Revolution, Embodiment, and the Black Feminist Sound: A Sound-Text Analysis
of Lillian Allen’s “Revolutionary Tea Party”
by Maria Caridad Casas
Department of English
University of Toronto
In my forthcoming book on the transcription of creole in Afro-Caribbean
Canadian feminist poetry (Casas) I examine the connections between meaning and materiality through the social semiotic category of mode. Mode is the socially-
recognizable style of a medium, a type of style which carries social and therefore crucial
meanings in any text. Mode tends to get short shrift in literary text analyses for reasons I
will shortly suggest. The main purpose of this essay, however, is to extend my analysis of mode in Caribbean Canadian feminist poetry by taking up the sound aspects of a dub poem -- that is, analysing a dub poem as a sound-text. The specific text is the title track
from the contemporary dub poet Lillian Allen’s album Revolutionary Tea Party, which
was recorded with the Toronto band The Parachute Club in 1986 and released under
Allen’s own label, Verse to Vinyl. I will analyse this text on its own terms. What those
terms are, of course, is open to discussion, and it is this discussion I turn to next.
Dub poetry is a genre that developed under the inspiration of reggae -- socially,
politically and aesthetically. In written versions, its combination of syncopated rhythms, 2
attention to the beat, and emancipatory activist content is what makes it characteristic.
Originating in the 1970’s, it quickly became part of the inventory of Jamaican verbal art forms of London, Toronto, and New York. Today, written and performed dub flourishes through the work of numerous poets in North America, Europe and the Caribbean, co- existing alongside its super-commercialized descendant, hip hop.
Although dub has a double platform in sound and writing, academic critics of dub have not kept up with this dual activity,1 because literary studies as a discipline has always been concerned with written literary texts -- that is, written verbal art. This, in turn, is because literature has been considered written only. Thus, in close readings, only the written aspects of texts that are also meant to be performed are examined; the discipline does not look at performance as text, nor at the sound aspects as text of performed texts. Examining dub poetry as sound-text thus achieves two things: it emphasizes the ‘literary’ aspect of dub poetry (and therefore declares its cultural value); and it develops a reading methodology or approach to the sound-texts of verbal art.
Though it may be argued that this sound-text analysis is something better left to musicologists, dub poets themselves consider their art form literature -- poetry -- rather than song. Yet, the sound of a dub is as much its meaning as is its written words; and to ignore the sound in a literary analysis for too long risks seriously misrepresenting this poetry.
I interpret the famous dub and reggae slogan “word sound power” as word-sound and power, an emphasis on the power of word-sounds. This power operates in several
1 See however Eldridge and Carr for readings of Allen’s dubs that make references to their sound. 3
quite specific ways: the physical properties of a word-in-sound; the impact of those properties on the physical world; and the power the sound has in its referencing capabilities. It is something akin to naming in primary oral societies or those social contexts in which oral verbal art remains an important form of self-expression. In these contexts, naming is not taken lightly; naming physically conjures the thing named.
Naming is something Allen is very aware of. According to Allen, to perform is to
give power to words; to name is to access the power of what the name represents.
Naming cancer, for example, is to “spell” 2 cancer in order to disempower it (Personal
interview). Allen also taps visceral responses to sound by imitating in her performances
the wail of a siren, or the lick of a whip, or the spasms of birthing labour. She has also
used chants and political slogans to create cohesion in a crowd and thus to focus
community protest. For Allen, as for all dub poets, sound as power is a concrete social as
well as physical force.
The title “Revolutionary Tea Party” contains two entities that are usually seen as
contradictory: revolution and tea party. They are contradictory along several vectors. A
revolution is a burst of energy in the public domain, changing history. A tea party is a
restful activity in the domestic sphere; it connotes tradition and hence stability. The name
is also an allusion to the Boston Tea Party and thus evokes a historical cultural context in
which the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘tea party’ are heavily gendered: revolutions in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the concern of men; tea parties in the same
2 “Spell” is defined by Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as “a spoken word or form of words held to have magic power.” This reflection of an old Anglo Saxon reality reinforces my point. 4
period were the preserve of women. These two strands of connotations of course overlap:
the domestic sphere in the European tradition is female, public life is the domain of men.
