Jesus Dub

Theology, Music and Social Change

Robert Beckford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415310192
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134388950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Robert Beckford explores the dialogue between two central institutions in African Caribbean life: the church and the dancehall. He highlights how Dub – one of the central features of dancehall culture – can be mobilized as a framework for re-evaluating theology, taking apart doctrine and reconstructing it under the influence of a guiding theme.

Engaging with the social and cultural heritage that informs Christian African Caribbean culture, including the influence of slavery, Revival Christianity and working class Jamaican life, Black theology and music ranging from post-war Sound System to American Hip Hop, Jesus Dub is a detailed exploration of how throughout history, music and faith have been transformed in response to racialised oppression. Finally, Beckford demonstrates that dub style appears in the teachings of Jesus, and that Dub is a tool which can provide new ways of envisaging and practising spiritual gifts and financial giving, proposing a more inclusive theology for everyone.

Part 1
Church hall, dancehall and resistance

Chapter 1
Theorising the politics of sound

In this chapter, I want to theorise the politics of sound in the dancehall and church hall. When I refer to sound, I mean the process of sensing acoustics as a way of living and being in the world. Sound is never merely noise; it is fecund with cultural values. Therefore to hear sound is to decode cultural meanings.¹ My understanding of politics comes from African-centred thought. Maulana Karenga describes politics as, ‘the art and process of gaining, maintaining and using power’.² Whether politics is personal or structural in analysis, the fundamental concern is with power. Power is not domination, but the ability to realise the full potential of all people. In this regard the quest for power is inter-related and inter-dependant. To pull these themes together, in relation to the task of this chapter, my aim is to construct a way of understanding sound in relation to the quest for gaining and maintaining power.

I want to begin by reflecting on my personal experience of sound in a sound clash. This is to provide a comparison and contrast to the experience of sound in the church hall, or worshipping of the African Caribbean church. I will end by providing a theoretical framework for uniting these sounds through socio-linguistics and acustemology.

Dub and 1970s Black youth politics

The very first time I heard a dub version of a record was at Sidney Stringer Comprehensive School in Coventry in the mid-1970s. I was no more than ten or eleven and was taken to hear the local sound system called ‘Conquering Lion’ by my two older sisters on a Friday night. Their reasons were not altruistic but subversive: I was ‘cover’ for them from my strict Christian parents who knew we were going to the youth club but not to engage in the kind of ‘sport’ my siblings had suggested. ‘Conquering Lion’ consisted of a crew of teenage boys who had built a sound system set of half a dozen or so speaker boxes and wired them up to two turntables, an amp and mixer.

What immediately struck me when I entered the converted classroom masquerading as an urban dance floor was the sheer intensity of the event. It was corked full of young people and the events were conducted in pitch dark. It was also boiling hot due in part to the reggae dance floor chic of wearing winter coats with matching headwear. However, overpowering all of my senses was what Julian Henriques terms sonic dominance³ of the sound system. There was a throbbing, pulsing bass line ricocheting through the bricks, mortar, flesh and bones. The sonic power was tamed in part by the DJ’s improvised poetic narration or ‘toasting’ over the dub track. Playing on the turntable was a dub version of MPLA by a reggae artist called ‘Tappa Zukie’ (David Sinclair). As the DJ ‘toasted’, the silhouetted bodies moved in unison to the bass line: the heat, darkness and body sweat adding to the sheer pleasure of this Black teen spirit.

‘MPLA Dub’ was an instrumental reworking of a vocal track heralding the rise to power of an African socialist regime in Angola. Through an Afrocentric repatriation lens, Tappa Zukie humorously declares his intent to holiday in newly-liberated Angola:

MPLA, natty going on a holiday,
MPLA, natty going on a holiday
A Natty fling away you sorrow
Natty going on the Black Star Liner tomorrow⁴

Stuart Hall has exposed the processes by which encoding and decoding becomes an everyday part of cultural production.⁵ Decoding and transcoding were evident as the DJ in Coventry translated the religious (Rastafari) and political (MPLA) sentiments of Tappa Zukie’s original into a contextually specific critique of ‘race’ in Britain. Intriguingly, rather than contemplating a vacation to West Africa, these Black Coventonian lyrics focused on mobilising culture as an oppositional force:

Conquering Lion from the tribe of Judah
Conquering Lion no check fi di system
Show dem you culture, down in a Babylon
Show dem you culture, down a Babylon

The crowd responded to the DJ’s explicit politicisation of sound – that is, the audible articulation of culture as a weapon in the struggle for justice and freedom in England – by occupying the dance floor. As the Black bodies in the crowd moulded together in celebration of the music, simultaneously Black Atlantic cultures and cultural identities collided and were recreated. In the words of Kobena Mercer, social and political identities do not appear overnight; instead they are ‘culturally and politically constructed through political antagonism and cultural struggle’.⁶

However, this occurrence in a small Midlands city was more than the working out of a contextual politics. These rituals of orality, physicality and communality were also acts of pleasure and healing:

The sound system functions firstly as a conduit of the consciousness of Britain’s Black settlers into that mainstream world; it helps them … there’s a phrase the African Americans have ‘the night time is the right time’ – and that means that during that space when the world is asleep, those marginal spaces create a space of healing, of cultural play, a place where their broken and tired bodies can be reclaimed from the world of labour, where they can celebrate themselves, their vitality, their strength, their sexuality in the dark.⁷

Intoxicated by sonic dominance and the physicality of the sound clash, I felt at home with the music, sound and culture of the event. On reflection, this was because I had been sensitised to these oral and physical aspects of Black life through worship at church. In church, I had learned to recognise the dynamics of Black noise through the antiphonality of call and response, the narrativity of orality in song and preaching and the expressive physicality played out in the artistry of the sermon. Apart from the liturgy the only major difference between the church hall and the dancehall was that in church we credited the Holy Spirit with providing the dunamis, or energy, for church deportment. Even so, the Sidney Stringer school experience clearly directs us towards a common social and religious-cultural heritage shared by the church hall and dancehall.

