Jamaica: Roots, Rackets and Redemption (Part I)

Robin’s Bay, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica

After less than a week in Puerto Rico, I flew to Kingston on a Saturday morning, and due to the discordant state of travel in the Caribbean, found no option for the trip other than connecting through Ft. Lauderdale. I went to the airport straight from a night in the town in Old San Juan, and by the time I arrived in the Jamaican capital, it was already late afternoon. The immigration officer, unlike his counterparts in Trinidad, Antigua and Puerto Rico, would not let me into the country with just the name of a hotel chain listed as my local residence, so he held on to my passport as I visited the nearby tourist information desk. I had the name of a contact at Kingston’s Edna Manley University, and when I told this to the young woman behind the counter, she suggested a moderately priced guesthouse/hotel in the Barbican neighborhood, not far from the Bob Marley Museum. Despite almost leaving behind the bag containing all my previous video footage, this detour through immigration turned out to be major stroke of luck–in both positive and negative ways–for my quest to understand the state of music in Jamaica.

My plan was to relax and explore the local scene until Monday morning, then call the university and try to arrange for an interview–and perhaps some advice for meeting musicians. After that, I would reevaluate my prospects in the city and decide how long to stay before starting west towards Montego Bay and my flight home. The guesthouse turned out to be an ideal place to lie low and wait: It had high-speed Internet, a swimming pool and a spacious patio that looked out on a ring of low mountains north of the city. Most of the clientele were either Americans and Europeans who wanted to avoid the all-inclusive scene, or Caribbean-born holiday-makers and business travelers. Among the latter, I met Stuart Wilson, a Reggae musician and singer from the Cayman Islands, who was was waiting for a flight home after several gigs in Jamaica. We spoke informally at first, comparing notes on our musical influences, styles and experiences before moving on to more serious topics. After listening to him discuss such issues as life on the road, the economics of making music and the state of the industry in general, I asked if he’d be willing to speak on the record. He agreed, and I ran for my notebook and video camera, while his friends took pensive looks at their watches. On the whole, Mr. Wilson was quite upbeat and enthusiastic about his career and prospects for the future. He and his band “Love Culture” were touring at regular intervals and, according to him, playing all the “high level” venues. However, over the course of our interview, I got the sense that he felt restrained by the socio-economic parameters of his chosen profession. Many of the shows he plays are at tourist resorts and up-market hotels, where the clientele is dominated by white, middle-class tourists who come to hear noncontroversial, toe-tapping island favorites like “Yellow Bird” and “One Love,” without a though to where the music came from or what it stands for. As a result, the lifetime Reggae musician said laughing, “sometimes we even play (the Calypso classic) ‘Hot, Hot, Hot.’” Mr. Wilson was clear that he respected whatever music his fans wanted to hear, but hinted that many performers in the region felt pressured to conform their physical appearance to this clean-cut, safe and happy vibe. “We still have a lot to achieve in terms of perception of artists.” he said, adding that he knew of artists “who would love to go dread (wear dreadlocks), but don’t, because, if they did, they would start losing out on gigs.”

Given the nature of my research during the previous weeks, this man’s experiences struck me as more than a little ironic, but not at all surprising. After all, upper class usurpation of emerging musical forms–which they once dismissed as crude or vulgar–is a well-established pattern around the Caribbean and elsewhere, as is the tendency of promoters and producers to alter a genre’s essence for reasons of commercial viability and marketing. However, in this case, the powers that be were taking things to a whole new level: not only were they content to present a watered-down, “entertainment” version of the original, but they seemed to be intentionally obscuring the unique, often difficult conditions from which the original emerged, to make a profit. Calypso, for example, was born as a vehicle of social commentary and mobilization, and even though it endured its own period of good-timing artificial sunniness, the root qualities of self-expression, call-and-response one-upmanship and lyrical edginess were never lost–even “Hot, Hot, Hot” contains some examples of clever wordplay and bawdy innuendo. In a similar way, Reggae emerged from the ghettoes of Kingston’s Trenchtown and Spanish Town neighborhoods, amidst a climate of poverty, violence and disenfranchisement, and it too provided a means of criticizing the status quo and mobilizing the masses in the hopes of achieving greater social justice. However, unlike its steel drum counterpart, Reggae always focused more on peoples’ experiences than their grievances. Whereas Calypso’s most famous stanzas include rants about corruption and incompetence–like King Shortshirt’s classic jibe “When people have power and authority, they don’t give a damn about nobody”–the works of Bob Marley and others are more likely to describe hunger, despair and frustration. Joe Higgs, a Jamaican artist and one half of the duo Higgs & Wilson, who himself was known for penning lyrics about his difficult life in Trenchtown, once described the inner impact of tribulation thusly: “You have a certain love come from hard struggle, long suffering. A certain love that, through pain, girdle yourself with that hope for freedom. Not to give up.” Speaking about Marley’s music in the authoritative Jamaican musical study Reggae Routes, Higgs said, “The heavier albums…’Catch a Fire’ and ‘Burning,’ dealt with experiences totally. Confrontation, truth and rights. No compromise.”

The reason for this focus on everyday suffering, according to Robert Ffrench, my second impromptu interviewee of the evening (who had just stopped by the guesthouse to check his Facebook page), is that Reggae was created by divine intention to “teach the pain” as a means of healing it. Mr. Ffrench is a local musician and producer who has traveled the world playing Reggae, and has performed with well-known artists such as Anthony Johnson and Frankie Paul. He identified himself as a Rastafarian, and was keen to discuss his music’s spiritual aspects: “Reggae was well-created by Jah, from the grassroots and the ghetto,” he said, emphasizing the genre’s origins among poor, marginalized urbanites with little or no musical training. In his eyes, these humble roots make Reggae the ultimate “peoples’ music,” which was destined by God to propagate and spread its message of personal redemption around the globe. “Reggae is a guideline to life,” Mr. Ffrench continued, “it’s music that matches everybody’s life and teaches that whatever background we come from, we are all one people.” It was therefore no surprise to Rastafarians like himself that Bob Marley could achieve so much success in bringing Reggae to the masses, since he was merely acting as an agent of God’s (or Jah’s) divine plan to awaken the passions and creativity of the world’s people after millennia of oppression and misery. “That’s why anywhere in the world that you travel, you see Bob Marley posters and Rasta flags. Reggae is music of revolution; it’s culture is to blend itself” with existing, less-evolved forms of music, thereby creating something new and powerful to “straighten the way we walk.”

This was the first time I had heard such a passionate, philosophic take on the relationship between a musical genre’s origins and its popularity. As a non-Rastafarian, I was not prepared to blindly accept Mr. Ffrench’s spiritual proscriptions, but could not deny that they offered an intriguing explanation for the subtle differences in content between Reggae and other forms of Caribbean music. I asked him if he knew of any musicians that might be willing to elaborate on these ideas during a jam session and/or on-camera interview, and he agreed to put me into contact with “Bongos” Herman, another well-established Kingston musician, who had just recently performed at a recent Reggae festival in St. Mary’s Parish. Herman had been involved with the local music scene for decades, I was told, and would be an invaluable source of information for my project. However, by the end of the next afternoon, it would become clear that respect, brotherhood and unity were not the only things these men were looking for.