Political philosophy, including those philosophies advocating revolution out of a pressing
need for social reform in the long eighteenth century, were written by and addressed to
men.
Both tea party and revolution, however, are collective activities. The juxtaposition
of the terms suggests a specific, utopian social vision, perhaps following disillusionment
with current and past revolutions; it states that the rituals of domestic life are neither
‘just’ domestic nor just shoring up tradition: it blends the two concepts and their
surrounding worlds. The title of the dub is radically inclusive, re-visioning the nature of revolution.
The words of the dub are an invitation to the listener to join a grass-roots, activist
left-wing political movement (see Appendix 1). It addresses “you who know what the
past has been” and invites you to “come sit here with we… a mek we talk / analyse /
strategize.” The dub is, loosely, a performative speech act of interpellation and invitation.
As such, it is more than a simply-worded, inclusive invitation. The poet characterises the
movement, the collective “we” to which she refers, through the ways in which she
presents herself and the group -- in the way that any speaker does. Thus the address “You
who have been burned by vanguardism / … / You who believe in the future / in
transforming by your labour / … / You who see for peace a future / … / you who create
with yu sweat from yu heart” is a direct characterisation of the group reaching out to the
listener (or at least of the poet herself, because she is implying a relationship of similarity 5
in her address to like-minded people). The invitation is to “come sit here with we / a mek we drink tea / …talk / …analyse / … / come mek we give yu little nurturing / come sit awhile”. This offers a vision of co-operation and stability as political relationship.
But is the group represented by the different voices in the text itself in such a relationship? Do the represented participants (‘characters’ within the sound-text) work together in the way the human chanter invites “you” to? Or is the verbal advice of the chanter -- to work together -- qualified by the sound of the dub as represented by the activities of her group? The following analysis will initially focus on the relations of power between the represented participants3 in the sound-text in order to answer this
question. It draws on ideas and categories in van Leeuwen’s Speech, Music, and Sound. but will also consider the implied references of sounds as social symbols and on the more symbolic, dub-specific aspects of revolution and riddim.
Each participant is represented by a ‘voice’ or instrument. The sound-text as a whole uses vocal polyrhythms,4 background noises, and an appeal to electronic effects
such as echoes, fade-aways, and other recording dynamics against a tight structure of
repeating bass rhythms. These latter are produced by three instruments: a set of bongo drums, a bass guitar, and a brush. The polyrhythmic voices, on the other hand, are: a human voice (“the chanter” from now on); a lead guitar; and several types of chimes. The six represented participants, then, are: brush, bongo drum, lead guitar, bass guitar, human chanter, and chimes.
3 This useful category is found in Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images.
4 Polyrhythms are conflicting rhythms or accents produced simultaneously. 6
As a first step in describing the relationships of the participants, I will focus on
time. According to van Leeuwen, time in dominant Euro-Canadian culture is conceived
of as a progression from past to future; it flows in one direction only, at an even pace, and
hence it can be segmented, or measured (x). I would add that this is closely entwined with
pastoralism (in its aspect as nostalgia for a simpler, purer past) as well as progressivism
as structuring mythologies. The temporal or rhythmic nature of “Revolutionary Tea
Party” is partly within this Western tradition of measured time, because the most basic,
simple sound is a brush that establishes a very, very regular beat, with no stresses. It
simply brushes back and forth throughout the song like a metronome, with a soft onset
(beginning of each beat) and a relatively sibilant, soft timbre (quality of sound).5
However, the timbre of the metronymic brush and its unassuming character
suggest that the dominant context for this song is not classical European measured time.
