7 Ragga Music

7 Ragga Music: Dis/Respecting Black Women and Dis/Reputable Sexualities Denise Noble We take the girls dem out the darkness, And put the girls dem in the light, That’s why the girls love to hear, Shabba voice ‘pon mic’ (Shabba Ranks, ‘A Wi De Girls Dem Love’, ) Through the blues, black women were able to autonomously work out – as audiences and performers – a working class model of womanhood … it revealed that black women and men, the blues audience, could respond to the vastly different circumstances of the post slavery era with notions of gender and sexuality that were, to an extent, ideologically independent of the middle class cult of ‘true womanhood’. In this sense … the blues was a privileged site in which women were free to assert themselves as sexual beings. (Angela Davies : ) In thinking about my own enjoyment of Ragga music as a Black British woman, I have been intrigued by my own contradictory responses. For as much as I have ‘disapproved’ of some of the overtly sexist and porno- graphic lyrics of some songs, I have also found myself basking in their celebration of Black womanhood. Furthermore, this very public display and celebration of Black sexuality, and particularly Black female sexuality, struck me as very different from other forms with which I had been familiar which represented Black women’s sexuality in my immediate experience of Black culture; an experience that is geographically located in London, but traversed by my familial connections with Jamaica and the USA, travels in Europe and a diasporic consciousness of Blackness that shapes my sense of myself as a Black British woman. The central focus of the contention between those in favour of Ragga and those against is whether it celebrates or disrespects Black women. In Britain, many of us are preoccupied with whether Black women are represented in the public domain in ways that are likely to reinforce racist Ragga Music 149 perceptions of us as objects of ridicule, pity or disrespect. When, in , I gave a presentation of my work at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Reading,1 several of the other Black women there expressed their discomfort with some of my ideas. One woman remarked that, although she had liked my argument, she had felt embarrassed about my frank discussion of Black women’s bodies and sexuality in front of white people. This view was typical of an ambivalence expressed by many Black women with whom I have discussed Ragga. Mostly they have expressed a tension between an openness to Ragga’s celebration of Black women, and an unease and concern about what many regard as Ragga’s reinforcement of racist stereotypes of Black women as sexually licentious; stereotypes that these high-achieving, mostly ‘thirty-something’ Black women regarded as potentially damaging to how we would be viewed and more importantly might be treated, not only by Black men, but by the wider British audiences of Black popular culture. I share in this ambivalence, and it is my interest in my own and other women’s contradictory responses that I have sought to understand and analyse. Although I have been proud of the display it has enabled of an often outrageously sexy, rude and unashamed enjoyment of Black female sexuality, I have also felt uneasy about how these might be translated into everyday perceptions of Black women outside the dance-hall, especially by those whose only engagement with it, or for that matter, us, comes from Top of the Pops or MTV. But even more than this, I wanted to understand what Ragga, and Black female audience response to it, might indicate about Black British women’s concerns, feelings and aspirations, and the implications of these for the development of Black British feminism. My analysis of Ragga, then, begins from my own participation in Black cultural life and my own enjoyment of Ragga as a valuable and positive opportunity to raise questions about eroticism and sexuality in Black life, in a way that very few other forms of Black culture in Britain previously have Ragga Dance-hall Culture Ragga music emerged in the s from a range of musical styles in reggae music. Ragga is an abbreviation of ragamuffin, a word that emerged in the s, within the lyrics of male DJs, as a self-referential term. To call oneself a ragamuffin was to state an attitude similar to the use of the Jamaican term ‘rude boy’ or ‘rudie’ in the s and early s. A ragamuffin is located in ghetto culture, and has a ‘bad’ attitude towards authority and mainstream conventions. The positive reappropriation of the ragamuffin image was a subversive rearticulation of pride in an identity which had been devalued within legislative mainstream ‘Jamaican’ Creole Cultural Entanglements 150 culture as well as the hegemonically afrocentric cultures of the ghetto. Instead of a term of abuse, to be called ‘ragamuffin’ (and, subsequently, ‘Ragga’) became a badge of pride, indicating belonging to a set of marginalized and devalued practices and values. Both versions of culture – creolized and Afrocentric – are concerned with the maintenance of the values and forms of Black cultural life which will enhance communal growth and racial advancement, regarded as an important function of Black culture. Ragga, on the other hand, is viewed by many, in its preoccupation with sex, as a meaningless distraction, as crude rather than culturally uplifting to Black people, as mere ‘slackness’.2 As in many other forms of Black popular music, the main producers of Ragga have tended to be male, expressing through the lyrics and the DJ sound systems – exemplary forms of musical production and distribution – a strongly urbanized working-class male culture. Yet through the s women have gradually gained significant influence and power to shape the nature and content of Ragga dance-hall culture. Since its gradual rise in the mid-s, the Ragga dance-hall has become less and less an un- contested Black male working-class space. There has been a shift in focus from the male ‘ragamuffin’ DJ/audience as the predominant sign of Ragga identity in the mid– to late-s, to a greater presence and recognition of the female Ragga devotee or ‘queen’. There seem to be two key develop- ments through which we can trace this movement: first, a shift within the lyrics from an exclusionary male to male discussion about women, to a greater emphasis upon a male to female dialogue. In Ragga lyrics the male DJs for the most part are speaking directly to the female audience. This shift acknowledges both the presence and power of women in the dance- hall, which comes mostly from their position of being consumers of Ragga music rather than producers. The prime exponents of Ragga lyrics are male, with only a few female DJs gaining diasporic attention in the s (namely Lady Saw and Patra). Therefore I have chosen to focus on Ragga lyrics by male DJ’s, principally because what caught my attention about Ragga music is how women as consumers of Ragga lyrics have constructed readings which subvert by ‘playing’3 with and within its hetero/sexist authority. This is principally achieved through the dialogic call and response nature of Ragga performance and consumption, so typical of other forms of Black popular music. Gilroy recognizes this call and response motif as disjunctive of Eurocentric notions of the division between art and social life, which create the moment of performance and consumption. These ‘dialogic rituals’, in which the authority of the musical text is transformed through ‘de/reconstructive procedures’, create new meanings (Gilroy a: , ). It is primarily in this interdependent and dialogic relation- ship between DJ and DJ, and DJ and audience, that Black women have Ragga Music 151 elaborated and extended the Ragga lyrical texts. Expressed in forms of dance and dress, they have produced a Ragga style, or more precisely Ragga dance-hall culture, which actively elaborates a racialized, therefore, in this context, Black, sexual and gender politics. The Ragga ‘style’ in fashion and dance has been dominated by women, both within the dance- hall and outside, primarily through the production and distribution of Ragga clothing and hairstyles within the predominantly feminized pre/ occupations of fashion retailing, dressmaking and hairdressing, and it reveals the second aspect in the elaboration of a specifically Black lower-class female culture. Ragga Music: ‘Slackness’ Versus ‘Culture’ Culture in the dance, represented … Make we preach pure love and reality Slackness in the back yard hiding, hiding, hiding. Slackness in the back yard hiding, hiding from Culture. Josie Wales, ‘Culture A Lick’) Carolyn Cooper () points us to the special status of the terms ‘Culture’ and ‘Slackness’ in Jamaican society. She claims that the lyrics of ragga DJs subvert the official culture of Jamaican society, and seek to escape the appropriation of folk culture into what she calls the scribal literary tradition by asserting an urbanized folk ethos, a ‘verbal maroonage’ (Cooper : ). Cooper explains that the word ‘Culture’ represents the authorized values, morality and behaviour of official Jamaican Culture, which seeks to present itself as the representative culture of Jamaica. Slackness represents ‘backward’, ‘rude’4 folk/ghetto culture, vying for recognition and value within official Jamaican national identity. So, for Cooper, Slackness and Culture represent oppositional values within Jamaican society, centring round the ways that class and patriarchal gender ideology establish ‘con- sensual standards of decency’ (p. ). Cooper defines Slackness as ‘an (h)ideology of escape from the authority of omniscient Culture’ (p. ). To extend Cooper’s analysis beyond a local Jamaican particularism, and questions of Jamaican national identity, we must engage with the diaspor- icity (see Hesse, ch.

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