Jamaican music has long been a contributor to the European avant garde and you'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary highbrow genre in the nebulous art-popular field that doesn't reference or relate to (at least) dub in some way. Glitch, for instance, definitely counts dub among its chief influences, as Jamaicans were among the first to create music on a larger scale by consistently misusing technical equipment to create strange noises.
Well, in autumn 2009 this influence seems to have gone full circle. Listen to these two recent tracks by major Jamaican dancehall artists:
Black Ryno - Pon di Earth (produced by Demented)
Busy Signal - Black Belt (produced by Kirkledove and Jukeboxx)
The riddim (Arrhythmia) of the first track has a second "snare drum" totally done in glitch style with some sort of noisy digital cut thing, whereas the "metronome" in the second track seems to be made up of skip-around clicks. Brilliant! I'm not going to claim it's a conscious connection, but some people in Jamaica are obviously fucking around with their machinery... AGAIN.
In general Jamaicans are friendly, outgoing and very proud of their nation. [...] Jamaicans keep a positive and care-free attitude toward life, answering many questions or inquiries with a "No Problem Mon" or an "Irie" - believing that it's all going to work out and everything is OK!
Most minstrels projected a greatly romanticized and exaggerated image of black life with cheerful, simple slaves always ready to sing and dance and to please their masters.
The picture I posted on Wednesday depicts two men dressed as stereotypical Jamaicans. They're selling a commodity (pineapple) whose association with Jamaica is a largely colonial one - it's where the fruit is grown for global north consumption. They're largely dehumanised, wearing a generalised-exotic lava-lava in lieu of anything specifically Jamaican. The music is pastoral and rich-world-oriented "roots" reggae, in a fake plastic version... And their proscribed behaviour is carefree and laid back, much like the fake Maori in the last set of Fanta commercials (here, appropriately, in Estonian), and indeed much like both the stereotypes above.
And yet, it seems to still be okay. And I'm kind of wondering why, and discovering the wider implication of various angles on the blackface phenomenon are disturbingly plentiful.
I've nicked the illustration above from an online costume site, where it's advertised as "Rasta Mon Costume. This costume represents the carefree life-style of the Carribean Islands Mon!". I've looked through the site, and although there are plenty of costumes with some sort of parody intent directed at the hip-hop lifestyle, there are none that directly portray African Americans as an ethnic group in this way. Because that, of course, would be blackface.
I realise the historical and activistically racist context to this discrepancy. But surely, at the base of it, the problem is exactly the same. The blackface performer perpetuates an extremely simplified stereotype with strong negative or servile implications. He pretends to be an oppressed person in order to mock. The oppressed people are denied the custody of their own culture and the voice, they are spoken for by a grossly simplified parody of themselves, often for bigoted purposes.
And yet, dressing as a "Jamaican" in this way seems perfectly okay with most people. I've got enough issues, lord knows, with trustafarianism and middle-class white rappers as well, but at least they're trying to be something, not ironically mocking subalterns from a position of privilege. I cringe when I see stuff like this:
(via) What are Diplo and Switch thinking? Seriously? Having Andy Milonakis come in and do a perfectly ridiculous number in a faux-Demarco manner, cynically ridiculing the current style of dancehall and some sort of mystical, generalised-exotic voodoo bullshit? Exaggerating all the negative aspects, the violence and the drugs? Blabbing on about "pussy" in a manner which in the class/racial context comes accross as sexist in the extreme?
I can understand a desire (however warped it is) to want to be Jamaican or to want to act authentically so. But that isn't the case here at all. For me, when it comes to putting down Jamaicans by imitating them stereotypically - whether in costume or in music - there's really only one word for it.
In the next post I'll look at the idea of blackface as extended beyond ethnicity altogether - what happens when people imitate genders and classes, and how does that fit in?
Hideous Swedish vegan-concious rapper Promoe released a new single a little while ago that sounded nothing like his previous material. "Svennebanan" (literally: Honky Banana, but figuratively a derogatory equivalent of Joe Sixpack) is a track heaping bile on the cultural practices of the Swedish working class, deriding their trips to Thailand, their musical taste and their use of morning-after pills. The music, in what Promoe believes is satirical move, is a simplified version of the kind of electro-rap that Maskinen puts out, and the video consists of supposedly authentic footage of people from Gothenburg out on a stag night on a Finland boat. (I swear my mother is briefly visible at 2:28.)
What no-one was probably expecting, least of all Promoe himself, is that the video has become extremely popular, the most viewed Swedish video on Youtube in fact. The single is predicted to become a huge summer hit, and the people buying it would be precisely the people mocked. (In effect a domestic, class-based version of tourist-watching.) If you read the Youtube comments, Promoe's fans are scoffing at the stupidity of Svennebanan, buying a song that makes fun of him, by someone who thinks he and his ilk are scum. By their way of seeing it, Svennebanan is a loser who doesn't get the ironic subtlety.
