Reading Religion and Spirituality in Jamaican Reggae Dancehall Dance

Spirit Bodies Moving

'H' Patten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000546422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book explores the genealogy of Jamaican dancehall while questioning whether dancehall has a spiritual underscoring, foregrounding dance, and cultural expression.

This study identifies the performance and performative (behavioural actions) that may be considered as representing spiritual ritual practices within the reggae/dancehall dance phenomenon. It does so by juxtaposing reggae/dancehall against Jamaican African/neo-African spiritual practices such as Jonkonnu masquerade, Revivalism and Kumina, alongside Christianity and post-modern holistic spiritual approaches.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies, popular culture, music, theology, cultural studies, Jamaican/Caribbean culture, and dance specialists.

1Warm upDancehall literature

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003083887-2

Introduction

For most dancehall practitioners, dance is a central aspect of life. This chapter critically examines the seminal and key full-length dancehall texts in order to ascertain: Firstly, how scholars and researchers have interpreted Jamaican dance practices in relation to spirituality and the dancing body; and secondly, how resistance and liberation themes manifest spiritual and corporeal genealogical continuities that impact notions of identity within reggae/dancehall scholarship. Reflecting on my experience of Jamaican culture as a young man growing up, numerous special occasions and events were etched in my mind through music and dance.

Watching elders – rocking pelvises from side-to-side, throwing arms out and in, up and down – dancing the Ska to Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ in the 60s; the excitement and thrill created by Trinity’s lifting of his leg to reveal ‘Diamond cut’ patterned socks to his 70s hit ‘T’ree (Three) Piece Suit and T’ing (Things)’; experiencing the electrifying mass dancing and stellar performances by an array of dancehall dancers and artists from the 80s well into the Millennia, including the ‘Just Buss’ Digicel advert (music video) dance performed multiple times between Mavado’s crowd rallying ‘Hope and Pray’ anthem, and the frenzy created by Vybz Kartel’s headlining performance closing the Sumfest 2010 ‘Dancehall Night’ show. Each of these and numerous other events are inextricably linked by the particular dance movements, music tracks and feelings of resistance, liberation and spiritual upliftment they signal in charting the different eras of my life.

This chapter therefore lays the foundations that assist in demonstrating how themes of resistance and liberation dominant within the Jamaican psyche might contribute to the ascertaining of the nature of any potential dancehall spirituality. It does so by exploring the key works of Carolyn Cooper (1993; 2004), Norman Stolzoff (2000), Donna P. Hope (2006a; 2010), Sonjah Stanley Niaah (2010), Julian Henriques (2011) and Dennis O. Howard (2012; 2016). Between them, supported by journal articles and chapters that broaden the field, these texts outline the key discourses underscoring contemporary dancehall practice. In surveying the literature, it is apparent that most scholars either fully omit or pay little attention to spirituality and the corporeal dancing body.

Dancehall, a reggae appendage or voice of the people?

Early written accounts on Jamaican popular culture position dancehall as an appendage to reggae, summing it up in a chapter, or section within reggae texts. Many writers rightly assert that reggae created the space for blackness and marginality to become visible (Thomas, 2002; Farley, 2009; Brodber, 2012). Most suggest that reggae provides an ideological social and political voice for the oppressed whilst conversely, as the opening statement in Salewicz and Boot’s (2001) dancehall chapter suggests, dancehall is regarded as ‘the marriage of digital beats and slackness … [a] tough and very upfront style of street reggae music’ (2001 p.173). Dancehall’s complex and nuanced discourses frequently foster contradictory views concerning its artistic content and function.

Dancehall’s presentation devoid of its own discourses often enables the DJs’ lyrical challenge to the hegemonic value systems that work against society’s poor to be easily dismissed. For example, Chang and Chen in stating that, ‘many big-name deejays are illiterate’ (1998 p.79), play into the negative perceptions many ‘uptown’¹ ruling-class Jamaicans already hold pertaining to dancehall and its participants. However, the contradictory representation of the dancehall DJ is clear as Chang and Chen continue to describe DJing as ‘a surprisingly versatile art form … Deejays are almost “street newspapers” … giving commentary on almost every topic’ (ibid). The DJs’ representation as the voice of the people is inherently elevated here to that of modern day Griot (historian/storyteller/praise-singer/poet/musician).²

Lloyd Bradley supports the conception of dancehall as representing the voice of the people arguing, ‘underlined by Bob Marley’s massive overseas success, it [roots reggae] was being defined by influences other than its immediate environment’ (2000 p.502). The Jamaican concern with controlling an authentic cultural expression is what is raised here, a theme that runs throughout the whole development of Jamaican popular culture. Bradley’s assertion that dancehall was ‘quite literally, a retreat into Jamaicanness: [as DJ] toasting can’t happen without a deep yard-style accent’ (2000 p.504), reinforces the desire for ownership by Jamaican people of their own cultural expression. This is of crucial concern to a people who exist within a post-enslavement and post-colonial social context.

