Bling-Bling for Rastafari?

Wayne Marshall Ph.D. candidate, UW-Madison Writing Sample (Dissertation Excerpt) Bling-bling for Rastafari? As a direct outcome of its growing sonic and visual presence hip-hop has come to define what it means to be black and “modern” within a global context and particularly in youth cultures. Because of hip-hop’s preeminence, Afro-diasporic youth populations habitually identify with or define themselves against hip-hop culture, creating identities suspended between the local and the global. Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies On the one hand, they desire to participate in the world as cosmopolitans who can move with social ease across geopolitical divides, unfettered from nation or locality as a primary source of identity. On the other, they face a pressure to metaculturally mark their global participation as ethnically specific and emplaced. When the processes of imagining the global and fashioning sounds that might enable access to its stages are situated within the context of local struggles, processes of mediation and commodification become analytically inseparable from conceptions of culture and musical experience. Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! 1 When I asked him about the relationship between hip-hop and reggae, Wasp, a Kingston- based DJ and one of my primary collaborators, told me: “Rap, ‘pon a level now, come from reggae, seen? Dancehall now is a new ting weh come after rap, seen? So hip-hop get influence from reggae, but this what we a do now—what Dami D a do, Beenie Man a do, Bounty a do, y’know—a dancehall, and that come from rap.” 2 Due in part to the hip-hop retrospectives frequently aired on MTV and VH1, all of which tie hip-hop’s beginnings to Jamaican immigrant Clive Campbell’s (i.e., Kool Herc’s) parties in the mid-70s Bronx, many Jamaicans hear hip-hop as an outgrowth of reggae and, conversely, dancehall (the latest subgenre of reggae), as a direct 1 Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 146; Louise Meintjes, The Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 220. Here Meintjes refers to South African musicians, but I leave her use of the pronoun “they” purposely vague in order to resonate with Jamaican circumstances. 2 Because I was recording music with Wasp and thus literally “collaborating” with him, as well as talking with him about music in Jamaica, and because I would like to underscore the role that he and my other primary contacts played in the making of this work, I prefer the term collaborator to informant , consultant , subject , or the like. 2 product of hip-hop’s local influence. Even Jamaicans who seek to promote themselves as “reggae artists” are increasingly drawn to hip-hop style, often in order to play to the perceived tastes of a coveted international (i.e., US) audience. Once while producing a song with Wasp, he instructed me to place the snares squarely on beats 2 and 4 and to avoid any semblance of a 3+3+2—dancehall’s distinctive rhythmic accent. He did not want a dancehall sound, he explained, he wanted an “international sound,” which, stylistically, amounted to hip-hop. 3 But for all of hip-hop’s influence and popularity, such a full embrace of “foreign” style remains contentious in Jamaica. Most of the artists I interviewed (who were predominantly young and lower middle-class) unabashedly admitted to incorporating some stylistic features from hip-hop into their own style, but generally they expressed a sense that such a wholesale embrace of music “from foreign” was too culturally transgressive and not their preferred practice or strategy. Today, dancehall’s incorporation of hip-hop style most frequently takes the form of allusion (e.g., adapted choruses, interpolated rhymes, covers and parodies of pop songs using un- licensed instrumentals, etc.), as well as more subtle attempts to evoke hip-hip’s timbres, textures, rhythms, and themes. This sort of interplay is consistent with decades of practice in Jamaican popular music, where the sounds of the US, especially the music of African-Americans, have long animated reggae’s internationally-informed but locally-accented cultural politics, one expression of what anthropologist Deborah Thomas calls “modern blackness.” 4 With the advent of cable television and the internet, many young Jamaicans have adopted hip-hop wholesale, calling themselves MCs or rappers—as opposed to DJs , reggae parlance for rapping vocalists— and trading local stylistic markers for putatively foreign ones. I met a number of young 3 We might compare this “internationalist” orientation to the similarly idealized, and pragmatic, notion of “overseas” that Louise Meintjes teases out in her ethnography of South African musicians, as described in the epigraph above (see Sound of Africa! , “cut 6,” 217-49). 