Ian Boyne I AM eager to engage in a sober, rational, dispassionate and intellectually rigorous debate with the defenders of the Jamaican dancehall who have appointed themselves guardians of the people's culture against middle-class incursions.
The otherwise highly useful and engaging Mona School of Business (University of the West Indies) symposium, held recently on Transforming Values and Attitudes: Policy Challenges for Jamaican Society, failed to go beyond the dialogue of the deaf in the session on dancehall music. The topic, Constructive and Destructive Music Lyrics: From 'Bling Bling' Culture to Social Transformation? was almost totally ignored, and a straw-man type defence of dancehall given without seriously engaging the gravamen of the criticisms levelled by "middle class intellectuals" like me. For yet another time, let me try to engage my critics in a sober debate on this issue.
Dancehall defenders, particularly those from the UWI, engage in a certain kind of fallacious, either-or discourse. They usually begin by noting that people like me try to use dancehall as "a scapegoat for society's ills", and that we have an ideological or political interest in downplaying the injustices and inequities in the society which has given rise to dancehall. In other words, people who attack dancehall should spend their time attacking the corrupt, greedy, guns-distributing politicians who have given us the kind of rotten, degenerate society which Bounty Killer, Ninja Man and Baby Cham sing about.
SLACKNESS
But those who are not too intellectually lazy to read lengthy articles will know that I take a plague-on-all-your-houses approach to the politicians and the socio-economic system which we have in Jamaica. As a progressive, I have consistently attacked this unjust dehumanising and exploitative society. I have pointed to the ways in which our history and economy have excluded large sections of our people and have marginalised them, and I am at one with fellow progressives like Cecil Gutzmore, Carolyn Cooper and Kingsley Stewart who are eloquent on the shortcomings of this class and race-driven, socially stratified society.
Yes, dancehall reflects a certain "reality". It is not that the dancehall is the mother of vulgarity. The slackness was already there in the way we organise the society to marginalise and disempower people. That is slackness. Under-representation by politicians is slackness; political victimisation is slackness; handing out guns for poor, black ghetto youth to kill one another is worse than slackness and vulgarity. These things need to be fixed, and not just the lyrics of the dancehall. Indeed, the slackness and violence of the prevailing political, economic and social order is more urgent than that of the dancehall. I want my critics to note that I freely acknowledge and am at one with them on these points.
Dancehall defender and former UWI lecturer, Donna Hope, who is doing her doctorate in the United States in cultural studies, puts it well in her paper "Love Punaany Bad: Negotiating Misogynistic Masculinity in Dancehall Culture", delivered at the Second Conference on Caribbean Culture at the UWI, Mona, in January last year: "A real man is one who can act as the traditional hunter and provider. He is able to access the symbols of masculinity that is, wealth and power, money, brand-name clothing, flashy cars, beautiful women with very little effort. For the man who cannot access these symbols, issues of sex and sexuality attain primacy in laying the foundations for definitions of his identity". Well put.
So the inner-city youth who boasts of how much he can mash up 'punaany' is finding the recognition and acceptance which all humans crave in the ways most accessible to him. He can't get it through the university degrees, sports prowess, professional association nor by having the "right colour" or owning a successful business. Other ghetto youth get their recognition and standing from badness, from showing that they are "wickeder and more dog-hearted" than others and that they can kill more people and more savagely than others. They are really victims of a society that has thrown them on the scrap heap of history and which has dehumanised them. They are validated through the promotion of violence and the subjugation and domination of women having "gal ina bungle".
KEEPING SOCIETY BACK
The dancehall defenders, however, must now move from a compassionate understanding of the underlying roots of dancehall to engage in a critical analysis of the appropriateness of the response to the oppression and social exclusion. Not all responses to injustice are equal. Some reinforce the injustice and hold you back. That, I suggest, is exactly the case with dancehall.
A fallacious argument frequently employed by the uncritical defenders of the dancehall is that middle-class people like me are seeking to impose uptown values on the inner city. Or, as Cecil Gutzmore and his wife, Carolyn Cooper, charge, it is my own "fundamentalism" which I am trying to impose on the ghetto youth. So let us take the position of ethical minimalism. Since we can't agree on values and philosophically have a hard time grounding them let us decide on some non-controversial matters.
For example, peace is a public good. But not just public good. Peace benefits the inner-city youth. It is not just a "middle class value". When dancehall music glorifies badness and elevates the Shotta as the hero, how does this help tribalised, violence-torn inner-city communities, balkanised by politicians? When communities are at war and youth and youth go to the dancehall and hear that only a P- run away from a fight or only a P- tek dissing without "mek bwoy marrow spill", then isn't that type of dancehall music inimical to the interest of peace in the inner city? It is not that it is the dancehall which creates the friction, but music has an effect on people; that is why advertisers spend billions using music to carry their messages.
