DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto

Preface

xv preFace Growing up in the 1970s, I was surrounded by what I later understood to be the intense unfolding of Jamaica’s popular music and dance performance , in particular, the evolution of dancehall music. Songs such as Tappa Zukie’s “Rocksteady,” whose lines my mother had to correct when we sang “every time dem panty go” instead of “every time dem passmego,”establishedthefermentthatinspiredthisbook.Atamore concrete level, I became acutely aware of this space through my own participation in the Jamaica Festival competition, school parties, Friday evening sessions at Pier One with Pieces Music, and my own sixteenth “birthday bash,” at which a sound system delivered the latest tunes. By 1988, when Shabba Ranks emerged as the dominant DJ, my choice of entertainment was securely chosen. By 1989, after moving to Kingston from rural Jamaica, it became clear that Kingston was the centre stage for dancehall, indeed its largest “amphitheatre.” Up to that point I was far removed from anything but the sound of dancehall music. As my understanding of Kingston’s population, layout and topography grew, I became committed to the need to write “anarrativeofthecityofKingston,”aconceptwhichoneofmyformer teachers, Mr. Clement Branche, had expressed. On the road between campus fêtes, listening to the likes of Buju Banton, Spragga Benz, Bounti Killa and Capleton during my own personal exile in the United States, and engaging in active research in 1999, I became convinced that I could contribute something to the documentation of Jamaican popular culture. This book forms part of my writing of that narrative of the city of Kingston, a narrative of an unmapped heritage that can only profit the redevelopment plans for downtown Kingston in tangible ways and Jamaica’s creative industries more broadly. I see this as part of my purpose for writing this book. Though I am an inside/outsider, in the sense that I am not, strictly speaking, from Kingston and not a dancehallcreator ,IamastakeholderindocumentingJamaica’spopularperformance culture. Ultimately, my hope is to expose the multidimensionality of dancehall as an Afro-Jamaican creation, and as a space of celebration for ordinary people in Jamaica and beyond. AsIbegantolookcriticallyatthedancehallspace,therewereinitial questions that guided the research I conducted from 1999 to 2007. In takingtheunderstandingofdancehallbeyonditsaccessibleandcommodifiedmusicalform ,Ireliedoninsightsfrommygroundingingeography , sociology and cultural studies. On the path to exploring key aspects of the performative spaces, the arena of the dance, movement and the types of events organized, the following questions helped to xvi prefAce shape a broad-based inquiry into dancehall: What map of dancehall currentlyexists?Whatismissing?Whatdoesexplorationofdancehall through its events, dance acts, dancers and general spatiality add to its definition? What is the value of dancehall to inner-city Kingston? Towhatextent ispresent-day dancehalla mirror ofyesteryear’sdance halls? Is there a generational bias in the definition of dancehall? What relationships exist between performance cultures across the Black Atlantic? One important conclusion from my early research is that musiccentred approaches have served to telescope research lenses along narrow and unsystematic lines, to emphasize and conjure excesses and obsessions rather than sociocultural, spatial and historically contextualized readings. Even as the dancehall musical genre has penetrated the world through the DJs’ lyrics and performance styles, and the dissemination of research, details of dancehall topography, performance space, life/style and meanings, indeed its ecology, are lacking. The topography of the cultural production of dancehall life and style is foregrounded, therefore, to increase understanding of the dancehall context. Emerging from the marginalized youth of (mostly) Kingston’s ghettos, dancehall is inextricably linked to the ghetto and the performance culture has given these spaces particular identities . Perceptions of “ghetto people” and their creations as outside the status quo have accounted for some censorship of dancehall, coupled with the real and imagined perceptions of the inaccessibility of these spaces, based on their location within poverty traps, or the inner city as underworld. This is consistent with the perception of ghettos generally , defined as uncontrolled groupings that are at the bottom of a hierarchy of power and wealth, and are spatially coherent. They can be considered “excluded spaces” because of their relationship to the hegemony of dominant social groups. Ghetto residents have “no use” in the eyes of the business class and political interests, who see “more to lose than to gain” in developing policies to benefit such residents (see Marcuse 2003, 277–78). Grounded in a cultural studies approach that holds trans/multidisciplinarity and inter/multitextuality as givens, I used the perspective on methodology that cultural studies brings to the study of complex social phenomena embodied in the term “bricolage.” This...