“Stone Love spans the development of some critical aspects of dancehall: the centrality of downtown venues; the re-emergence of street venues in uptown Kingston; the movement of the DJ from dance halls to recording studios, television shows and music videos, and thus the international arena; and the shift from street dances to “big dances” with corporate sponsorship and commercial success surpassed only by that of large stage shows such as Reggae Sumfest. Stone Love began as a small-scale sound system playing at parties and had to ground itself within the downtown space in order to attract a large following, although Winston Powell always had ambitions for making it big. Jones Town was where they made their breakthrough from being branded as centred on American R&B to being known as a community-centred sound system. Improved technology, the skill of a new selector, and the groundings at Joyce’s Hot Spot and Cherry’s Bar, near and within Jones Town respectively, were important factors in this breakthrough. Jones Town is demographically illustrative of an inner-city community, a space in which the trappings of a metropolitan musical sense had to be shed for the sound system to gain local and later wider international appeal.

Once Powell’s sound system had acquired a following, new opportunities materialized at playout venues with increased demand for the sound. As their popularity grew, however, so did police intervention, because dance events spilled onto the street, inviting attention and complaints. Moving through venues from Jones Town to Cross Roads, New Kingston and Halfway Tree, Stone Love climbed to “champion sound” status when it settled into a longstanding Thursday night playout at House of Leo in the Halfway Tree area in the mid-1980s. With a weekly local calendar, Stone Love was in demand. With more staff, kilowattage of sound, boxes, a playing style that was different from other sound systems, and links uptown and downtown, Stone Love changed the face of dancehall, simply by capitalizing on the ghetto and technology as vehicles to propel its capacity beyond that of other systems by the early 1990s. Eventually its sound capacity called one and all to join its dancehall calendar and be baptized into the fullness of its love. This baptismal resonance is confirmed by the late dancer Bogle, for whom church and school were replaced by dancehall: “He had to go every day to mark present” (Reyes 1993, 71).

It was in 1988 that Stone Love earned a commitment to play in Canada, on the first of its many forays outside Jamaica. Since then Stone Love has advanced the image and popularity of dancehall internationally, moving it outside the local realm to an international and trans- national one. As Louis Chude-Sokei (1997) suggests, dancehall has negotiated a trans-Atlantic Diasporic space in which the celebration of the local has surpassed, if only superficially, the appeal of an Afri- can past and present reified in the culture-centred music of Rastafari and Rastafari-influenced reggae artists. The movement of Stone Love’s equipment, audio and (eventually video) recordings, fans, specials and dub plates, and personnel from uptown to downtown, then out of town and internationally, has solidified its high levels of appeal.

Stone Love’s space in the dancehall is also a political one, in the sense that they operate within and across certain borders that have to be carefully negotiated because they can mean life or death for a sound system. In the early 1990s Stone Love took the decision not to play tunes that incited gang feuds or “matie fights” (fights between women over men) or promoted gun talk. In addition, Stone Love has helped to maintain the standards set by the Sound System Association of Jamaica for democratizing the business. This has resulted in appearances at venues stipulated by the Association to break the monopoly of some systems over particular venues, in some instances within volatile areas.

One of the crucial lessons Winston Powell learned early within the sound system business was about the need to keep one’s past firmly in the conscious present. This necessitates the capacity to accept invitations to play for and to promoters and fans who were there at Stone Love’s inception. They cannot be left behind, because they were crucial to the establishment of the sound system from the start. Stone Love therefore acquired and established a new oldies sound system to navigate old and new spaces at the same time. This has a bearing on the partisan political trends in the business as well, since running different units under the name Stone Love has allowed the sound system to play at different venues in one night, sometimes for warring factions.
Stone Love’s basic development reveals the depth and breadth of dancehall space, in addition to the ways in which dancehall perpetuators continuously negotiate and navigate a variety of spaces, policed and contested, old and new, local and transnational. Theirs is a significant achievement, which helps to solidify the sound system’s honorary title, “The Immortal Stone Love.” This “immortality” is inextricably linked to dancehall’s identity and its rubric of multiple spatialities.”