At a time when we need cooler heads; when we need to cut down on reprisal killings; when we need to tell inner-city youth to let go of the long-held grievances and grudges and "give peace a chance", how are dancehall lyrics which glorify those who "nuh tek no foolishness" helping? Remem-ber that the violence that dancehall music glorifies is more likely to affect inner-city youth than middle-class people like me. So don't talk nonsense about imposing middle-class values on people. Are the people in Cherry Gardens, Norbrook and Stony Hill affected by the reprisal killings, gang warfare and even police killings as inner-city people are? So by crusading against negative lyrics, one is crusading for the lives of the already oppressed, dehumanised and exploited poor, black inner-city youth.
The UWI intellectuals who, from their ivory tower, are saying "leave the youth dem" and "stop fighting dem culture" live in relatively safe communities and don't have to endure the daily terror under which many inner-city residents live. So they can intellectualise and write papers about the dancehall. It is time they see what the dancehall is doing to these poor inner-city youth. Saying that these lyrics are "reflecting reality" is not completely true: The inner city represents various responses to the condition of oppression, not all of them negative. There are many persons indeed the majority who are coping in socially acceptable ways and who are not further victimising themselves and their neighbours by generating negative anti-social responses to their plight.
A part of the reality in the inner city is that many forgive for wrongs done. Many bury the hatchet. Many are teaching their children to love people who hold different views and to do good to those who despitefully use them without necessarily being subservient. They can see all round them those who are "chucking badness" being hauled off to the morgues. Vybz Kartel, Ninja Man, and others who promote gun lyrics are enemies of people in the ghetto. They are not teaching them how to respond positively to a society that has rendered them redundant.
The same negative features of the dancehall here which represent a threat not just to middle class society and decency but to the inner city itself are also found in hip-hop, which we have the dubious distinction of influencing. Claude Robinson, in his Sunday Observer column of March 16 on music lyrics, quotes from a fascinating article on the negatives hip-hop written by a very young black American who had analysed the 15 top-selling hip-hop records. The youth noted that "Nine of the top 15 records have sex and/or crime as the main subjects". Only three address economics. This 10-year-old makes the point which many grown adults who teach at the UWI apparently have not recognised, and that is the preponderance of the emphasis on spending and consumption rather than saving and production which are critical to us, black people, who need to build an economic base: "The top 15 records say that spending rather than producing equals wealth".
'BLING BLING' CULTURE
The 'Bling Bling' in the dancehall is almost as pernicious as the violence and slackness. Inner-city people need to inculcate the habit of saving; they need to stress self-reliance, postponement of gratification, education, and sacrifice for the future. Young women in the inner city need to ensure that their children go to school regularly; that the little money available not be wasted on expensive hairstyles, piercings, gaudy clothes, name-brand this and that, all designed to give a sense of importance which should come from self-acceptance. Fathers need to be responsible and support their children rather than spend money on Bling Bling to show off and prove that they are men.
The children who are uncared for and uneducated are the ones who are committing most of the murders in Jamaica. We fail to see the connection between the twisted, distorted values which dominate the dancehall and the increasing marginalisation of our working classes.
I repeat: There is structural violence and exploitation in the society, but it is reinforced by dancehall values which inculcate in people the dangerous view that personhood is bound up with possessions. To be sure, these values are very uptown. The upper and middle-classes have also lost their moorings and are engaged in a crude materialistic and hedonistic quest. It is not just a problem of the dancehall. But the point is that while the middle and upper-class youth might be able to afford the luxury of distorted values and have something to fall back on when they crash in life, the poor, unconnected inner-city youth have nothing but their inner resources and value-system as potential assets. When you mess with that, you mess with everything.
Youth from uptown "coke-out", get entangled with the law, waste their resources and their rich parents send them abroad, get high-priced lawyers for them and cushion them. The youth in Tel Aviv, Zimbabwe, Jones Town, Grants Pen and Jungle have no such luck. They need their music to make them feel proud that they are not bowing to corruption just to get name-brand; they need to hear songs bigging them up for "holding the struggle", doing without the fancy car, fancy house and name-brand to hold on to dignity, consciousness, "upfulness" and integrity.
They need to be told of our African heritage of communalism, sharing, co-operation, and peacefulness as opposed to the dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all, war-mongering Western way of life.
Away with the backward lyrics of these mimic men called deejays, these empty warheads, who are poisoning the minds of our youth with their Weapons of Mass Destruction called dancehall lyrics. It is time these weapons are destroyed and the inner-city youth are liberated from mental slavery.
Ian Boyne is a veteran
journalist.
