Time and memory in reggae music

The politics of hope

Sarah Daynes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781784992804
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

On the basis of a body of reggae songs from the 1970s and late 1990s, the author offers a sociological analysis of memory, hope and redemption in reggae music.

Part I

A study in elective affinity: Music, religion, memory

1
Reggae and Rastafari: A short history

Some say dem a Jehovah Witness

Some say dem a Adventist

Some say dem a Anglican

I am the Rastaman

The Wailing Souls, “They don’t know Jah,” 1977

Reggae music is seldom analyzed without a reference to the Rastafari movement, which makes it difficult to organize a bibliography that would clearly distinguish the works on Rastafari from the ones on reggae. Indeed, even Hepner (1998), who criticizes the space given to reggae in the Rastafari scholarship and calls for studies of Rastafari “through and beyond” reggae, still spends a lot of time speaking about the latter. This is due to the close ties that exist between the religious movement and the music as much as to the methodological choices of scholars. I argue that both reggae and Rastafari can (and should) be studied independently, but also that they can (and should) be studied together; in other words, both approaches are pertinent. For my part, I have chosen to examine the relationship between reggae and Rastafari, using the former as the starting point. This choice implies a focus on the points of contact, on the intersections, between reggae and Rastafari; and on the latter only insofar as it appears in the former.¹

Speaking of a meeting point between a religious movement and a musical style implies that both also overflow this specific space, and have an existence independently of each other. On the Rastafari side, there is independence at the level of both the individuals and the movement: not all rastas listen to reggae, and further the specificity of Rastafari is not to be found solely in its attachment to reggae. On the reggae music side, a large part of the musical production does not refer to Rastafari at all—a fact that is widely ignored by many scholars, to echo Hepner. Beyond the double romanticization of reggae music as a socially engaged popular music rooted in Rastafari and of Rastafari as a musicalized, fashionable religious movement, my approach still remains based on the existence of a point of meeting between the two, which, although commonly taken for granted, has rarely been systematically studied. I will argue that one could speak of a relationship of elective affinity found between reggae and Rastafari. The term has a long history. It was used in alchemy to express the attraction and fusion of two elements; Goethe transposed it to human beings in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1802), in which he defines it as follows:

The tendency of those elements which, when they come into contact, at once take hold of, and act on one another, we call “affinity.” The alkalis and the acids reveal these affinities in the most striking way—although by nature opposites, perhaps for that very reason they select one another, take hold of and modify each other eagerly; and then together form an entirely new substance. (Goethe 1963: 39)

And those cases are indeed the most important and remarkable, wherein this attraction, this affinity, this separating and combining, can be demonstrated, the two pairs, as it were, crossing over; where four elements, until then joined in twos, are brought into contact and give up their former combination to enter a new one. In this dissociating and taking possession, this flight and seeking, we actually imagine we see some higher pre-determination; we believe these elements capable of exercising some sort of willpower and selection, and feel perfectly justified in using the term “elective affinities”! (Goethe 1963: 42)

It is with Max Weber that the term came to be developed as a sociological concept, with which he explains the complex relationship between the protestant ethic and capitalism, a relationship that does not involve any clear causality but rather an attraction that draws two kinds of “ethos” to each other (Weber 2002). The notion of elective affinity is one of Weber’s great contributions to social thought; with it, he means that there exists some sort of “affinity of meaning” between two “mentalities,” between two practical ways of conducting one’s life. These two elements are attracted by each other “naturally,” as if there was some powerful mutual attraction that drew each to the other; when they come into contact, they attract ineluctably and are able to interact in such a way that the two prior configurations may form a new configuration. We can turn to Goethe once again:

Imagine an A so closely connected with a B that the two cannot be separated by any means, not even by force; and imagine a C in the same relation to a D. Now bring the two pairs into contact. A will fling itself on D, and C on B, without our being able to say which left the other first, or which first combined itself with the other. (Goethe 1963: 43)

Once the mutual attraction that draws the two elements to one another has produced a new configuration, it becomes impossible to say which has influenced the other, and to what extent. The two elements are in a situation of elective affinity—that is, their relationship is multi-directional. No exclusive unidirectional causal relationship can be distinguished. A relationship of elective affinity implies that there is a special affinity, a special attraction between two “practical systems of value” that enrich each other in a very complex, and rich, way. Michael Löwy offers the following definition: “It is the process by which two cultural forms (religious, literary, political, economic, etc), on the basis of some analogies or structural correspondences, enter a relationship of reciprocated influence, mutual choice, convergence, symbiosis, and even in some case fusion.”² I would argue, then, for a relationship of elective affinity between a religious form and a musical form, namely the Rastafari movement and reggae music; indeed, we witness two independent cultural forms that have an existence of their own, but also a point at which these two forms meet; and this point of meeting has come from, indeed, a “special attraction,” an affinity that seemed natural and ineluctable; in turn, it has produced such a complex relationship that it has become difficult to say which cultural form has influenced the other first, or most. In this first chapter, I will briefly give an historical account of both cultural forms, by focusing on their point of meeting. In chapter 2, I will describe the methodology I have used to select and analyze the material that forms the basis of my analysis. In chapter 3, I will test the validity of looking at the relationship between reggae music and the Rastafari movement by analyzing the evolution of Jamaican reggae charts since the early seventies. Finally, in chapter 4, I will introduce the issue of memory by analyzing the construction of a musical memory within reggae music.

