Jamaican reggae's evolution and political expression since the 1970s

Jamaican Music

It is never just about the music.

No matter how great the musician, music is always the expression of an entire culture, of a moment in history, of a particular place in time. The genius of a particular musician, the synergy of a particular group - these are both essential to the success or failure of a particular group. But that success or failure is never intrinsic to a single song, to a single album. Music that succeeds - both in its own time and later - does so because it has the ability to express something important about that moment in time. Reggae has been able to provide just such an expression of the beliefs of a particular people at a moment in history for the last two years - and it has been able to do so because of its ability to change with larger political and cultural changes. This paper examines the ways in which Jamaican music - and especially reggae - has changed since the 1970s to the present using a reader response model to understand the importance of these changes.

It is difficult for us to remember - because reggae and the influence of reggae is now so nearly ubiquitous - that as a distinct style is arose only in the late 1960s and did not receive any substantial notice outside of Jamaica until the 1970s. From the very beginning as Bradley (2001) argues in his history of Jamaican music, it was considered by both performers and audiences as the voice of the oppressed. This was based both on the fact that so many of the musicians and fans were minorities as well as on the position of Jamaica as a reminder of the injustices of the colonized world. The 1960s were the decade that saw an irrevocable end to the era of colonialization and reggae in many ways became the voice of that moment in history when peoples in Africa and the Caribbean became their own masters for the first time in generations.

The History of Jamaican Music

Reggae had its roots - although there is some disagreement on this issue - in ska, which was an earlier and in many ways (at least aesthetically) a similar form of music (although it was less political and more purely popular. Reggae is defined by its heavy four-beat rhythm, which is driven in different measures (depending on the artist concerned) by two percussion instruments - drums and a corrugated stick rubbed against a plain stick called the scraper - and two string instruments, the bass guitar and the electric guitar. (This rhythm, based on the drum and bass only, would spin off and become dub, a purely instrumental form.)

As Bradley (2001) notes, reggae may sound "black" to white listeners, but it incorporated elements of "white" music and "white" culture and its ability to comment on the dominant culture was one of the key elements that made it a music of the disenfranchised. The "chunking" of the guitar that marks the ends of measures in reggae is called skengay and is supposed to represent the sound of ricocheting bullets that were bringing down so many young men in Kingston. In this sense, there is a clear musical and philosophical line from reggae to gangsta rock - a mourning of those lost that is mostly disguised by a celebration of a subculture of violence.

Although reggae has its roots in ska, it is musically distinctly different - much slower, more mournful and more fatalistic. Ska was the music of liberation in Jamaica, the fast-beat, upbeat music of the independence of the island from Britain in 1962. That music - the style known as rock steady - brought about the rise of a generation of new stars such as the Heptones and Alton Ellis.

But as the bright promises of independence began to fade, the youth of Jamaica became increasingly politicized and the music that they created and listened to also became increasingly political. The late sixties and early seventies saw the rise of the greatest of all reggae stars, Bob Marley, along with a number of other singers and groups that are now rarely listened to -- Toots and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff, for example.

Marley brought reggae to the rest of the world (although not without help) but at home he remained very the voice of Jamaica:

Jamaican broadcaster Jeremy Verity said once: "The fact that Bob Marley was what he was and that he was a Rastafarian and that he wore the locks and that he lived a certain way right up to his death, and was at the same time a great musician and artist

Reggae Reader Response

The lyrics of reggae - compared to those of hiphop, for example - are not in fact terribly radical - especially if we look at the work of someone like Beenie Man who spends his time now singing about (more or less) girls and high living. Rather, the revolutionariness of reggae lies not so much within it and within the response of its audiences, which is why a reader response model of understanding reggae is most appropriate. And in looking at the ways in which audiences respond to reggae we may ask ourselves to what extent that response - of seeing reggae as revolutionary - is valid.

Another way of posing the question of how is it that we may analyse a text (or how it is that we should read a text) is to ask how do we know, when we read a text, whether or not our interpretation of it is correct? This is a question that many of us may never even have thought of, assuming that however we ourselves respond to a text is the most appropriate way. Unknowingly, if this is what we have done, we have unknowingly allied ourselves with what is known as a reader response model, a model of interpreted texts that privileges the position of the audience. Is reggae revolutionary even when its lyrics or not simply because we as listeners believe it to be so?

Audience response models assume that the truth that exists in a text lies outside the text itself, in the audience's interpretation of it. Alternatively, some critics assume that the meaning of a text lies outside the text itself but not in the audience's response to it but rather in the creator's original intent.