There are some moments of impact which are priceless. This week I was reminded of what I consider to be one of my most important reasons for being in this world at this time. It started with a telephone call from a friend who wanted to talk about the redevelopment of Downtown Kingston. The details of the call led me to a vision of Kingston which came rolling back to the forefront of the memory, indeed, the one I had written some years ago. Here is what I said about Kingston and my understanding of its place as a sacred space, a sacred space for rhythm, life and style.

While the history of popular music and dance culture in Jamaica, particularly the emergence of mento, ska, rocksteady and reggae, has to acknowledge the role of rural-based traditional music and dance forms, a cartographic representation of reggae and its contemporary expression, dancehall, would locate its central nervous system within the city of Kingston. Most of the musicians, sound systems, recording studios, DJs, dance venues and patrons, were and still are located in the urban complex known as the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA), which includes the parishes of Kingston and St Andrew. The citizens who have inspired, performed and consumed dancehall lifestyle include dancers, such as the late Gerald “Bogle” Levy, a foremost dance master, or Denise “Stacey” Cumberland, Dancehall Queen 1999; the early DJs U Roy, Tappa Zukie, Brigadier Jerry, Tenor Saw and Yellow Man; and today’s DJs such as Elephant Man, Bounti Killa and Capleton, [Lady Saw, Cham, and Konshens] whose practice reveals strong ties to what is loosely known as inner-city Kingston.

The inner-city communities are mostly located around Kingston Harbour and along the gullies entering it. The Harbour operates as an aquatic drum on which the sounds from the inner city are amplified and sent out to the world. While this is a figurative rendering of how reggae music and later dancehall spread globally, it is also a visual representation of the sacred drum, the echo chamber that Kingston Harbour has become for Kingston’s sound systems. Kingston, with its backdrop of mountains overlooking the natural harbour, is both physically and metaphorically the amphitheatre in which daily life is performed for both the self and the world as its spectator. I argue that performance is the lifeworld of actors: they are not merely subjects in a postcolonial script but agents in the creation and recreation of their own urban life stories.

When Elephant Man proclaimed “Me an’ my crew got di whole city lock,” he was referring to the fact that, from high to low, from uptown to downtown, in clubs and streets, and on radio and television, dancehall has the attention of the entire city. Kingston is one of the spaces where New World Africans settled their minds on the task of performance, enacting their being in that space between violation, ruptured roots and self-(re)construction….

Kingston—King’s Town, “Jah Jah City”, amphitheatre and once auction block—is where the drum and later the drum machine beat one of the world’s most popular musics, to which bodies the world over move, a signal of something new and ancient. It is the city that Jah made, that garden with the Hope River running through, where rhythm signals the pulse of life in the redefinition of violated selves that are renewed in the complex process of re-enacting memories from a ruptured past. The development of the parish and city of Kingston was a consequence of the destruction of Port Royal by earthquake in 1692, and the move on the part of colonialists to capitalize on the trade made possible and strategic by the world’s seventh largest natural harbour, Kingston Harbour. The city, modelled on English-style residential squares, grew slowly, with the population being concentrated in the southern sections from its inception.

