Cut `n' Mix

Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music

Dick Hebdige

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134931033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

First published in 1987. This is a book about the music of the Caribbean - from calypso and ska through to Reggae and Caribbean club culture.

Original cut (1979) (Rebel sound: reggae and other Caribbean music)

Introduction: the two Jamaicas

“If you are island hunting and you are looking for a subtropical climate, ivory white beaches, dramatic lush green mountains and superb hotels, then you need look no further than Jamaica… Jamaica is regarded by some to have the most breath-taking scenery in all the Caribbean. Take an excursion into the Blue Mountains… Gushing streams form a network down the mountain sides, creating spectacular waterfalls and finally reaching…the Caribbean sea… Jamaica has an exciting history beginning in 1494 to show you. Great plantation houses such as Brimmer Hall and Rose Hall have survived and are open to view. Charming mountain villages such as Mandeville, steepled churches, village greens and the counties of Middlesex, Cornwall and Surrey all strongly bring to mind the centuries of British rule.

… All the air-conditioned bedrooms in your hotel face the sea and have either a private patio or balcony. Your room will be attractively furnished with a shower and/or tub-bath… You can sail, or try your hand at snorkelling, scuba diving, water skiing or fishing, or stay on land and play tennis… In the evening there will be local entertainment, steel bands, calypso singers, limbo dancers and for the late nighters a discotheque…”

(P & O Cruises booklet, 1979)

“… Too many people living in oil drums and fruit crates and one-room plywood outhouses, with nothing except a formica dinette and a glass cabinet for the family china and a radio blasting. West Kingston literally is a garbage dump… They built shacks and huts out of cardboard and plywood and rusty old iron, and the place spread...till now it’s teeming. Kingston itself is in a basin, shut in by the Blue Mountains, and in the summer, when the sun fries the street and the asphalt begins to bubble and erupt and the dirt and zinc-dust and nameless vapours hang in the air, down in Trench Town and Jones Town and Tivoli Gardens...you choke.

… And still they come to town, gangling teenage runaways from the canefields and five-acre farms, all looking for something faster than chopping cane and humping bananas all their lives. Not sure…what they’re really looking for at all —except they all know about Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker and the rest of them. They were all just country boys running with the Rude Boys until they bluffed their way into Leslie Kong’s record store with a little tune they’d written…”

(Jamaica: Babylon on a Thin Wire, Michael Thomas)

“Jamica, land of weed and water,

Motor vehicle and man-slaughter.”

(No Chuck It by Dillinger, a reggae artist)

Jamaica…for most people living in Europe and the States the word probably conjures up a confused set of images—a patchwork of impressions derived from rum bottle labels, television and travel ads. This is the Jamaica of the travel brochures—a tropical paradise of white beaches, blue seas and swaying palms. And as far as history is concerned, there are the grand old plantation houses—stately reminders of the “centuries of British rule” (Jamaica was a British colony until 1962). An even more romantic picture of the island and its history can be found in childhood books and Hollywood adventure films. Here, the word “Jamaica” summons up a world of pirates and doubloons, of Captain Henry Morgan and the Brethren of the Coast holding the high seas to bloody ransom from Port Royal. And together these two versions blend to give us a picture of an enchanted island which, between its “colourful” past and carefree present, has experienced few real problems.

But there is another Jamaica—a different, more disturbing set of images. This is the Other Side of Paradise which Michael Thomas writes about in the extract above. Anyone who has listened to the lyrics of songs recorded by Jamaican reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff or Bob Marley will already be familiar with this other Jamaica. Marley has called it a “concrete jungle” —a twilight world of slums and shantytowns where the island’s black population—the descendants of West African slaves —live out their lives in conditions which are a million miles away from the plush resorts of Ochos Rios and Montego Bay. Reggae has done much to publicise this image abroad. For reggae isn’t just a set of highly danceable rhythms. The lyrics of reggae hits often stray far from the normal concerns of rock and pop music—problems with parents, boyfriends and girlfriends. With the new rhythm comes a powerful new message. The message is about poverty and inequality and black identity.

