Clashing Interpretations in Jamaican Dancehall Culture

In recent decades, dancehall music appears to have surpassed its predecessor, reggae, as Jamaica’s major cultural export. In her recent collection of essays written over the last decade entitled Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper continues the project she began in what is arguably the first seminal essay on dancehall culture.¹ In this latter collection, Cooper offers the model of clash as a way of thinking through an array of issues surrounding the culture. The text presents the notion of clash in a variety of ways: clashes between conservative Jamaican insiders who fail to understand the worldview of lower class Jamaicans, clashes drawn along sexual and gender lines, clashes of words between competing DJs and sound systems, inter- and intra-religious clashes within Jamaican, as well as clashes between “foreign” and “native” decoders of the culture.

As with any export, appropriation and expropriation of local meaning are inevitable, leading to mistranslations, different understandings, and hybridization as aspects of the culture are re-embedded elsewhere. In this article, I explore some of the problems Cooper’s approach to the analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture raises by focusing on two key areas. First, I address the problems created by Cooper’s privileging of the local voice over the foreign in the decoding of dancehall culture. I argue that while she appears to accept contradictory forms of meaning within dancehall lyrics, at the same time she rejects the possibility of plural interpretations occasioned by such semantic bifurcation. Secondly, I question Cooper’s assertion that the violence in dancehall music is better understood as a metaphorical and lyrical game that sublimates real violence, by arguing that Cooper neither understands the nature and dynamic of violence, nor the way in which metaphor infiltrates reality and structure experience. My critique of Sound Clash is based essentially on a materialist and phenomenological analysis that privileges the moment prior to language in the production of culture, without disregarding the discursive effect on cultural activities. Such an approach allows us to move away from forms of critique and analysis that requires intimacy with the linguistic register of dancehall in order to truly understand the richness, irony, and parody within dancehall.

The Problems of Insiderism

One of the clashes running throughout Sound Clash is that between the native and the foreign interpreter and the concomitant consumer-audience dichotomy within dancehall culture. From the outset, Cooper asserts that her project “is stubbornly rooted in a politics of place that claims a privileged space for the local and asserts the authority of the native as speaking subject” (2). Part of the need to assert the authority of the “native speaking subject” has not only to do with the “devaluation of misunderstood local traditions” (173) by both elite Jamaicans and the parasitic cultural “outsiders who do not understand the multi-track discourse of the dancehall” (39),² but as a strategy to recuperate “the power of the indigenous voice and the nativist worldview of the marginalized wordsmiths, especially the DJs” (7). For Cooper, as dancehall culture “enters cultural spaces that cannot accommodate them” (25), indigenous meaning is stripped of its layers (208), and what is lost or mistranslated is the metaphorical, lyrical, contradictory meaning, parodic performance, and resistance to local hegemonic structures and cultural symbolisms that dancehall culture playfully evokes and resists. Therefore, the tradition of “role-play in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture makes it difficult for outsiders to accurately decode local cultural signs”(153).

It appears from Sound Clash that the native occupies a privileged space as the arbiter or mediator of a “truthful” interpretation of dancehall culture. This emphasis is motivated at least in part by Cooper’s antagonistic relationship with external accounts as noted in her statements below:

I foreground Stolzoff’s and, to a lesser degree, Henry’s dismissal of my work in order to draw attention to a recurring “sound clash” in the academy between “local” and “foreign” scholars of Jamaican popular culture (9)….

I certainly welcome all those non-Caribbean academics who do engage seriously with our culture, adding to the ample body of scholarship that...