From the days of Captain Morgan and other pirates in Port Royal, life and style in Jamaica attracted world attention even before the development of Kingston, mostly for the negatives of corruption, piracy and violence. The “high life” of Port Royal, Jamaica’s first metropolis, attracted so many explorers and exploiters that it soon became the den of iniquity that history recalls it to have been. In some ways, the disasters that plagued Port Royal and southern Kingston were the only solutions to a history gone bad. The harbour between Port Royal and Kingston today stands as a kind of spirit glass or mirror in which memories lie, as it is simultaneously a drum’s echo chamber. The harbour could also be seen as a goblet or cup, from which the somewhat bitter-sweet wine of celebration is drunk, especially by those closest to the rim. Indeed, dance venues at the edge of the harbour, such as Jamaica Gates (now defunct) or the New Little Copa Club, have functioned in this way for countless celebrants. Today life and style in the KMA are reminiscent of Port Royal: politicians exploit the poor, violence is the Achilles heel, and agents come as explorers wanting to find the latest pulse of the reggae beat. The DJ Capleton (a.k.a. Clifton Bailey) says this of “King’s-to(w)n” in his song “Jah Jah City” (2000): “Jah Jah city, Jah Jah city, dem a tu’n it inna dead man town.” The Rastafari rendering of Jamaica is “Jah mek ya” (“God made here”), which is consistent with notions of sacred space heralded by DJs such as Capleton.

Excerpt from DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, pp. 39-41.

Its important to note that his articles came to my attention in this Jamaica’s fiftieth year of independence, marking significant national achievements but also the sad truth of many woes. One that sits at the forefront of my brain is that many at home still underestimate the importance of culture, whether it is expressed in our language, dance moves, or our music, and its the external recognition of our intangible cultural heritage that often brings it into focus at home. Be it reggae or dancehall, for example, some Jamaicans will never see their potential, the need for investment to reap their full potential, or appreciate their global impact. This sad reality also explains why resources for research and documentation of culture lags behind that of other areas, and why serious study is not growing among locals.

In yet another piece, Dannaway charts the ebb and flow of a nation’s sexuality through its music from mento, rocksteady, reggae, dancehall and more. Here’s a look at one of the most central elements of human identity and culture through the Jamaican lens. Tell us what you think.

‘Kinky Reggae: The Agony and Ecstasy of Sex in Jamaica’

Although there are more churches per capita than anywhere else in the world, Jamaicans are not, and never have been, puritanical. Perhaps it’s the island heat that makes clothing superfluous, combined with the seductive riddims that infuses Jamaica with sexuality. Sex and music go together like ackee and saltfish, and Jamaica is saturated with both from the rent-a-dreads trysting with white women, to the orgies of the Hedonism resort and the indigenous sexuality of the dancehall. The rhetoric and fundamentalism in Jamaica emerged when foreigners descended en masse into military guarded enclaves for the rich – otherwise known as resorts – which overtly broke Jamaican laws of decency in an orgy of neo-colonialism, debauched materialism and racial elitism, expressed in fortified tropic paradises firewalled from the island poverty by razor wire and military guards.

Read the entire article here.

Never Give Up The Fight… Attorneys For Banton File Motion For New Trial.

Scratch’s presence alongside other innovators like the U.K.’s Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor and voices of dub’s new generation like Vienna’s Dubblestandart sound system and dubstep vocalist Jahdan Blakkamoore, gives authenticity to the Dub Invasion Festival which is currently moving between New York and Boston. It is the first such systematic presentation of the thrilling art of dub, which in the 1970s established Jamaica as the pioneering source of all future dance sounds. It was the first music to use the studio as an instrument at a pre-video time when users weren’t able to talk back to their technology.

Francois K is a French house DJ who is participating in the festival and hosts the popular Deep Space parties. In his mission statement, he declares: “Dub has been present in popular music since its early ’70s Jamaican reggae roots, also filtering into dance music in later decades, without ever being widely acknowledged for what it is: a truly groundbreaking conceptual art form equal in significance to other giant aesthetic leaps such as Cubism or jazz.”

To make a dub, an existing track is stripped down to the recording desk’s individual fader tracks of instruments and vocals, then re-assembled differently as a dub version. On the flip side of reggae singles, you expect to get a dub version — the same song, but utterly re-invented. The essence of dub is the unexpected, so you’ll hear elements of the original sound suddenly expanded by quivering reverb, then dramatically silenced, only to return when you least expect them — but always right on time. Dub means adventure.