As Bob Marley, reggae’s first truly international star, “chants down Babylon” and shakes his long, plaited dreadlocks on the stages and screens of Europe and America, he not only gives the world a new form of music. He puts that other Jamaica on display. In records like Catch A Fire and Exodus, he reveals what our travel brochures and history books hide—the roots of black Jamaican experience in slavery and colonialism.

It’s hardly surprising that the brochures have tended to play down reggae music. For the tourists there are, instead, steel bands, jaunty calypsoes and brightly costumed limbo dancers. Reggae, “raw” reggae —the Trenchtown rock you can hear in downtown Kingston— would simply not fit in. And so the tourists and the “sufferers” are kept separate. They offer us different images—the official and unofficial versions of life in Jamaica. The two Jamaicas never meet. But the conflict between them is becoming more and more open.

In 1978 Peter Tosh, a founder member of the Wailers group, gave a performance at Jamaica’s huge National Stadium. The place was filled to capacity and the crowd included both the island’s Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition party. Striding on stage clad in a menacing black kung fu suit, beret and dark glasses, Tosh took the opportunity to make a passionate speech about the state of present-day Jamaica. He referred to men like John Hawkins and Sir Walter Raleigh—men whom the English history books have turned into heroes—as “slave-trading pirates”. Before playing a set which included a song entitled Get Up, Stand Up For Your Rights, Tosh gave a final warning. There are still pirates in Jamaica, he said, only now they are called tourists, and instead of carrying cutlasses, they are armed with “little cameras round their necks”.

If we are to understand how reggae and the tourist handbooks can present such different images of life in Jamaica, we have to go back into the history of the whole Caribbean. And if reggae or any of the other forms of West Indian music are really to make sense to us, we must first trace them back to their origins in Africa and Europe.

Chapter One: Slavery days

“Every time I hear the crack of the whip

My blood runs cold.

I remember on the slave ship

How they brutalise my very soul.”

(Bob Marley and the Wailers, Catch A Fire)

“For sale: two mules, three goats, a sow with eight pigs and a fine healthy woman with four children.”

(Advertisement from a Barbadian newspaper, circa 1770)

The New World—the mainland of America together with the West Indian Islands—was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. However, despite the fact that the area was settled by Europeans and supplied Europe with many of its raw materials, at least three-quarters of the present population of the West Indies are not of European descent. Instead, they are the descendants of black slaves who were forcibly taken from the West Coast of Africa and made to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands during the centuries of British rule.

The first people to be made slaves were the Carib and Arawak Indians who lived on the islands before the Europeans arrived. And it wasn’t until the landowners began cultivating sugar in the 1600s that large numbers of slaves from Africa were brought to the Caribbean. Because the settlers grew their sugar on huge plantations, there was a need for a large, disciplined workforce to tend and harvest the crop. It was at that point that the slave trade was opened up. Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to exploit the West Coast of Africa for slaves, the trade was soon dominated by the British.

Most of the Africans who worked on the West Indian sugar plantations had originally been sold into slavery by other Africans. They had either been captured during tribal wars, kidnapped by Arab slavers, or taken during raiding parties organised for profit by local chiefs. Once in European hands, the slaves were herded into the cramped holds of the slave ships and chained together.¹

The conditions on the ships were appalling. Some shipowners reckoned on losing half their human cargo through sickness during the long voyage. Things hardly improved once the ships had docked. When they arrived in the West Indies, the slaves were lined up on the quayside like cattle and sold to the highest bidder. One slave, who managed to buy his freedom in 1776, wrote his own life-story, which included this account of a slave auction in Barbados:

“On a signal given (as the beat of a drum) the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended and the eagerness visible on the countenances of the buyers serves not a little to increase the apprehension of the terrified Africans. In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. I remember on the vessel in which I was brought over…there were several brothers who, in the sale, were sold in different lots, and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting.”