Scholars writing about dancehall acknowledge that dancehall expression voices the concerns and harsh realities that marginalised lower and working-class Jamaicans experience. Salewicz and Boot quote veteran DJ Buju Banton who declares, ‘Inspiration for songs is a everyday thing from what happen around me … things that you see that no one else seems to see’ (2001 p.198). Jahn and Weber similarly quote DJ Cutty Ranks who affirms:

Most of the lyrics guys like me talkin’ about right now is reality, understand? Is REAL reality … My message is that the people have the power.

Cutty Ranks in Jahn and Weber, 1998 p.42

Yet, full-length scholastic texts offer in-depth analysis of the DJ’s lyrics broadening their possible interpretation. Carolyn Cooper in discussing poor peoples’ reality privileges the accomplished words of DJ Bounty Killer’s ‘Sufferah’ (‘Sufferer’) anthem, proclaiming:

Mama she (is) a sufferah (sufferer)

Papa im (is) a sufferah (sufferer)

Can’t mek mi (allow my) children [to] grow up [and] turn sufferah (sufferer).

Bounty Killer, in Cooper, 2004 p.183

Although, as Cooper argues, DJs aptly demonstrate their role as ideological spokespersons for Jamaica’s impoverished poor, ‘whom, nevertheless, ambitiously strive to improve their circumstances’ (2004 p.183), I contend that marginalised African/Jamaicans also speak for themselves through dance. Jamaican dancehall corporeal dancing bodies not only articulate their present concerns, but also simultaneously offer access to the historical and spiritual (en)coding they embody. Dance scholar Halifu Osumare describes dance as the rhythm, space, shape and dynamics through which society, ‘create[s] a choreography of life itself’ (2018 p.3). Thus, as this chapter will demonstrate, due to the predominant focus on dancehall lyrical content and the socio-politico-economic issues surrounding dancehall culture, dance and the corporeal dancing body are frequently neglected. Yet, African/neo-African practitioners both consciously and subconsciously approach dance as a spiritual practice. Whereas dancehall lyrics may be argued as demonstrating, ‘illiteracy’ by some dancehall corporeal dancing bodies may better be conceived as collapsing spiritual, historical, performance and what I call ‘performatisation’³ knowledge into a corporeal literacy.

Dancehall’s emergence within Jamaican popular music

Whilst a comprehensive historical mapping of reggae/dancehall is beyond the scope of this study, some comprehension of the historical context it evolves from as a contemporary indigenous Jamaican form, is vital. Reggae/dancehall represents an alternative genealogy of Jamaican dance practice to the often derogative and racist perspectives offered in early Euro-historical writings. The 1707 account by British medical doctor Sir Hans Sloane reads:

… Negroes are much given to Venery, and although hard wrought, will at nights, or on Feast days Dance and Sing: their songs are all bawdy … [t]heir Dances consist in great activity and strength of Body, and keeping time, if it can be.

Sloane in Ramdhanie, 2005, p.84.

These early colonial records, often dismissed Caribbean African/neo-African dances as being, as Bob Ramdhanie rightly exposes, ‘“savage in nature”, “simple” and “indecent”, through … lack of understanding of what [the authors] w[ere] witnessing’ (2005 p.87). Racism and ignorance were major contributors to the lack of insight shown within early scholarship, as exemplified by a number of accounts in Abrahams and Szwed’s (1983) edited collection. Nonetheless, some examples of early Jamaican African/neo-African dance practices may be excavated, by discerning researchers with some knowledge of Jamaica’s dance heritage.⁴