There is a polyrhythmic displacement of beats in the bass line as well as a polyrhythmic
relationship between the chanter and bass line. Polyrhythms are characteristic of African
music. While van Leeuwen’s categories do not ignore non-European traditions of time, I
expand his semiotics here by exploring a local tradition of time. As rhythm, ‘riddim’ has very specific connotations in Jamaican popular culture. It is a specialised term central to
reggae as well as dub; in Jamaican popular culture, according to Habekost, it connotes “
‘the heartbeat of the people,’ or ‘the pulse of life.’ Moreover, riddim […] is frequently
associated with violence, blood and pain; but, at the same time, it can be ‘food’ for the
5 It is not quite mechanical, though: occasionally, if you listen carefully, it will throw in a double stroke per
beat. 7
suffering people.” (93) Habekost adds that repetition in dub, as a technique for achieving riddim, is based on an African philosophical conception of time:
While the European poetic tradition tends to conceal the repeating constituents
of its forms, the black tradition emphasizes them as a crucial means of distinct
improvisation and extemporization; they become an expression of one of the
fundamental formative principles of black culture, which is based on the idea
of circulation and cyclical development, as opposed to the European principle
of progression. (94)
In addition, time, rhythm and revolution have even more specific meanings in Allen’s
work. Revolution in her conceptual cluster revolution / motion / emotion / riddim is both a cycle, based on the word’s etymology (from the Latin revolvere, from re + volvere, to roll, turn) and an interruption of the European ‘forward march of progress’, a cut in the linear time line. Motion is riddim in the sense of (rhythmic) dance, physical motion, the motion of the body; but also the most basic motion of the body, its heartbeat. Motion is also e/motion, a more organic motivation for political and moral decision-making than the measured linearity of reason (Allen, performance).
If the brush is not the rhythmic keynote for the dub, then, the bass guitar and the bongo drum, as the two other participants in the bass line (the line that maintains the
rhythm of the dub throughout) must be. The rhythmic patterns of bass and bongo in this
dub together define the basic measure of eight beats; the bass, through a slightly syncopated pattern which breaks the 8-beat measure up into three sections; and the bongo through a regular pattern of strong/weak beats to every beat of the brush. Together, the 8
bongo, bass, and brush create a very controlled background. The patterns of the brush, bass and bongo are represented in Figure 1:
brush | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
bass |. † † † | | |. † † † | |
bongo ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ ∏ (stress) ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
The down strokes of the brush in the top line are regular beats. In the bass guitar’s line, a
dotted down stroke is the equivalent of a delayed or “dotted” quarter note, and a crossed
down stroke is the equivalent of an eighth note. Similarly, the bongo’s line is a series of
coupled eighth notes, with stress on the third, seventh, eleventh, and fifteenth notes of the
eight-beat measure. Because the same collective pattern of rhythms repeats every eight
beats of the brush, I have designated this eight-beat cycle the bass-line measure.
The alignment of all of the strokes in Figure 1 shows how they relate to each
other. For example, the first dotted note of the bass guitar takes up one and a half beats of
the brush and three eighth-note beats of the bongo. The arrangement tells us also that the
bass guitar is the bass-line “lead” in the sense that its down beat is the defining beat of the
bass line; but that three of the four stressed beats of the bongo play during moments of silence or delay on the part of the guitar, and that the fourth stressed beat coincides with
the guitar’s up beat. This up beat is an important motif for the song as a whole, since
expectations towards the up beat are created by the delayed notes and syncopated rests of
the bass guitar, as well as by the rhythms used by the lead guitar (as will be seen later). 9
Even the chanter tends to end her clauses on a rising intonation, and throughout the song
there are raised expectations with no resolutions, whether in sound or in implied
interaction between the participants.