All dance musics use dub’s studio tricks, its ghostly deployment of echo, reverb and rewind. Nowadays, we expect records to come with a bunch of DJ re-mixes. Dub IS a remix, it’s where it began. You can trace rap and hip-hop back to the African griots’ oral tradition, but really, hip-hop rapping stems from dub. DJs who introduced records at a sound system would often “chat” on the re-vamped riddim, and they soon crossed over to the recording studio. Sampling and use of found sound? In its pursuit of the unexpected, dub started it, throwing anything in from a crying baby to a police siren or idle studio banter.

In a sense, the media and technology have grown up to shape the sort of multi-sensory world that dub predicted three decades ago. With the motto, “Respect The Foundation,” the Invasion’s organizers, Emch of Subatomic Sound System and Quoc Pham of Sound Liberation Front, are musicians whose mission is to keep awareness of dub’s role alive. They collaborated with Manhattan’s lively dub, DJ and mixing academy, Dubspot, who organized master class seminars with producers, enabling the festival to come at their fan base from all directions, just like a dramatic, sensurround dub mix. Dub aficionadoes can attend the festival workshops online and even participate (classes can be found at Dubstop’s site).

All dub’s shoots have taken wing and flown. But now, Emch and Pham feel, the branches have overshadowed the roots.

Most dance tracks today are done by a solo human and a computer. Back in the day, to cut a dub, though you might have one auteur producer (like a Lee Perry), equally often the mix would be improvised by several sets of hands dancing round each other over the mixing desk faders. Pushing up one instrument, pulling another out for a crucial two bars then dropping it back in; making a crooned vocal blur then swoop in a wicked flange of ambient sound, then come back sweet as a bird, singing the same phrase three times, getting quieter with each repeat. The original track would be dismantled and re-assembled in a deliberately off-kilter way that would keep the dancers guessing. Dub is dependent on a human element, our rhythm, hands, heart and ears, that a computer can only be programmed to replicate, never feel.

Says Emch, “We want to make the connection. Kids today are hardly playing drums and guitars, it’s all drum machines and laptops. It’s fine to use computers but it’s important to understand where the music comes from. There’s so much soul and culture in reggae. Injecting your soul into a laptop is harder than it is with a guitar.”

With its fractured sensibility, the frisson of never knowing where a track will go next, dub captured the edgy, fractured sensibility of the ’70s. The old order was crumbling to make way for a newly multiracial reality At the time of dub’s first wave, punk was yowling in the streets; America was still recovering from the national double vision of hippies vs. Vietnam; unemployment was high in Britain and Jamaica and their left-wing governments were seeing if socialism could stave off the system’s collapse — only to be replaced by the right before the results were fully in. Sound familiar?

Dub still resonates with our society today. More than a genre, it is a state of mind that involves enjoying life’s ride and being ready for anything. Staunchly individual, the outstanding producer Adrian Sherwood has kept on recording and releasing dub music since the early ’70s, building a community around his On-U Sound label. (Full disclosure: I sang with the original On-U Sound studio collective, New Age Steppers.)

A fixture at international dub and reggae events, Sherwood has seen the world of dub expand from basement “shebeen” parties in squats to events like the Dub Invasion and the recent Rototom Reggae Festival in Spain which attracted more than 200,000 attendees. “Dub has more space and tone and encompasses and inspires all sorts of music,” says Sherwood. “But at the heart of everything related to dub, whether its old or new, is the original Jamaican stuff. It was really saying something.”

[Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/09/15/140481477/dub-invasion-festival-lands-on-the-east-coast?sc=ipad&f=124289519

The journey with Buju as an artist began (before I knew the word ‘groupie’) in a moment of deep respect and appreciation when I felt compelled to introduce myself to the artist backstage at Superjam 1994 after his spellbinding performance. Where did dis yout’ come from, with such raw passion and an embarrassment of talent? I am still to answer that question in a profound metaphysical sense, but were I to give the quick ‘off the cuff’ response, I would say he’s Made in Jamaica. His meteoric rise to dancehall prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s holding such records as most number one hits on the Jamaican charts, or touted as the next Bob Marley with his Til Shiloh release are just some of the fruits of his labour of love. This is an artist with profound contradictions in his experience: so much positive has been said of him, so many people love him, yet so many negatives abound and so many have come to question their appreciation of his talent. A so life go….mi nah sell out mi frien’ dem or mi artist!

Well, it was an October day in 1995 that the telephone in my room rang, on the other line a voice I immediately recognised. The husky cooner travelled into my world in a real way: I can say now it was ‘Destiny‘. I livicate this blog posting to Buju, my favourite DJ and fellow traveller on the reggae dancehall life path. As I matured, I became witness to the maturation of Jamaica’s popular indigenous music with DJs such as Tappa Zukie, Yellow Man, Shabba Ranks, Little Lenny and Buju Banton as some of my contemporaries.

In an unqualified facebook post over the past weekend, I stirred a discussion on Buju, asserting his status as a prophet. Afterall, for those who know his music and have moved beyond the Boom Bye Bye saga, statements about Buju Banton being a prophet might not stir any outrage. This was my Facebook post: “Buju Banton is one of the biggest prophets to have walked the earth. ‘Supporting him in his struggles….”. And, these were some of the responses: ”Define big, just curious”; “Predicting in lyrical content many of the events in his life is big, major, huge…. Or another way to look at it is that his prophesying has been big…has had big impact for all the world to see”; “I only know one Buju song, ‘Boom Bye Bye,’ and I hope that one is not a prediction”;  “We will soon find out”; ”Truth – a prophet indeed”; “I thought he did some atrocious things to a woman AND was arrested for drug possession. AND, the one song I remember most starkly is Boom Bye Bye. Prophet?”; “After all is said and done, what did he do that is so different from those who went before? Maybe he is keenly aware that he hasn’t walked a different path at all, just did so in a different moment”; “Really? A prophet?”; “Everyone has lessons in life to learn, some more publicly than others. The reach of his life is what makes him and his actions or lyrical contributions recognizable. His lyrics have shown the major plots in his life. Listen and you will hear. Its not enough to make a comment based on a lack of knowledge on the subject or based on propoganda. I have listened and have documented my listening. He has prophesied about his own demise and the rise that will come based on his transformation(s). We are lucky to be witnesses”; “I guess that we are conditioned to associate the word “prophet” with a religious figure, especially one that espouses the tenets of morality as construed through Judeo-Christian lenses. I suppose that we can view the term ‘prophet’ within a different context and apply it to Buju (or perhaps even the same context). To be honest, I don’t know enough about him personally to have an opinion either way. All I know are the songs I have heard him perform. He has never been a figure that has ever had any significant influence over my thought process, nor have I ever aspired to be like him in any way but I will definitely acknowledge his reach and influence not only in Jamaica but worldwide. My question is: If he is truly a prophet, is HE aware of this? Also, would you consider other musical figures such as Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, or even Bounty Killer prophets as well?”; ”WOW! What a rash statement without putting thought to it…..Prophet???????…I think not….”; “I am as liberal as they come, but I wish the energy that was put towards Buju being freed was put towards pressuring the government(S) of Jamaica to do the right thing. Coke? DESTRUCTION.”

