It would be a lie for me to say that I never shook my behind to a song of Vybz Kartlel, Konshens, Sean Paul or Spice. I think a majority of us can agree on the fact that dancehall music sounds nice. It sounds nice, it feels nice, it makes you want to dance, or should I rather say to “bruk out”. But what are the messages conveyed through dancehall and what impact does it have on the listener’s psyche?
As I always say, to understand the present, one needs to look into the past. In regards to our current topic, we need to do the same thing and go back to the roots: reggae music. Endemic to Jamaica, reggae music emerged in the late 1960’s with the 1968 single “Do the Reggay” by Toots and the Maytals. With strong Afro-diasporic influences, reggae music has for origins genres like traditional mento, American jazz, RnB, ska and rocksteady. The Wailers, a band started by Reggae-King Bob Marley alongside with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1963, in fact transitioned through those music genres during the course of their career, progressively going from ska, to rocksteady and reggae. But what contributed to the success of the emerging genre of the 1960’s was not just its sonorities, but rather its lyrics.
Anchored in a strong panafrican spirit, reggae music was a mean for postcolonial Jamaica to express its freedom and to raise awareness about the remaining injustices which inhabited the island and the need for African liberation. In addition, Reggae music was also an ode to black love and unity, with songs about love, peace, and the happiness of a simple life, far from a then-growing capitalism, western consumerism and materialism, and the pervasiveness of dangerous colonial ideologies. Reggae artists like Bob Marley were not just singers or performers, they were fully-fledged activists, promoting freedom from the West and the necessity for a fully independent and awaken Jamaica. For instance, Bob Marley’s 1980 “Redemption Song” includes quotes from Jamaican panafricanist icon Marcus Garvey’s speech “The Work That Has Been Done”: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds”. Another great example is “Get Up, Stand Up”, written by Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, urging black people to stand up and fight for equal rights. Reggae music also conveyed messages on religion and spirituality, with frequent occurrence to Jah (God) and Rastafarian beliefs.
Although reggae and Rastafarianism being perceived by the general public as a staple of Jamaican culture, they were far from being appreciated and celebrated by the local authorities. An example of that is the Coral Gardens incident, which occurred from April 11th to April 13th 1963. After a violent altercation at a gas station in Montego Bay, local police and military forces proceeded to detain Rastafarian people throughout the whole of the island, killing and torturing a considerable percentage of them. On April 12th, then-Prime-Minister Alexander Bustamante gives the official order to “bring in all Rastas, dead or alive”, after what an estimate of 150 people will be forcibly detained and tortured. In the late 1950’s, tensions had in fact been building up between Rastafarians and the British colonial government in Jamaica. Already in 1958, British police proceeded to several arrests and evictions of Rastafarians people, often arrested for bear charges of possession of cannabis. Several of these incidents however resulted in the killing of innocent people, some of the arrested being reported as “never seen again” by their relatives and friends.
So how did we shift from this to dancehall? As anything in life, nothing happens overnight. Dancehall, although taking its acoustic roots in reggae music, made an almost complete U-turn on the road of Jamaican music, shifting the narrative from social activism and African liberation to a mindset characterized by performative hypersexuality, materialism and gun violence. Emerging in the late 1970’s to early 1980’s, Dancehall added new tones to Jamaica’s musical palette. While 1981 also marked the tragic death of reggae music’s undeniable King Bob Marley, it also marked the beginning of a new musical era. By the 1990’s, Dancehall had made it to one of the most popular genres of the Jamaican diaspora. Artists like Buju Banton, Beenie Man and Shabba Ranks were the new Kapellmeisters to Jamaica’s symphony. Made independent from the British Empire in August of 1962, Jamaica expressed through Dancehall the celebration of a long-awaited freedom, but also the promotion of not-so-positive ideas, such as a growing glamorization of materialism and consumerism, as well as colorism, hypersexuality and homophobia. Buju Banton’s first songs in fact set the tone for modern-day popular dancehall artists like Vybz Kartel, Mavado, or Dexta Daps. Not long after his famous song “Love me Browning”, Banton releases “Boom Bye Bye”, a controversial song recorded several years earlier when the artist was 15 years old, in which he expressed his wish for homosexual men to be shot dead. Those narratives, although nowadays perceived as shocking by the West, made it to Jamaica’s mainstream culture and influenced the sociodynamic of its inhabitants.
Although nowadays being an ultimate party-anthem, dancehall contributed to the undoing of reggae’s battle for Jamaica’s independence on a physical, spiritual and psychological level. With a strong emphasis on unity and education, reggae music helped Jamaica fight against the tyranny of European colonialism, which dancehall replaced for values rather centered on erotic hedonism and a focus on the self.
Although one cannot associate Jamaica’s status quo purely to its music – Jamaica’s history being far more complex than that – it is however possible to observe through its music the evolution of the country’s culture along the years as well as the shift in its inhabitants’ mentality. Dancehall did in fact not participate in the upliftment of its people, but rather in the demise of Jamaica’s resistance vis-à-vis former colonial powers and their corrosive ideologies.
Aude Calloch 