The bass-line measure is repeated eight times in a prelude to the chanter’s first
verse. The chanter’s beats in relation to the metronymic beat and bass-line rhythms do
not at first seem to have a sound pattern. The chanter’s basic measure is, instead, a
grammatical clause of varying lengths. In print, it is shown with line breaks: with a few
exceptions, each clause is set on a separate line (see Appendix 1). Each of these measures
has at least one beat, created with contrastive length, volume and pitch, just as stresses
are created in English speech. Most clauses contain more than one stress; and yet, there is
no regularity to the number of stresses. There are two, three, or four stresses per clause.
This variability is typical of Allen’s dubs.
This is why the bass line is important to the sound-text as a whole: it provides a
solid ground against which the chanter can move in varying rhythms. For example, she
starts the first clause on the downbeat, together with the bass line, but then gradually
moves the onset of her clauses so that the downbeat falls on main noun of the last phrase
in each clause (e.g., line 18 “wealth of the world”; line 15 “future”). This can be seen in
Figure 2, in which the chanter’s stresses are marked with slashes above the line, the bass
guitar’s downbeat is marked with a large dot above the line, and its upbeat is marked with
a smaller dot. Clearly the chanter has huge independence against the rhythmic
background of the bass line:
10
[INSERT FIGURE 2]
However, if one considers the relationship of the lead guitar and the chanter, a more complicated picture emerges. The lead guitar plays in the key set by the pitch intervals between the three syllables in the chanter’s refrain “togéther” (see Appendix 1).
This word is the semantic as well as the harmonic keynote for the text. In the role of respondent to the chanter’s call, the guitar “chimes in” almost literally with high notes, chords, and echoes during the chanter’s verses; and it echoes the chanter by repeating the three notes of “together” and the notes of the chanter’s intonation when she repeats “in a really bad way”.
The lead guitar also gives the keynote for most of the initial beats of the chanter’s verses. However, this keynote is always embedded in a sequence of notes, a bridge of sound that the guitar creates between the intervals of silence between verses and the chanter’s voice. The guitar produces these bridges overlapping the chanter. The timing of these ‘moves’ on the part of the guitar can be interpreted (and, one presumes, is unconsciously interpreted by listeners) by analogy with human conversation.
Conversation analysts have shown that the rhythm of turn-taking in conversations is extremely intricate and culturally specific. It can be viewed as a microcosm, in some views, of power relations in a society as a whole. According to anthropologist Stephen
Feld,
The Western normative concepts of individual speaker turns, floor rights
and turn-taking etiquette, notions rationalized in speech act philosophy and 11
conversation analysis, are absent from Kaluli [of Papua New Guinea]
conversation and narration. What might be heard as regular ‘interruption’ is
not that at all, but rather the collaborative and co-creative achievement of
dulugu salan, ‘lift-up-over-speaking’. (Qtd. in van Leeuwen, 132)
Discourse analyst Deborah Tannen adds a gendered perspective to such a view of
conversational structure (also included in van Leeuwen): she recorded conversations in
the United States and Greece between women friends that she says are principally about
“rapport talk” rather than “report talk” (204). In such conversations, interruptions are not
considered rude, but a sign of enthusiastic involvement. Both of these explanations of
overlapping moves in conversation can be used to interpret the relationship between lead
guitar and chanter in “Revolutionary Tea Party”. They suggest that the guitar has an
egalitarian position in relation to the chanter -- overlapping speech or sound in a
conversation requires a more equal relationship between participants and produces a
different type of sound-text in our society than the more formal conversation-as-turn-
taking.
The participant who would normally be in the foreground of a dub, the human
voice, in this text is really a chanter that intones on a fairly level pitch, stressing some
beats over others, repeating formulae (such as the invocation: “you who”; and the invitations “come”, “a mek we”, and “let’s”), and in some verses repeating a strong end rhyme ([ayz] in analyse/strategise). These aspects emphasise the rhythm of the chanter’s phrases, which places her in the background melodically, leaving the lead guitar the role 12
of expressivity through its melodies and timbre. The lead guitar, however, has a disrupted
line; its role seems to be to respond to the chanter; it maintains a delayed rhythm and
disrupted melody, so its role as foregrounded participant is inverted. The lead guitar is
really a support to the chanter, but a very expressive, energetic support that gives much
colour to the text as a whole. Meanwhile, the group leader, the chanter, conforms to the
social ground of the bass instruments by keeping her pitch variation at a very low range.
The implied role of the listener, then, is to consider an invitation to join a group
with flattened hierarchy relations -- a utopian feminist society, perhaps -- in which the
importance of members is not as individuals but as a collective whose nature is centred
on the social.
Thus, as far as participant relations go, the social nature of the space created by
the configuration of voices and their dynamics invites the listener into a certain type of
social group. But an important sound is actually part of the background: the wind chimes.
One hears three types of wind chimes in the text: wooden tubes, metal bells, and a
synthesised “tinkle”. They evoke a natural6 landscape or a field behind or beyond the
social. They also create a three-dimensional space because they sound at different
volumes. These volume dynamics, as with the chanter and lead guitar, create a fore-, mid-
and background perspective. The chimes sound at once close to the listener (loudly in the
foreground, not in rhythm with other participants) as well as far away, as well as in the
middle distance. They surround the listener, then; the physical symbolism (of positioning
6 “Natural” in reference to the energy that moves the chimes -- the wind. The wind is represented, but not heard except as the moving energy behind the chimes as they hit against each other. 13
via volume dynamics) suggests that both listener and social group, or individual and social, are contained, and should be contextualised, in the natural world.
Through the chimes, we can also look at metonymic and metaphorical meanings in this sound-text. Metonymically, the chimes represent the breeze that moves them -- a force that is part of nature; and thus they recreate in representation not just a force of nature (metonymically in turn becoming nature itself), but also a sort of implicit field of restful silence -- because the breezes which make the chimes sound can only be heard if surrounded by silence. The chimes place the listener in a space of withdrawal from the antagonistic aspects of the social. The sound of the wind chimes also has a very strong evocative power, creating the “meaning” of their imagined provenance: the peaceful, quiet porch of a country house.
The metaphorical meanings of the chimes are almost endless. They often come into the foreground as a commentary on the chanter’s last word in a verse -- as a sort of metaphorical affirmation. So, for example, when the chanter says, with stress, “work together,” the chimes sound immediately, as if to say “you can work together like us, in harmony but at different pitches, in random rhythms. Together we make beautiful music.” Or after the verse in which the chanter suggests talking and strategising, the wind in the chimes says “let natural energies do the work,” and the chimes themselves say,
“hang loose.”
The categories of participant relations and field perspective I have been exploring in the text are van Leeuwen’s. In the interest of developing a rhetoric of sound-text 14
analysis that is responsive to the black feminist perspective, I will now investigate one further kind of meaning, embodied materiality, through timbre.
The two lead participants -- guitar and chanter -- have contrasting timbres (sound qualities). The lead guitar is high-pitched and is quite emphatically an electronic sound, which makes it extremely high-intensity in comparison to the acoustic instruments
(bongos, brush, some chimes). Intensity is an actual physical property of sound coming to our ears; we often hear it as loudness, but it can be any volume and is actually caused by the amount of power transmitted by the sound wave (Rogers 126). We hear the sound
“electric” and through our ears experience “electric power.” At the same time, the guitar’s sound is electronically modified while it is being played, so that some notes are vibrato or wah-wah, some echo away to silence, some have echoes of a different pitch, some lengthen into each other and some have more reverberation than others. The tone of the guitar is pulled and twisted constantly, often in the same phrase. It plays chords, intervals, and produces weird, staccato effects, imitating the rhythms of speech. In fact, it sounds like something with a personality and an opinion, but not something identifiable as human.
In addition, the guitars (both lead and bass) are plucked. Plucking gives the bass notes the sharp onset they need to keep a well-defined beat; but plucking in the role and register used by the lead guitar makes audible the tension of the strings. Tension in the strings, again, is energy -- power is needed to keep the strings tense, and it is that same power that becomes audible energy. The audible energy means energy -- when we hear it, 15
we are participating in the experience of tension in the strings and of the controlled power
exerted by the structure of the guitar to keep the strings tense.