A brief account of Rastafari

The founding event of the Rastafari movement was the coronation of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, which took place on November 2, 1930. In Jamaica, some interpreted it as the fulfillment of the prophecy announced by Marcus Garvey before his departure for the United States: “Look to Africa when a Black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.” Four Jamaicans started preaching: Howell in West Kingston, Hibbert and Hinds in the parish of St. Andrew, and Dunkley in Port Antonio.³ All four essentially raised the question of the identity of God and affirmed his blackness: this was the great innovation of the Rastafari movement compared to other religious movements of this era, an innovation that directly attacked the colonial Christian God. At the end of the forties, following the widespread rural exodus, the faith expanded to the ghettos of Kingston, such as Back’O’Wall and Trenchtown, where some members of Howell’s dispersed community settled. Young rastas then moved away from existing groups and emphasized the notion of “spiritual struggle”;⁴ according to Chevannes (1994: 152–170), the major difference between “traditional” rastas and these youth, whom he calls “dreadlocks,” was the aggressive position the latter adopted against the surrounding world, which they called Babylon; he argues that, hostile to any hierarchy and institution, they established the foundations of the contemporary Rastafari movement.⁵

Rastafari remained marginal until the seventies, when it benefited from the international success of reggae music, which made it known beyond Jamaica; today, from Harlem to Brixton, from Dakar to Tokyo, from Trenchtown to La Chapelle, one can see men, women and children with red, gold and green garments, wearing their hair in dread locks. Academic inquiry followed the same pattern: the work of Simpson in the fifties was followed by a report written by scholars from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica; however, in the seventies, several scholars showed an interest in this seemingly strange and paradoxical religious movement that considers the Emperor of Ethiopia a messiah, associates the West with Babylon the Great, promotes the use of “ganja,” calls on the war against oppressors as much as universal peace, and expresses itself in a language which plays with words and is filled with metaphors, parables, and mystical and biblical symbols. The contemporary scholarship on the Rastafari movement is widespread, and cuts across disciplines. The works produced are very diverse, due to the different fields involved but also because the Rastafari movement seems inherently resistant to any easy attempt at classification: it has simultaneous religious, political, social and cultural dimensions; it is closely linked with a popular music, reggae, but has also developed its own music, Rastafarian chants. Moreover, its polymorphous character implies a great variety within the movement itself. It is characterized by a quasi-complete absence of institutions (Yawney 1976, Chevannes 1994, Cashmore 1994, Homiak 1995): while there exist a few organizations, such as the Twelve Tribes of Israel or the Nyabinghi Order, there is no equivalent of a clergy, nor are there any official theologians. Consequently, within their own group rastas retain a freedom of thought that leads to a great variability of practices and even beliefs. As Cashmore notes, Rastafari’s “dynamic is in its heterogeneity of commitment and expression … No one will ever create a definite version of what Rastas should believe” (Cashmore 1994: 193; emphasis in the original). Therefore, two scholars can work in two different locations and come up with two “versions” of the Rastafari movement that might contradict each other but nonetheless accurately represent two of its facets.

Some scholars have proposed an analysis centered on religion, usually based on the Jamaican case (Owens 1976, Johnson-Hill 1994) and focused on sacred practices, and the beliefs in which they are grounded. As Chevannes notes (1994: 20), Rastafari has been variously described as escapist, nativist, millenarian, visionary, or as a revitalization movement; although it indeed possesses millenarian tendencies, Chevannes holds that a strict focus on Rastafari’s religious dimension limits analysis. To be sure, the dynamic character of the movement tends to elude these religious approaches because they are usually based on the study of communities that can be considered as the religious side of Rastafari, and therefore do not take into account the multitude of individuals who adhere to the movement without belonging to any specific group. However, their detailed analysis of symbolic processes, of the construction of the movement’s own concepts, and of the elaboration of a worldview and its interaction with practices, make these studies extremely valuable. Edmond’s recent book stands out by its analysis centered on Weber’s ideal-type of charismatic authority and its routinization; he attempts to show that Rastafari can be seen as a movement which has routinized in the “third way” mentioned by Weber—that is, “routinization as cultural formation” (Edmonds 2003: 26). This work stands at the crossroads between studies which focus on religion, and those which see Rastafari as a cultural and social movement.

In contrast with the religion-focused approach, other scholars have considered the Rastafari movement from a socio-political standpoint, emphasizing its historical emergence in relation to a context of domination and its articulation around the key notion of liberation; these works usually concern the Jamaican case, and often represent a Marxist approach, using terms such as neo-colonialism, social stratification, economic deprivation and racial prejudice (Llewelyn-Watson 1973 and 1974, Campbell 1980b and 1985, Lewis 1986 and 1994). Llewelyn-Watson, for instance, compared Rastafari and the Nation of Islam, and concluded that

religion per se is not their major attraction. Both are social protests which move on a semi-religious vehicle, with emphasis on social action geared to transforming their objective life situations … close examination of these movements revea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and boxes
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I A study in elective affinity: Music, religion, memory
• Part II Remembering the past
• Part III Revealing the future
• Part IV From revelation to revolution
• Part V Conclusion
• Appendices:
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnote