Dancehall: an Introduction

My first encounter with dancehall happened on my first night on the East Coast, in the basement of Faunce Campus Center at Brown University.  There, during a pre-orientation dance for the Third World Transition Program, a DJ spun tracks by new-school Jamaican legends like Vybz Kartel and Assassin.  As “Dutty Wine” by Kingston-based Tony Matterhorn emerged from the speakers, so did a circle of female students, who proceeded to gyrate and whip their hair forward as the song’s chorus sounded. 

Dancehall, whose name reflects its origins in the musky taverns of Kingston and Montego Bay, is a bass-heavy, electronic brand of reggae that emerged out of more traditional reggae cultures in Jamaica during the 80’s and 90’s.  As electronics’ impact on the genre has grown, and as it has been fused with hip hop and adopted by contemporary performers like Sean Paul, its association with the reggae of Bob Marley’s generation has been questioned.  Dancehall has spawned a youth culture rich in high-energy dancing, which often includes intense gyration, hip rolls, and writhing movements on the floor that may seem more heavily influenced by a contemporary hip hop aesthetic than that of traditional reggae, calypso, and other West Indian styles.  With heavy waves of immigration from the West Indies, and particularly Jamaica, to urban nodes on the East Coast, has come the transmission of a dancehall culture to these spaces.  Furthermore, the presence of many students of Caribbean descent on college campuses such as Brown has brought consciousness of this genre to fraternity basements, orientation dances, and the Brown University radio station, among other spaces.   

This semester, I aim to dig into dancehall, using the Internet, Brown University, and greater Providence to examine the social, racial, and sexual politics of this genre.  When a dancehall track comes on at a Brown party, who enters the circle and spins their heads?  Does the scene look different at a venue off College Hill than it does on campus?  How do male and female bodies become sexualized in the performance of a “hot wuk,” a “dutty wine,” or other dances embedded in the dancehall canon?  How has dancehall’s migration to the United States impacted its identity as a musical and subcultural entity?

Seeking answers to these questions will be a fulfilling endeavor this semester.  In the meantime…here’s the song that has gotten my blood thumping and my head spinning, ever since that glorious night in the basement of Faunce. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg0qluaxpOo

Critical Review Set 1, Post #3 (Maira, due 9/27)

Maira, Sunaina.  1999.  “Identity Dub: The Paradoxes of an Indian American Youth Subculture (New York Mix).”  In Cultural Anthropology (14.1), Feb. 1999.

Maira’s article deconstructs Desi youth musical culture with respects to its hybridity, its melding of styles and aesthetics associated with hip hop rooted in black American communities and with a variety of regionally distinct South Asian genres, particularly Punjabi bhangra.  Throughout the article, Maira questions this hybridity and interrogates its power as a subversive tool; she examines the “logic” of this melding by claiming that through the Desi dance party network, second-generation youth can “mediate between the expectations of immigrant parents and those of mainstream American peer culture by trying to integrate signs of belonging to both worlds” (37), in short that the multiple dimensions of this scene (where parties are attended by a largely Desi crowd that includes men and women that often share commonly held cultural values or regional and linguistic lineage) satisfies both a familial rootedness in South Asian community, as well as a subcultural identity that is distinctly American.  The result is the formation of a subcultural capital, a “hipness” as Maira observes, that is neither distinctly American nor distinctly South Asian, but rather distinctly South Asian American.  Maira also observes the splinters within this distinct Desi youth culture, noting the tensions between regionalist attitudes expressed in club culture (Gujaratis might scoff at the prevalence of Punjabi music), as well as the power dynamic that arises from typified Desi ideals of beauty based on “fair skin” perpetuated by Bollywood and an entrenched caste system, and a counter-femme culture of machismo under which many Desi men operate.      

In reference to the “culturally hybrid style” associated with South Asian American youth cultures, Maira cites the “juxtaposition of hip-hop fashion with Indian-style nose rings and bindis” (32) and later asserts that the melding of Indian and African American musical and aesethetic traditions “symbolically juxtaposes Indian and urban American popular cultures” (37).  If we trust Maira’s assertions that many second-generation Indian American youth have commodified “hip hop culture” to construct distinct, “hybrid” identities, does this relationship with established American art forms really represent one of “juxtaposition?”  When is it appropriate or valid to deem two cultures or communities “disparate” or oppositional so as to validate this “juxtaposition?”  As styles and traditions are appropriated and absorbed by certain groups, how does this further deconstruct the notion that traditions that are fused together are simultaneously juxtaposed?

