“Slackness Personified,” Historicized and Delegitimized

Maps establish reality, but also representation. As with all maps some spaces loom large and some escape focus, depending on the projection. For cultural studies and postmodern interpretations in particular, mapping speaks to territory as much as to reality, representation, and articulation. Using the metaphor of the map for books on culture, it is important to explain the conceptual territory Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large occupies in the context of academic writings on Caribbean popular culture, in particular dancehall culture, and the politics of what is made visible, excessive, or absent.¹

Scholarly approaches to dancehall have largely gained access through its music, with “readings” that exclude the lifeworld embodied in for example the geography, performance, and performers other than the DJ. Thus, even authors who explicitly try to step outside of this reading, this text, fall into a kind of “music-mania” because the DJs, their lyrics, stage performance, and politics, still form the basis for analysis.² Existing works on dancehall have hardly contributed to a historicization of the culture.³ Rather, they create a particular kind of view, because the music—that is, structures such as lyrics, their performance and politicization—has been the fulcrum or energizing force.

Sound Clash is an important expansion on Cooper’s 1993 highly acclaimed essay “Slackness Hiding from Culture.”⁴ Its contribution is significant and one which places dancehall squarely in the realm of legitimate academic subject. Cooper is undoubtedly a forerunner and gains full credit for consistently engaging dancehall from within the academy. In a broad sense, Cooper addresses the hidden agendas of not only critics of several variety: those who have critiqued her writings, statements, or presence in the media, and those who have critiqued (knowingly or unknowingly) dancehall, but also those who have used dancehall as a platform for their own anti-dancehall activism. The book is evidence of Cooper’s passion for the subject and deep commitment to the cause of interpreting dancehall for the uninitiated.

The broad scope of Cooper’s engagement—dancehall culture at large—and her attempt to depart from a portrayal of dancehall culture totally centered on DJ lyrics for a fuller contextualization in Jamaican politicized and sexualized society and the culture’s transnational significance, is only partially achieved. The chapter “Mix up the Indian with all the Patwa: Rajamuffin Sounds in ‘Cool’ Britannia,” which locates dancehall as a transnational sound and style in the work of the Punjabi and British DJ Apache Indian, does not effectively locate or historicize the wider musical genre that locates him. Bhangra is given one paragraph and an opportunity is missed to make the point attempted in chapter 10, “The Dancehall Transnation,” which has an overwhelming emphasis on linguistics, literary history, and style. Bhangra has a diaspora of its own with Canadian and African iterations that ultimately expand the definition, scope, and influence of dancehall. Links can therefore be made into a transnational soundscape, to other genres directly influenced by dancehall such as kwaito, reggaeton, makossa, samba reggae, and Afro beat, among others. The risk is that readers could slip into a kind of Dawesian reading: “Cooper is never exhaustive … the metaphor of forerunner who clears the ground for more lasting cultivation suits Cooper’s work here very well. She manages in each chapter to propose just enough of a case to warrant further study.”⁵

My intention is not to review the book but to engage the chapter “Slackness Personified,” which fails to contextualize slackness historically and within contemporary performance. It is notable that academics, especially Cooper, have continually used notions such as “clashing” and “slackness” even where the very purveyors and creators of dancehall have delegitimized them. Sound Clash, somewhat of an anachronism, does not fully succeed in expanding and updating the definition of dancehall. This is an imperative with expressive cultural products and practices such as dancehall that shift with the shifting spaces and bodies that occupy them and that they occupy. Notably, recent works on dancehall, and important old works that precede Cooper’s, are not used to make important and new points regarding...