4 Deborah Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3 performers who shifted seamlessly between speaking in patois and rapping in Brooklynese, for instance, and who peppered their “yard” slang with references to “mami’s”—essentially a Nuyorican coinage—and “playa-haters.” None of my collaborators would go so far as to say that a Jamaican who rapped was not “keeping it real,” so to speak. As another Kingston-based DJ, Raw-Raw, put it: “If someone lives in Jamaica and him wan’ rap like him born in Brooklyn, I have no comment on that beca’— whatever you feel [is valid].” In other words, Raw-Raw would not want to tell a performer what is in or out of bounds regarding their mode of expression. Yet, this stated generosity toward Jamaican performers’ embrace of styles marked as non-local is not necessarily shared by all. When I asked Raw-Raw how Jamaican audiences receive a Jamaican performer who raps in an American style, he simply noted that “they don’t like it” if someone’s style is not perceived as original. Other Kingston-based artists assented that such a stylistic strategy implies a serious trade-off but is a testament to hip-hop’s power. A singjay named Dami D equated the decision of a young Jamaican to write a rap song with “put[ting] away all pride.” At the same time, he attributed the phenomenon of Jamaican rappers to hip-hop’s ability to inspire people, or in his words: “That show, seh, that hip-hop, it dedeh for really uplift the youth dem.” Many Kingstonians view homegrown hip-hop performers as confused about their cultural identity, making an implicit equation between musical practice and national attachment. As Wasp put it, “I just be a man weh stick to my culture, still. Our culture is like, reggae, dancehall, seen? From your yard, man, is either you have a choice between reggae and dancehall, you see me a say?” Hence part of hip-hop’s reception in Jamaica, at least in terms of who can perform in a style still strongly marked as African-/American, flows from enduring beliefs about cultural propriety and national identity, about what one can and cannot do as part of a community. 4 Despite the range of significations that hip-hop in Jamaica carries, it remains marked, at least in some sense, as foreign—which, given its hybrid and fairly Jamaican roots, not to mention the number of Jamaicans now living in the US, perhaps speaks as much to the tenacity of nationalist ideologies than stylistic or linguistic features. In our discussions, Wasp gave voice to the tension and incongruity around embracing something perceived to have come from the outside. Despite himself being a reggae artist of the hip-hop generation, as influenced by Tupac as he is by Beenie Man, Wasp ultimately stated, if tempered by some tortuous phrasing, that a Jamaican who decides to express himself completely through American rap style might as well move north: “If a man live a yard and him a rap is like, me feel like him fi just go seh, bomb, and just know seh, yo, him fi go live in other heights, you know?” A connection to the local thus remains paramount despite Jamaicans’ longstanding (and perhaps increasing) fluency with so-called foreign forms. Conceptualizing Jamaicans’ embrace of hip-hop as a locally-accented use of America, as Deborah Thomas suggests, may help to make sense of the perplexities swirling around such appropriations. While Thomas acknowledges, for instance, that “aspects of modern blackness appear to reproduce some of the discourses regarding consumerism and individualism that are associated with neoliberal capitalism,” she reconciles the apparent contradiction of employing seemingly derivative discourses by shifting our frame of reference to more specific, local acts: [I]f we reorient our vision of politics in a way that decenters totalizing revolutionary narratives and pays special attention to very locally grounded negotiations, incorporations, and rejections, we are able to more clearly conceptualize the ways people confront and revise both structural and ideological systems of power and domination. From this perspective, black Jamaicans use ‘America’ to simultaneously critique, selectively appropriate, and creatively redefine those aspects of the dominant capitalist ethos that they believe benefit themselves and their communities, both materially and psychologically. 5 5 Thomas, Modern Blackness , 14, emphasis in original. 5 Indeed, if one examines hip-hop in Jamaica from the perspective Thomas provides here—a perspective grounded in her own historical and ethnographic research and resonant with mine— certain contradictions around national musical provenance, imaginary as they may be, recede in importance next to questions about the local meanings of such practices. Moreover, even seemingly irreconcilable incompatibilities, such as those between Rastafarians’ longstanding critique of materialist capitalism and hip-hop’s “bling-bling” celebration of conspicuous consumption, might be understood as expressing something other than a lack of coherence or integrity or the end of an influential era of oppositional cultural politics.

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