Conversely, a number of texts have more reliably charted the broad roots of Jamaican indigenous cultural practices (Beckwith, 1929; Baxter, 1970; Barrett, 1976; Ryman, 1980; Coester, and Bender, 2015). Others present Jamaican dance within the context of dance in the wider Caribbean (Sloat, 2002; Manuel, et al., 2006; Sloat, 2010), and yet others provide detailed explorations of individual African/neo-African dance and spiritual practices, including Jonkonnu masquerade (Barnett, 1979; Ryman, 1984a), Kumina (Warner-Lewis, 1977; Schuler, 1980; Ryman, 1984; Lewin, 2000), Revivalism (Seaga, 1982; Lewin, 2000; Smith, 2006), Rastafari (Chevannes, 1994; Lewin, 2000), Myalism, Ettu, Dinki Mini and others (Coester and Bender, 2015). Authors have also mapped Jamaican popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present (Clarke, 1980; White, 1984; Chang and Chen, 1998; Jahn and Weber, 1998; Foster, 1999; Bradley, 2000; Salewicz and Boot, 2001; Katz, 2003; Barrow and Dalton, 2004; Seaga, 2004; Veal, 2007; McCarthy, 2007; Gooden, 2014; Hitchins, 2014; Howard, 2016).

Garth White’s (1984; 1998) early history of the development of sound system culture and the Jamaican recording industry offers an enlightened in-depth delineation of the urbanisation of Jamaican popular music from mento, to ska, rocksteady and reggae, albeit expressly focusing on social ‘dances [that] are [performed] for pleasure and not for ritual purposes’ (White, 1984 p.47). White’s focus therefore centres on Mento dance. Subsequent studies by Chang and Chen (1998), Bradley (2000; 2002), Katz (2003), Barrow and Dalton (2004) and Seaga (2004) all provide further comprehensive histories of sound system’s contested and at times conflicting interpretations, but most only briefly address dance, and few discuss the corporeal dancing body.

Lloyd Bradley’s (2000; 2002) studies usefully parallel the historic development of Jamaican popular music both in Jamaica and the UK, employing the voices of artists and engineers. Although dancehall’s emergence as a distinct dance and musical genre is debated, Bradley holds, ‘the 1985 hit single by Wayne Smith “Under Mi Sleng Teng” … was the first to have no bass-line, and is, therefore, dancehall’s clearest line in the sand’ (2000 p.517). Most scholars concur that Smith’s hit, ‘whose riddim was generated entirely on digital keyboards … [a rumoured] adaptation of a pre-packaged rhythm on a Casio’ (Manuel and Marshal, 2006 p.452), marks dancehall’s digital emergence. David Katz (2003) deliberately uses interview statements and personal observations to enable reggae/dancehall pioneers to ‘use their own voices to tell its tale’ (2003 p.ix), which gives his study a greater authenticity. As Katz remarks, ‘dub music has taught us that what is absent from a mix is as important as what stays in’ (2003 p.xi), the same applies to reggae/dancehall history and dance.

Prior to Cooper (1993), and Stolzoff (2000), Jamaican dancehall as an appendage to reggae rather than a subject in its own right, meant academic discourses focused on dancehall DJ artists and the analysis of their lyrical content (Cooper, 1993; 2004; Hippolyte, 2004; Henry, 2006). Alternatively, scholars focused on the socio-politico-economic conditions of dancehall participants and Jamaican society at large (Stolzoff, 2000; Hope, 2006a; Charles, 2013). Consequently, dance, the dancing body and their potential embodiment of spiritual symbolism have received little attention. A significant issue is the fact that few dancehall scholars or researchers have the necessary dance training or expertise to analyse corporeal dancing bodies. Nonetheless, the subversive resistance messages prominently evidenced within dancehall lyrics are explored through the alternative histories inscribed on and projected by dancehall corporeal dancing bodies within this study.

Dance and resistance

Dances within reggae/dancehall and its genealogical line both implicitly and explicitly perform an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• The Blessing – List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sanctification
• 1 Warm up: Dancehall literature
• 2 Old time story: The convergence of African, neo-African and popular dance in Jamaica
• 3 Come back again: Towards a definition of spirituality
• 4 The massive arrive: The gathering and meshing together of knowledge
• 5 Party time – early vibe: Thick descriptions/analysis of dance in the dancehall space
• 6 Party hot – man dem section: The corporeal dancing body creating ‘dancehall spirituality’
• 7 Party hot up – female section: Dancehall spirituality rooted and routed through African/neo-African practices and worldviews
• 8 Coupling section: Male and female relationships
• 9 Signing off/revelation: Findings and meanings
• Conclusion: Dispersal – recommendations
• Bibliography: Bruk down
• Index