On their arrival at the plantations, those slaves who were not destined for work in the “Big House” (some plantation owners employed as many as forty house slaves) were set to work in gangs. They laboured on average from six till eleven in the morning and, after an hour’s break, from twelve till dusk. They were housed in prison-like dwellings situated behind the ornate mansions of the masters and their families. Many slaves died soon after they arrived on the plantations during the period of acclimatisation—the “seasoning” in slaveowners’ jargon. They succumbed to a variety of illnesses, which ranged from dysentery and smallpox to lockjaw and “despondency” —in plain language, the loss of the will to live.

Those who survived were closely supervised and any misconduct severely punished. Slaves who were considered surly or disobedient were flogged. Runaways were publicly whipped and often gibbeted and hung up to rot as a deterrent to any other slaves who hoped to seize their freedom in this way. Still, despite the harsh regime of field work and the continual supervision of whip-wielding overseers, many slaves did fight back. There is a long tradition in the West Indies of resistance to white rule—a tradition which stretches right back to the earliest days of slavery.

The maroons were the first black rebels on the islands. The word referred to runaway slaves who formed their own outlawed communities in the mountainous interiors of islands like St Kitts and Barbados. But the Jamaican maroons were the ones most feared by the British authorities. Under the leadership of a Coromantee warrior, Cujo, the Jamaican maroons held out against the British and colonial forces for almost fifty years. Eventually, in 1739, a treaty was signed ending the war. But in the traditional maroon townships of Cockpit County the exploits of Cujo and his people are still remembered with pride. When Stephen Davis visited the descendants of the original maroons in 1976 he was told that dances are still held to commemorate the old battles against the British. And during these dances, an old red coat, a British soldier’s tunic “riddled with bullet holes and still boasting cutlass tears”, is taken out and hoisted aloft in memory of former victories.²

The maroons were not the only Caribbean rebels. There were frequent slave outbreaks on most of the British islands from the seventeenth century onwards, though most of them were quickly put down and the leaders executed. However, there was a successful revolt on the French island of Saint Dominique in 1791. Under the leadership of the black general, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slaves on this island rose up against their owners and drove them into the sea. And on 1 January, 1804, after a long campaign against the French, the rebel forces triumphed. Saint Dominique became Haiti, the first independent black republic in the Caribbean.

The last large slave revolt in the British West Indies occurred in Jamaica. In 1831, hundreds of slaves led by Sam Sharpe, a black Baptist minister, took up arms against the local militia. The uprising ended in the massacre by British troops of all those involved. But the rebellion helped to speed up the passing of a law banning slavery in the British colonies. In 1834, the Abolition Bill was passed in Westminster and 668, 000 slaves were finally given their freedom.

However, life for most ex-slaves remained grim. They were understandably reluctant to work for their former masters, particularly as the plantation owners offered very low wages for field work. In an attempt to drive the ex-slaves back onto the plantations, the authorities imposed heavy taxes which hit especially hard at the black population . As a result, in 1865 there was another rebellion. Paul Bogle, (who was, like Sharpe, a black Baptist minister) led a rebel force against the mainly white township at Morant Bay. He was eventually captured and hanged, together with a wealthy coloured planter named George William Gordon. Gordon was accused of inciting the people to revolt by advocating self-government for Jamaican blacks. It was to take almost one hundred years for Gordon’s dream to be fulfilled when finally, in 1962, Jamaica won her independence.

But the days of slavery have left an indelible mark on the island. Even in present-day Jamaica there are social and economic problems which can be traced back directly to the old plantation system. Jamaica’s poverty, unemployment and racial and social inequality are all largely inherited from the past. It is the light-skinned “coloured” population who, for the most part, run the country. It is the Chinese, Syrians and Anglo-Indians who own many of the smaller shops and businesses. (They are descendants of the large numbers of Indians and Chinese who were “imported” after slavery was abolished to work on the sugar plantations.) And it is in the more manual jobs, or without a job at all, that you tend to find the black descendants of the West African slaves. Unemployment amongst this group runs very high indeed and many families live well below the bread line. Such poverty naturally breeds bitterness and anger, particular...