Common heritage

The social heritage is the result of geography. The dancehall and church hall emerge from the same working class social locations in Caribbean culture and more specifically the context of Jamaica. To understand the social relationship we need to revisit the economic dynamics of Caribbean slavery.

The Caribbean migrants to Britain are the descendents of slaves who were transported by European powers from Africa. Hence, the people who came to inhabit islands such as Jamaica were not the original indigenous peoples of those lands. Regarding the specifics of British colonisation, this colonial regime created stratified societies built on the plantation system of inequitable economic relationship. Slave labour was exploited for the benefit and prosperity of the British overlords. After the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and the collapse of the slave-based economy, the descendents of slaves became peasant farmers, comprising the bulk of the island’s population. On most Caribbean islands, White planters, often less than one per cent of the population, continued to farm the best land. To ensure their economic and social domination they introduced cheap labour from India and China, which, over time, inadvertently formed a ‘Brown’ socio-economic buffer between the White elite and poor Blacks.⁸ By the middle of the Twentieth Century, urban industrialisation and tourist commercialism, lured armies of the poor to seek betterment in urban centres. The lack of real economic opportunities simply fuelled the spread of ghetto areas in the cities. It is out of the context of rural and urban poverty that modes of leisure associated with dancehall and religious devotion associated with Christianity develop, overlap and, eventually, travel with Caribbean immigrants to post-colonial Britain. What I am suggesting here is that dancehall and church hall are the product of working-class and working poor communities. Dancehall and church hall, in Jamaica at least, are social siblings, though somewhat estranged from each other.

As Carolyn Cooper demonstrates, the close proximity between the dancehall and church hall cultures has always facilitated a dialogue and the sharing of religious and cultural symbols and practices, including music.⁹ However, I want to point to a common religious influence and heritage that infused the folk culture of the poor, and, indirectly, both dancehall and church hall cultures.

While much has been said about the dynamics of African folk music and its influence on contemporary Jamaican music,¹⁰ little attention has been paid to the relationship between African musical forms and religious practice. We know that in slave society, music had a dynamic role. It was communal in that everyone was expected to participate in everyday musical events as well as the special songs and dances associated with festivals and feast days, such as the John Canoe dance at Christmas in Jamaica. Furthermore, music and dance were survival strategies of the first African slaves and also their descendents amongst the urban poor. Whether in the past in the form of the revolutionary call of the obeng (cow horn) by the ‘Maroons’ (anti-colonialist rebels), or the present-day passing on of historical memory through the teaching of drumming technique in tenement yards, music is mobilised to resist attempts to annihilate dignity as well as to pass on cultural memory.

However, music was also integral to religious practices that had travelled with the slaves. For example, African religious systems such as the cumina tradition in Jamaica made use of complex drumming rhythms.¹¹ The style and use of music in African religion also found their way into Christianity. Take for example the use of African musical forms in the development of indigenous Jamaican Christianity termed ‘Revival’.

‘Revival’ gained its name from the religious awakening that swept the island from 1860–1.¹² I side with Leonard Barrett’s view of Revival as a ‘political’ return to African religions within a Christian framework.¹³ Central to Revival was the use of singing, dancing and drumming as part of the service to usher in the presence of the ‘spirits’.¹⁴

For some time it has been recognised that Revival styles of music were appropriated by Rastafarian religion and subsequently became a part of the music culture that shapes and influences reggae-dancehall into the present.¹⁵ Therefore a genealogy of sound exists between African religious retentions (Revival) and dancehall music cultures of today. However, what has not been so widely reported is that Revival worship styles also found their way into twentieth century Christianity, particularly Pentecostalism. Revival ‘spirit possession techniques’, both oral and physical, were appropriated to evoke the power of God in the context of worship. This is why Jamaican religionist Dianne M. Stewart speaks of the foundational characteristics of African religion, including the beating of the drum and the recognition of the community of ‘spirits’, being absorbed into Christian traditions in Jamaica.¹⁶

This process of musical integration is given a Pentecostal specificity by Dianna Austin-Broos. Her description of the African mode of religious celebration, or ‘eudemonic’, within the worship of early Black Pentecostals in Jamaica identifies a seizure of Revival style – in particular the use of music, including drumming, within worship to provide a receptive environment for mediating the coming of the Holy Spirit.¹⁷

There is therefore a shared musical legacy between the dancehall and church hall rooted in Revivalism. Revival music and style found its way into Rastafarian music culture and also Pentecostalism in Jamaica. Thus, there are acoustic and performental qualities and sensibilities in both that predate any implicit dialogue between dancehall and church hall in the post-war period in the Caribbean or Britain. They share a religious-cultural legacy.

These shared his...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Church hall, dancehall and resistance
• Part II Dub, interpretation and Christology
• Part III Dub theology and social change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index