By contrast the chanter’s voice is low energy, nearly relaxed. The contrast with
the lead guitar is not only in the quality and materiality of the sound (organic, flesh-and-
blood resonator versus electric amplification), but in the ensemble roles they take: the
guitar has a wide pitch variation, the chanter a very flat pitch line.7 The intonation of the
lines is mostly descending, though there are in fact three line contours. The invocation
“You who…” has a final rise; the invitation “come mek… work together” is a descending
line, with no final rise; and the “a mek we” chorus has a completely level intonation
across the clause. These are all low pitch range, creating a soothing contour.
Some of the chanter’s lines receive more pitch variation, however. More pitch variation in human speech is caused by excitement: the vocal tract tenses, the breathing and heart beat increases rate, and therefore speech is faster, higher pitched, and there is more pitch variability. The lines near the centre of the song, voicing a protest about “the system” are chanted in a higher pitch and a wider pitch variation (lines 20-21 and 25).
These lines are a protest. In tempo, as well, lines around these and in the central verse six
(lines 19 and 29, for example) are chanted with lighter emphasis on the beats and with more words per measure (or clause), creating a very rapid patter.
7 It is a lower pitch, but is in the middle range for a woman’s voice, neither low and throaty nor high and
tense. Its gender is therefore not a marked aspect of its timbre.
16
I suggest that the meanings of more complexly coded semiotic systems such as syntax and morphology in speech and song cannot contradict the meanings created by
pace and pitch variation. That is, melody and rhythm always take precedence in meaning-
making, whether in speech or song. For example,
Who is on first.
said with a declarative intonation is invariably a statement in spite of its interrogative
grammatical structure;
You see what I mean
with a rising pitch is invariably a question, in spite of its declarative grammatical structure. I suspect, however, that timbre takes precedence even over melody. An interesting line of research would attempt to establish any such hierarchy of materiality in meaning-making.
Allen’s utopian feminist vision in this dub is more difficult to imagine from the
verbal text than from the sound-text. The sound-text amply demonstrates the type of
social space the chanter wants the listener to imagine. One problem for future sound-text
analyses in literary studies is, ironically, the nature of distribution networks for the media
of literature and of dub poetry. Distribution networks for printed texts are well
established, linking print institutions that are massively supported in Canada --
institutions like schools, universities, libraries, and book and magazine publishers. Print
predominates on the electronic sites of the Internet as well. Dub poetry’s push against the
centralizing, homogenizing force of exclusively written literature collides against these
socio-economic factors. Literary critics, then, in supporting dub poetry as sound-text, 17
must find a way of integrating sound recordings into the distribution networks and written medium of literary criticism. 18
Works Cited
Allen, L. Performance, Glendon College, York University, March 7, 2000.
---. Personal Interview with author, Toronto, July 1997.
---. Women Do This Every Day: Selected Poems of Lillian Allen. Toronto: Women’s
Press, 1993.
---. Revolutionary Tea Party. LP. Verse to Vinyl, 1985.
Carr, B. “A Style of Her Own and Others: Lillian Allen Assesses the ‘Critical
Condition’.” Sojourners (June 1992): 38--39.
Casas, M.C. My Mouth Could Not Find a Language: Transcribed Creole in Afro-
Caribbean Canadian Feminist Poetry. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
forthcoming, 2007
Eldridge, M. “ ‘Why Did You Leave There?’: Lillian Allen’s Geography Lesson.”
Diaspora 3.2 (1994), 179--83.
Kress, G. and T. van Leeuwen. Reading Images: A Grammar of Visual Design London:
Routledge, 1996
Rogers, H. Theoretical and Practical Phonetics Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1991
Tannen, D. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation London:
Virago, 1992
Van Leeuwen, T. Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan, 1999
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