica’s newspaper of record, often plays host to debates over whether dancehall lyrics reflect violence in society or encourage it.) It would not be wrong to parallel the rise of dancehall over reggae with the rise of hip-hop over rhythm and blues in the U.S. during that same period. Yet in the same way that lines of demarcation cannot easily be drawn between hip-hop and R&B, every DJ, from Beenie Man to Bounty Killer, sees his or herself as a reggae artist, as part of the movement’s larger ethos and sensibility.So how to reconcile dancehall with the new generation of roots revivalists who come from middle-class backgrounds? For artists such as Jr. Gong, Chronixx, and Protoje, the solution is to embrace a dancehall sensibility even as they’re fully inscribed in the roots ethos. Without personal narratives of suffering, the revivalists have, with greater force, assumed the role of social commentators. They grew up with this “cross-over” as normal, and the line-ups of many of the stage shows mounted in Jamaica demonstrate that the “roots” / “dancehall” divide is not one acknowledged by the Jamaican audience, who gladly embrace these artists regardless of genre. But roots artists wear the mantle of social critics and prophets with more commitment than any other group of popular musicians in Jamaica.In “Kingston be Wise,” Protoje calls on his city to be wise after an explosive attack by a joint force of police and soldiers on the ghetto community of Tivoli Gardens. The neighborhood is known as a “garrison,” meaning that it is run by a local don and is affiliated with a political party—in this case, the conservative JLP. (The garrison system, which envelops much of Kingston, grew out of political trade union battles in the 1960s.) At the time of the 2010 raid, Tivoli Gardens was the known base of Dudus, one of Jamaica’s most notorious and successful dons. The unprecedented offensive took place shortly after the U.S. issued an extradition order for Dudus for drug trafficking, and amid political intrigue about whether the JLP had colluded to prevent the extradition. The raid ended with Dudus’ capture, and he is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New Jersey. In his song, Protoje is outside looking in, waiting as the city remains under lockdown:When the city a go click-clack-blow, you betGovernment fingers and tic-tac-toes in itAnd while they working on the X’s and O’sI’m living I-N-I like I’m Mister KamozeNo surprise when they sending foes to meOpposite of when plain clothes approaching meFollow they rules is what they propose to meSelling they souls for what is owed, you seeNothing is owed, nothing is promisedNever know the government woulda run up inna them garrisonWithout no sorry, without excuseSoldier man inna them lorry, everybody get abused, andEverybody have them views nowThe media is owned so know where you get your news fromAnd the blood deh pon them shoes nowWhen them walking it traceLook them hard in them faceAnd say.Here, we see the best elements of dancehall meeting the best of the roots tradition. If the lines seem blurred, it’s because they are. The roots revival musicians recognize an artistic and spiritual lineage between themselves and the Bob Marleys and Joseph Hills of the past. At the same time, the younger artists associated with the revival—namely, Protoje, Jah 9, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, and Kelissa—identify dancehall artists such as Buju Banton and Vybz Kartel as important models, while pointing to Damian Marley as the central figure. Marley himself speaks of Buju, Bounty Killer, Super Cat, and Shabba Ranks, all dancehall royalty, as key influences, alongside artists of his father’s generation. The roots revivalists see themselves as straddling related traditions, and in this, they are re-injecting into reggae culture a visionary commitment to speaking truth to power. It doesn’t look the way it used to, but for us old-heads, this is still a welcome development.