I ended the facebook discussion by imploring those who were joining the discussion in the middle to read my comments carefully before passing judgement since it was easy to miss the quotidian sense in which I was using the word prophet; sort of removing it from its esoterical place in the sky living among saints beatified or pardoned by the Pope to apply it to local contexts among our immediate ancestors and even our peers. You can tell me what you think after really listening to his lyrics. For now, the fact is Buju Banton’s life has been an open book through which any walk through the colourful lyrics will reveal profoundly impacting life lessons. Buju’s lyrical walk through issues of love, deportation, safe sex, drugs, curfews, life changing experiences, supreme creator, Rastafari, touring and many many more, have made indelible marks on many a man and woman. Personally, Banton has taught me a lot, and my book DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto could easily have been dedicated to him. In lieu of my book I here today offer this poem as I pay homage to my DJ. Stay tuned for an excerpt from my book about the Gargamel on Tour.

The typical dancehall platform

On such platforms consenting adults seek entertainment, economic, and social fulfilment. Most of all, on these platforms, many enact their beings, live other sides of themselves and gain status.  The dancehall world, its stage, habitus,  citizenry and ecology are all at the heart of the research I published in DanceHall: From Slave ship to Ghetto.

Last week I  decided to begin my class (Identity and Conduct in Jamaican Dancehall, UWI) with my ruminations on the ‘ecological question’ and how it led me to look at embodied geographies which tell us a lot about the socio-cultural context that makes Jamaica Jamaica!  Do you really know what dance moves and names reveal about dancehall and Jamaican social life? Have you ever considered the cross-cultural implications of dance? Check out this video from dancers among the African community in South America. Does it look like anything from the Jamaican dance repertoire?

The dance is a distinguishing feature of the dancehall space. In dancehall dancers and other patrons take on the toil of ridding their mind of daily troubles, becoming enslaved devotees, not (solely) in a capitalist sense that renders them as pawns, but in a somatic and kinaesthetic sense.  As if they were ‘slaves to the rhythm’ that beat around them and inside them amidst the social ills of everyday Jamaica, the exerting body on the contemporary dance floors of Jamaica literally and symbolically replaces those on the plantations that preceded them. In this sense slavery and freedom are inextricably linked into mechanisms of law, identity and liberties.  Here is the body that, through contestation, exploitation, discrimination and oppression, has preserved itself through performance to tell the tales of history, while dance venues become de-localised for just a moment when they transcend time and produce the power to transform lives.  

The dancehall platform has seen many dance moves. Such dance moves tell stories about gender, history, and identity. Let’s look at one of the most popular female dance steps. The butterfly was the most popular dance in 1992.  It depicted the form of a butterfly with the movement of the dancer’s outspread legs and arms.  The ‘butterfly’ is danced with bent knees, a characteristic feature of African and diasporic movement patterns, with the feet flat to support the dynamic displacement of the hips, shoulder girdle, and legs. The knees, which open and close fluidly on a horizontal axis, mimic the flapping of the butterfly’s wings in flight. While the butterfly has clear connections with the Charleston, its North Atlantic cousin which has roots in an Ashanti ancestor dance, with its quick spreading and crossing of hands on the knees, there are differences.  For example, the forward and backward thrust of the hip which supports the opening and closing of the legs allows for increased degrees of variation on the movement style. 

Well, as with the musical rhythms — punawny, taxi, sleng ting, rampage, old dawg, diwali, fiesta, wicked, nine night, tai chi, military, red bull and guinness, and anger management — dance moves have names which tell stories.  These include stories of cross-fertilization, identification with characters, vibes, phenomena, globalization, contemporary and historical Jamaican and African traditional forms, body parts, as well as the valorization of local culture.  For example, the jerry springer and erkle moves present interesting names for an analysis of dancehall within the text of two television characters originating within the social milieu or melee displayed in America’s visualscape.  Jerry Springer is a talk show named after its host.  The show is known for high levels of controversy and public display of interpersonal feuding.  The identification with Jerry Springer – one of the most explosive talk shows in which guests openly displayed private controversies, contests and physical fights – within the bodily movement repertoire of the Jamaican space, says something about the identities within both spaces and the kinds of practices that they produce. The erkle, on the other hand, is named after a nerd from the series Family Matters.