Critical Review Set 1, Post #2 (Cohen, due 9/20)

Cohen, Sara.  "Ethnography and Popular Music Studies."  1993.  In Popular Music (12.2).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Cohen’s article tackles the delicacy of ethnographic research, namely the fine line between respecting a community’s values and uprooting that value by immersing it in Western research methodology, classical theories, and other ethnocentric vehicles for framing it.  But beyond the scope of ethnographic research, Cohen describes the imposition of “global processes of homogenisation or diversification,” mediated by a vast commercial enterprise (namely, the music industry), as a threat to the preservation of culturally rooted art forms, noting the “theft” of these forms as they are beaten and folded into a contmporary, “schizoid” musical agenda (126-7).  Cohen’s musing on identity and locality go a long way in articulating these concerns; she notes, for example, that since identity is “not a fixed essence...[but] always in the process of being achieved, negotiated, invented” (132), music and its relation to networks of individuals within a place or community (or, a locality) are constantly in flux as well.  These fluid boundaries harken back to the notion, as Thornton outlines, of “subculture” and “mainstream” as unfixed and relationally shifting entities (if the identities that construct subcultures are perpetually changing, so then does the relationship between these subcultures and the “mainstream”’s that they do(n’t) stand in opposition to; and furthermore, the flexible (or nonexistent) boundaries of identity allow music to ooze between the pores in groups and communities, making way for the socially contested but meanwhile celebrated fusion of musical styles in genres such as punk.  

My questions address Cohen’s bit on technology, namely her assertion that, within academic discourse, the idea that “new technologies...have supposedly resulted in the plundering of different cultures or eras” (126) predominates.  I question the notion that technology, and the melding and “homogenization” of “disparate” styles, enforces notions of placelessness in music, and I ask how can these processes actually give power and credence to communities and places that create them?  In what ways can “playing” with traditional ideals of music, and simmering a diverse gumbo of styles mediated by modern technology to produce a new sound,   re-define but preserve the strength and unity of this sound’s creators and visionaries?  (I look to my hometown of Detroit, the birthplace of electronic music and techno, as a locality that exemplifies the association between place and a new sound that may not initially seem like a “native” one...could we say this about punk in London as well?)

Critical Review Set 1, Post #1 (McClary; due 9/12)

McClary, Susan.  1994.  "Same As It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music."  In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, eds. Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross.  New York: Routledge, 1994.

McClary's article asserts that it is not the lyrical or overtly “political” value of a piece or genre that is at the heart of music's sociopolitical power, but rather the mind-body "correspondence" (34) -- the physicality associated with music at large, implicit in any genre or piece -- that informs music's capacity to deconstruct standing social conditions, gender roles, and systems of marginalization.  McClary writes that “the musical power of the disenfranchised...resides in their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body” (34), highlighting what I perceive as the most powerful reality captured in her text: that music activates movements of the body sculpted by racial, sexual, and gendered identities, and that the dispersion of music through commerce has produced a terrain in which these physical expressions are constantly contested.  Plato’s fear that music promulgates a “thirst for liberty” and “sensuousness of body” (29) comes on behalf of this terrain, and furthermore reflects similar anxieties as those who criticized Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” or the Ciaccona -- anxieties produced on the basis of uncomfortable freedoms, of physical and expressive liberties that push cultural envelopes.

In the article McClary observes that “white audiences have often come to black music to experience vicariously the body they otherwise deny themselves, then have castigated black musicians for indulging in physicality” (34).  I’m curious to know how the appropriation of physical expression rooted in the musical traditions of marginalized communities simultaneously serves to destabilize standing systems of marginalization.  How would these white listeners’ “indulgence” in jazz, or maybe even Plato’s indulgence in a Classical dance-craze that he publicly abhorred, complicate and deconstruct the very prejudices from which some of the most infamous and popular traditions have emerged?