Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Baby Cham performs at the RE-TV Unplugged Dancehall Anniversary Show, held at Weekenz, Constant Spring Road, in December. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
THE ARTS have long been used to comment on and chronicle current events and this is no less the case in Jamaica.
However, while songs as disparate as Culture's Two Sevens Clash, recording the near apocalyptic reaction to July 7, 1977, and Lovindeer's Wild Gilbert about the hurricane of September 1988, are staples of Jamaican music, deejays have tended to live up less to the role of being musical history books. Still, among the younger deejays, a few have been rifling through the leaves of Jamaican history and plucking reference points to lay on the hot rhythms of the day.
While Baby Cham's Dave Kelly penned Ghetto Story continues to rock dancehalls, the
'ra ra ra' line echoing on the lips of the faithful, he starts the
second verse with a critical reference to Jamaica's often unread and unmentioned history with:
I remember bout '80, Jamaica explode
When a Trinity and Tony Hewitt dem a run road
That a long before Laing dem and even Bigga Ford
When Adams dem a Corporal nuh know the road code.
The explosion was, of course, the violent campaign leading up to the general election that year, in which more than 800 people were murdered. Of the well known policemen mentioned "a run road" only one, Isaiah Laing, is no longer in the police force.
Instead, he is 'running' Sting.
In The Master has Come Back, from the Welcome to Jamrock album, the 'youngest veteran' Damian 'Junior Gong' Marley declares his roots with:
We learn from the old school
When strictly thugs used to run it
When one wheel wheelie was the move
Long before Bogle start dance and still deh pon paper money
Police ah lock up man fi dem shoes
That simply mean the station full up a Clark's and Bally...
The 'one wheel wheelie' he refers to recalls the early 1980s, when a deejay song from Early B of the same name was a huge hit, along with its bicycle and motorbike stunt inspired dance. In a delightful, deliberate mixing of characters, Deacon Paul Bogle who was hung after the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and dancer Gerald 'Bogle' Levy, who was murdered on Constant Spring Road in 2005, the second line uses dance and the change of all money denominations under $50 to coins.
As for people being locked up for their shoes, legend has it that there was a time when the police would raid a dance, put all the men wearing certain footwear in a line and march them off to the police station, Clark's, Bally and all, for they were reputedly 'bad man boot'.
The relatively young deejay who makes the most continuous reference to historical events in a particular song is Assassin in We A Bad From. In the song he chants of his 'badness' antecedents, at times declaring himself bad way before even his grandparents were born.
And he manages to touch on a significant amount of Jamaican history along the way. As Junior Gong does, he refers to the famous Clark's shoes, as he runs down the styles of old his
'badness' predates, chanting:
(We a bad from) Desert Clarks and diamond socks, pin stripe, Arrow shirt...
Assassin also says that he was bad "before Bob Marley start locks" and that would have had to be before the Catch A Fire album of 1973, on the cover of which Marley appeared with 'young locks'. Assassin goes back to 1957 and a sad day in Jamaica's history as he speaks about being bad "before Kendal crash". He takes on a landmark in the following line, saying that he was bad "before dem buil' Half-Way Tree Clock" (which was put up in 1913) and refers to "from Heroes Circle was a racetrack".
And he ends with a trip to a track of another sort, saying that he was bad "before Arthur Wint start sprint inna di 200 metre dash".
Seeing that Wint was the junior athlete of the year in 1937, that must have been pretty hard.