Some of the messages to be read from the dance moves include tangible socio-cultural and anatomical scripts.  For example, some dances comment on social ills. These include the curfew and drive by. 

The movement in ‘curfew’ presents policemen carrying guns while searching for criminal elements in innercity communities that come under attack from gang warfare and/or warring political factions.   With the characteristic bent knees, sometimes to very low grand plié levels, the dancer walks in a forward motion with hands mimicking the shape of a rifle while looking forward and backwards.  The get flat dance popularized by the Bloodfire Posse band through a song of the same name is a forerunner of the curfew.

The ‘drive by’ represents two things.  First it comes into common Jamaican usage because of the ‘importation’ of drive-by shootings from North America, as a sign of more complex criminal activity in Jamaica.  Added to this, however, is the representation of the actions involved in driving a car.  The dance moves through a sequence of actions such as steering, gearing down, turning left, indicating, braking, and parking.  The influx of reconditioned cars in the late 1990s, gave the middle and working classes in Jamaica increased access to motor vehicles and one could argue that the ‘drive by’ represents the ‘coming of age’ of car culture in Jamaica.

Information technology introduced concepts such as the internet and ‘logging on’ which are reflected in the internet and log on dance names.  Alongside such imports as cars, and technological advancements as it were, there are others such the log on dance whose movement and description in song are not stictly related to the technology.  The lyrics by Elephant Man instruct the dancer to “log on an’ step pon chi chi man, dance we a dance an’ a burn out a freakie man”, with a lift of the leg followed by a twist to the side before stepping down.  In the 1970’s, the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett popularised the term chi chi bus which refered to the popular mode of transportation in the island. In the 1990s the term was used to refer to the homosexual male whose sexual orientation was and still is strongly denounced within dancehall.

(This piece was abstracted from the book Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto, by Sonjah Stanley Niaah, University of Ottawa Press 2010, now available at Amazon.com).

I am particularly fascinated by the scope and unique features of this festival which is a site for investigation in my current research project. Broadly speaking, the University is organized as a “series of meetings to discuss important moments in the history of reggae music, together with journalists, writers, Dee jays and artistes. A real forum on the past, present and future of reggae music, analysing the influence and evolution of this music style, as well as its social, political and spiritual impact.” The collective that organizes the sessions comprises – David Katz, internationally renowned American writer and journalist; Ellen Koehlings & Pete Lilly, who represent Riddim magazine in Germany; and Pier Tosi, eminent reggae expert from Italy. What a collective!

Well well…this year I spoke about the many spaces, places and faces of dancehall along with Tony Matterhorn, Ellen Koehlings, Sick in Head and Chiquituta, all of whom I give nuff respect! I focused on my new book – DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (2010, University of Ottawa Press). Check out the link for the reggae university: http://www.rototomsunsplash.com/en/programme/beyond-music/reggae-university 

In the meantime till I see you again online, enjoy the hottest single on the scene – ‘Hold You’ by Gyptian. What a wicked forward march for this talented artist!

‘A wha do dem’…How could reggae have produced dancehall?

‘A wha do dem, a wha do dem dem dem…..mi nuh kno oh….’. These are classic lines from a dancehall tune back in the 1980s when the musical genre was thought to have emerged. Such lines form part of musical aesthetic structures that are founded on toasting, vibing and chanting to please crowds of celebrants typically atending dancehall events or ‘dances’. Dancehall style emerged in the work of Count Matchukie and King Stitt in the late 1950s and begins the era of the dancehall musical genre. How then can we say that reggae gave birth to dancehall? Have we all been mistaken? What is even more is that we continue to give credence to the technological shifts that give way to computerized rhythms and the proliferation in lyrics about women’s body parts when such strands were always a part of the lyrical repertoire. As for the technology, shifts from the juke box my grandfather bought for entertaining patrons in his shop, to pressing vinyl, and the broadcast capacity via radio stations, need not be discounted any longer!