It seems to me the truth is probably the opposite. Svennebanan is working strategically, and knows exactly what he's doing. Because by adopting the song as their own, the Swedish working class is able to neutralise it and mock Promoe back in return. Just as epithets like "queer" have become symbols of pride for other oppressed groups, there are signs that "Svennebanan" could become a rallying anthem, a celebration of precisely the values that Promoe despises. That, of course, would be the real irony.
And of course it's nothing new or localised at all.
Mockingly adopting the values of the upper classes or the ruling elite is a classic way to turn the politics of music into your own. I was reminded of this while looking through Central >merican music the other day, and finding this track by Garifuna musician DJ Kabeto:
The Garifuna are some of the most smothered people on earth by the world music crowd. Super-hyped musicians like Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Women's Project are projected as the typically servile, pre-modern types who make pleasant music for the consumption of Europeans, while still prefferably living in grass huts, for the authenticity, y'see. The "traditional" culture of the garifuna is even protected by the UNESCO as world unique. As such, the pressures from outside must be horrendously strong to conform.
In that context, the subversion of DJ Kabeto is genius. Instead of making an urban video with cars and modernity, he pretends to visually go along with the grass huts theme. But then he pushes to ridiculous extremes, with fake tribal tat aplenty, "african" headdresses and hula skirts mocking the whole idea of a genuine indigenous culture. By displaying the ridiculousness of the world's stereotypes about the Garifuna, Kabeto is able to disseminate his message like no straight track could do.
Perhaps that should be the next step of Svennebanan too. I hope for the day the working class here in Sweden take it upon themselves to start making music for mocking their "superiors"...
Google Reader recently put me onto this shadeypiratey blog which recently has posted a helluva lot of Chilean dancehall, like thesetwo (seemingly legit) mixtapes. As a genre the idea of a non-Jamaican dancehall is hardly surprising - you've got similar genres all over Africa, for example, and as usual it blends seamlessly into hip-hop. But in Latin America these days you'd think that sort of thing would involve an engagement with reggaeton, which after all is derived from the same source and started out as a similar Spanish-language version of dancehall.
Instead, these Chileans skip it entirely. Interestingly, they seem perfectly aware of and revere the roots in reggae en español, but their music forms an entirely separate strand which shuns any innovations made by the Puerto Ricans. In the mixtape above the list of countries in the liner notes actively doesn't include Puerto Rico, and at the same time shouts out to "de rest that knows the truth about spanish Reggae."
It's a wilfully perverse parallel universe. The Chileans have gone for the kind of hard-man gangsta image you hardly see in reggaeton these days, and the dancing aspect is wilfully downplayed. Equally much, they seem to play up the reggae influences as much as possible, resulting in this kind of rather wonderful hybrid:
Which is basically one-drop reggae except with a hip-hop beat instead, and some sort of rapping on top. Funnily enough it has the kind of gun-cocking sound effects you used to see in reggaeton... Or alternatively, there's basically hip-hop with a bit of one-drop feel and dancehall-style toasting:
Or the smoothed-out hybrid of all three that ORD presents.
In any case it's interesting, especially in the light of the nasty anti-reggaeton movement. I've not read up on it as much as I should, but I'm guessing a crucial factor here is gender: dancehall here is "male music", reggaeton, as it has been transcultured to the chileans, is "female". Doing a search for "chile reggaeton" produces material that is R&B-ish, poppy, club-oriented or a bit hokey, none of the hardboiled stuff. In any case, it seems to be a tough battle for revision. If we go by search numbers alone reggaeton still easily wins out...
Apparently all of Sweden's R&B bloggers are joining together in a couple of week's time, leaving Sweden without any current R&B blogs and the new blog without any competition. Since I've spent the last couple of weeks mostly listening to R&B (via the brilliant iM1) I thought I'd attempt providing both. At least for one post.
As you all probably know hip-hop has recently taken up a lot of influence from electronic dance music of various kinds to the point of sampling it directly. Well, R&B if anything permits itself to go even more trancey. There's plenty of effervesynths going around, and more and more beat and sound ideas from house, trance and techno are burrowing into the music. Hard to get more chillout room than this new Polow Da Don production, for instance:
Crishan - U
All well and good so far, because the harmonic and song-building qualities of R&B are still perfectly intact. (And it's a great track.) But what's considerably more shocking to me is just how much the beat has gone full-on four-on-the-floor. Sure, even in a song like the above those first beats are emphasised, but compare it to this:
Adonis - Senses
No, it's not the 80s house producer Adonis, but you'd be forgiven for thinking so. The first fifteen seconds has no percussion but four-on-the-floor kick drum, and then adds a hand clap as well until a slightly more rhythmically complex chorus a minute in, but nothing vaguely resembling syncopation. I realise the producer has done similar things before, but this is damn extreme, both in single-mindedness and volume.
This trend has got to have reached the end of the line soon, right? Pity. I kinda like it.
PS. Listen to it making its way into dancehall as well. How four-on-the-floor can dancehall get and still be dancehall?