And yet there are other models - what might be called original intent -- that look to what the author intended when she or he wrote the text. This presents us with a fundamentally different power relationship among the text, the reader and the author: While reader response models place the power with the reader, then the text and then the author, the model of authorial intent reverses this order: Author, text, reader.

While these approaches are obviously different from each other in the key factor that one privileges the audience while the other privileges the creator, we will for the purpose of the argument in this paper consider them as equivalent to each other because in each case the meaning - the truth - of the text lies not within the text but outside of it. This seems to be the case with reggae, and indeed perhaps with all popular music because the action of engaging with the "text" in the case of music tends to take place in a social context.

We begin this section by presenting a definition of a text. This is a trickier proposition than one might suppose it to be, because it encompasses not only literary texts (with their clearly delineated borders) but also such expressive forms as films, paintings, symphonies and commercials. Any bounded act of communication (whether for purely expressive or mixed commercial and expressive reasons) may be considered to be a text and so subject to the same forms and modes of analysis as a book.

This definition of a text is analogous, in linguistics, to a speech text, a concept that we are all familiar with, although probably not by this name. The idea of the speech text (or speech act) is simply the idea that each linguistic and cultural group has a specific idea of how a conversation (or a lecture or a sermon or a speech or a commercial or a novel) should be structured and that these rules vary widely from one culture to another. Within any given culture, the borders of any particular kind of "speech act" are widely recognized and this recognition provides the boundaries necessary first to recognize and then to analyse a text.

It may seem strange to consider reggae music as a collection of "texts" but for the linguist or the literary scholar any bonded form of language-based expression is a text.

As has been noted above, and as our own good commonsense would tell us, under a reader-response form of analysis, the primary focus is on the readers and the process or reading rather than on the author or the process of writing (on the text itself). This sounds relatively straight forward as a model, and indeed it is, but it must be noted that it actually contains a number of rather sophisticated theoretical assumptions. The first of these we will call the assumption of the performative nature of the act of reading. This can be compared to that tree falling in that empty forest: The text does not make a sound unless it is being read.

Texts, under this model, do not matter unless someone is actively engaged in reading them in the same way that while a script of course continues to exist after the last curtain comes down on the run of a play, that script is not the same thing as the play itself; it is arguably in fact at some level not as important or as authentic as the script made into a living act of performance.

Meaning under this model is recreated in each new act of reading or listening; just as no one performance of a play (even by the same cast and even if the exact same audience returned) is exactly the same as any other, no one reading is exactly like any other (even by the same reader). The fact that the text itself has not changed is irrelevant. Thus, to return to the world of reggae, every reggae song can be seen as radical and revolutionary so long as its listeners consider it to be.

This brings us to the next theoretical assumption contained in the reader response model: Because the reading/hearing itself changes from one time to the next, there is no fixed meaning. Meaning (as well as the value of any given text) is not constant. It is negotiated anew each time a reader performs the act of reading a text. If we allow ourselves to contemplate this element of the reader-response model for a few moments we will see how many very different readings or interpretations there can be for any given text. However, this does not mean that different readers do not share in similar readings of a text.

This may be - although here we totter perilously close to the precipice if we are to keep the loyalty of those committed to a reader-response model - because there is something inherent in the text that produces this coalescing of interpretations. Or it may be, as Fish (1982) argues that there are commonalities in the extra-textual experiences of these readers that tend to link their readings. Perhaps they all share a particular political philosophy, and this binds their readings together as members of a single shared "interpretive community" - to borrow Fish's phrase. This is certainly arguably true of reggae fans.

They share much in the experience of reading/hearing a text because they share, outside of the text, an already established common discourse. This is linked to the New Historicist emphasis on the importance of historical moment in understanding the ways in which certain texts are read. An historically informed model of reception theory would have us compare the ways in which readers in one era appreciate (or fail to appreciate) a text with readers in another era who appreciate/fail to appreciate that same text and then try to determine what it might be in each era that so influences the respective readings. In other words, being members of the same historical cohort is certainly a kind of shared experience and might well tend to produce a shared kind of reading of a given text. This explains in no small measure the reasons why reggae has changed over the past two generations: The shared experiences of its listening cohort have changed.

We may now turn to what can be seen as the mirror image of the reader-response model. There is no single tidy label for this model in which authors and their texts guide readers. That may be in part because there are at least two different positions within this camp of textual analysis.

Those that argue that the author meant a single thing in writing each text and that the job of the careful reader is to determine this original intent and those, like Wolfgang Iser, (1980) who argue that while texts and their authors may guide and even to some extent control the reader, there always remain lacunae that the reader himself or herself fills. This is the most collaborative model of those we are examining.

John Lye (http://www.brocku.ca) suggests that we need to consider, whether we are voting yea or nay on the reader-response model, some very distinctly different models of the reader.

