Sounds of the Citizens: Dancehall and Community in Jamaica

Bibliography

Notes to Pages 116–45 187 4. The position of younger performers at Wicked Times who have not yet “buss’d” (become popular) on the dancehall scene is slightly less egalitarian, where there is still dues paying to be done. 5. Wicked Times has not been impervious to violence. One of the company’s foundational members was murdered in what was reported to be a “contract killing,” which took place just outside the company’s gates. 6. I will discuss these development projects in more detail in Chapter 5. 7. Significantly, the pairing of No Doubt with Bounty Killer went sour because of a conflict of values that might be attributed to the very Jamaican “authenticity” that Bounty Killer contributed to the project. Bounty Killer parted ways with No Doubt after the music video for their collaboration was released and he realized that his DJ-ing appearance in the piece overlaid images of a naked man doing gymnastics. The image broke a taboo over male homosexuality from Bounty Killer’s perspective, and his insistence that the video be changed accordingly was not heeded by the California-based No Doubt. 8. The social uses of dancehall in “inner city” Jamaica are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 9. Thomas has argued that given the tenets of “modern blackness” and the deterritorialized nature of the Jamaican nation in diaspora, it is adherence to these narrow gender normativities that defines Jamaican citizenship, where geographical boundedness no longer serves that purpose (Thomas 2004). 10. Here “crossing-over” does not refer to popularity in international markets, but rather “Euro-American” markets where hip-hop and R&B, it can be argued, might have initially been intended for African-American listeners. Chapter5 1. This quote is excerpted from the 2005/2006 “Jamaica Budget Opening Presentation” delivered by the minister of finance and planning on Thursday, April 14, 2005. The full address is available at www.mof.gov.jm. 2. These choices may coincide with the overall development agenda, or they may be unexpected by-products of the development process, which nonetheless create new possibilities. 3. It might be more accurate to assert that the programs reinforce normative gender roles in general. However, the reinforcement of a particular style of femininity is less obviously at odds with Jamaican nation-building efforts. 4. In addition to enhancing immediate benefits, the duality may also 188 Notes to Pages 150–65 reinforce community residents’ vulnerability in that the presence of Wicked Times’s private support may negatively impact the benefits received from public sources. The withdrawal of private support might create a situation in which residents are left to fend for themselves under conditions of limited opportunity. 5. www.plunkett.co.uk/history/historym.htm. 6. In the time that I participated in Youth Organization meetings, Dads attended on only two occasions. Frustratingly, these two meetings were ones I was unable to attend. 7. JAMAL is the acronym for a state-sponsored literacy program, which many people see as carrying a stigma with it. 8. This is a reference to oral sex designed to challenge, insult, and publicly shame the object of the insult. 9. Homosexual. 10. These are all references to men who engage in oral sex. 11. At times the discourse around “ghetto culture” among residents of Guy Town was so anthropological that it was difficult to discern whether it was a product of the life of the community itself, or a product of social scientists’ teachings about their research on “ghetto culture” being assimilated and read back by the area’s residents. 12. “No fuck” is a slang insult used by men to suggest that they are not able to get sex from women. 13. It is important to note here that even if he did desire fully bourgeois status, it is unlikely that he would be able to attain it because his lack of formal education and music industry background would be largely unacceptable to his bourgeois peers. 189 Bibliography Adams, L. Emilie. 1991. Understanding Jamaican Patois: An Introduction to Afro-Jamaican Grammar. Kingston: Kingston Publishers. Adorno, Theodor. 1982. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 270–99. New York: Urizen Books. Alexander, Jack. 1977. “The Role of the Male in the Middle-Class Jamaican Family: A Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 8 (3): 369–89. Alexander...