There is first a psychoanalytic view that suggests that each reader brings to each reading a response to the "core fantasies" and "symbolic groundwork" in a highly personal way. This means that the true meaning of any text lies in the ground created by each individual in that individual's unconscious response to the work.

The hermeneutically defined reader, on the other hand, is, like the hermeneutically defined text defined by a position in history that is specific to the moment and is not connected to ongoing human psychodynamics.

The reader can only approach the text with her own foreunderstanding, which is grounded in history. However as the text is similarly grounded in history, and as often there is much in the histories that is shared and well as what is not, there is both identity and strangeness (http://www.brocku.ca).

A third kind of reader that may be present in the reader-response model, Lye suggests, is the phenomenologically defined one. This is the kind of reader suggested by the compromise model outlined above, one who reads from her own experiences and yet is also engaged in completing a text that has its own needs and requirements.

If we introduce a Structuralist or post-Structuralist reader to this model, this is the result. The Structuralist decodes the text using "various levels of competence -- competence in how texts work, in the genre and tradition of the text, etc., as the work is constructed according to sets of conventions which have their basis in an objective, socially shared reality." Meaning in this case resides in the degree of cultural competence.

Meaning for the post-Structuralist is far more indeterminate: Cultural and textual competence are still primary but the conventions of the text also operate implicitly to shape our readings. Is this the kind of audience that we see in the crowds at a reggae concert?

Meaning is indeterminate, is not 'in' the text but in the play of language and the nuances of conventions in which the reader is immersed: hence the reader constructs a text as she participates in this play, driven by the instabilities and meaning potentials of the semantic and rhetorical aspects of the text.

In various sorts of post-structuralist reading the reading process may involve the reader's countering and/or re-interpreting prevailing views, depending on various things, including: the force of the direction of the text to the reader; the potential reconceptualization, freeing-up of meaning the text can effect; the openness to the play of language and meaning of the reader.

The text may 'deconstruct itself', i.e. The reader may experience or see that the language of the text implicitly undermines its own assumptions -- the real agent here as in all post-structuralist positions being the reader, open to polysemy (multiple meanings and the sliding and interplay of signs) -- in her 'own' (socially shared) world of discourse, in a world discursively and socially constructed (http://www.brocku.ca).

Is Reggae Still Radical?

Much of the criticism of new reggae laments that it has lost its political edge. The following criticism is typical:

Any fan of political reggae will tell you that left-wing lyrics have been few and far between over the last 10 years. In their stead has been the apolitical commercialised sexist and nihilist party music known as dance hall or instrumental (more accurately electronic) reggae-meets-house music called jungle.

Conscious" reggae has been little more than the reactionary and wacky elements of Rastafarian fundamentalism shorn of its revolutionary political interpretation, best represented by the music of the late Bob Marley, the late Peter Tosh and Burning Spear -- who is, fortunately, still going strong.

Has reggae had its day as a rebel music? There remain radical artists -- new and veterans -- who are prepared to bring reggae to the service of new radicalisations, and it still appeals to radical young people. After Green Left Weekly put out a call through the internet for progressive reggae labels and artists to submit their work for review, the CDs that arrived soon after show that while political reggae may be down, it is not yet out.

One thing is sure: don't hold your breath waiting for the major labels to release progressive reggae. The most political reggae is being put out by small independent labels around the world.

Reggae Wrap brings together four new young talents from western Jamaica -- Mr. Peck, Inglish, Daddy V and Hii Fii -- who perform singly and in various combinations. The subject matter ranges over poverty, black consciousness and Afrocentrism, civil rights, calls to remember and learn from Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley, opposition to war and perseverance in the face of racism and oppression (http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1997/283/283p25b.htm)..

We have looked at reader response models as a way of coming to understand how it is that reggae has changed so substantially over the past few generations while remaining - in the ears and eyes of its audiences - still the same radical music. This desire to see themselves as consumers of a radical artform allows listeners to hear even the most commercialized forms of reggae as revolutionary - and also explains the continuing popularity of Bob Marley who still looks and sounds like a real revolutionary.

The community of interpretation that has grown up around reggae music is a relatively stable one, for as people grow out of their phase in which they need to see themselves as revolutionaries (or grow up to become true revolutionaries), the next cohort takes their place. Jamaica is no longer the revolutionary place that it was in the years after revolution when reggae was born, but the same spirit that flowed through the streets of Kingston is still alive and well - and looking for an anthem.

Reggae has not changed the world in fundamental ways: There is still as much injustice and poverty and violence and racism and hate as ever. But it has sustained two generations now, generations who wanted social change even if they push themselves into the front lines to bring it about.