Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large Review

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(More customer reviews)Carolyn Cooper continues to be the most insightful thinker writing on the implications of Jamaican dancehall culture for the politics of gender and globalization. While Cooper focuses heavily on local Caribbean dancehall in her book, she weaves a narrative applicable to political theory and cultural studies internationally. Cooper is a folk philosopher who has been at the center of much heated debates over the last decade due to her position privileging folk life and Jamaican indigenous language--patois--over high brow theory. Cooper did not need Immanuel Kant to know that articulating the gulf between theory and practice many times revolves around disputes over competing political languages. Cooper and Kant converge insofar as they each attempt to develop universal laws of culture, of which some elements are a priori and others specific to the realm of experience.
Cooper's 1989-1990 JAMAICA JOURNAL essay "Slackness Hiding from Culture: Erotic Play in the Dancehall" was the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture. Since the publication of that essay, an explosion in literature on dancehall ensued. Cooper expanded the central argument of that essay into a book released a few years later entitled NOISES IN THE BLOOD. Cooper's current text under review, SOUND CLASH (2004), is an investigation into Jamaican dancehall culture at large. To study local Jamaican dancehall is to study dancehall's impact outside the island. Hence, Cooper devotes the latter third of the text to dancehall in places such as Barbados and Great Britain. Nevertheless, a majority of the work deals with interrogations into the lyrics of key musical figures in Jamaican dancehall including Ninjaman, Lady Saw, Capelton, Buju Banton, and Anthony B, and the ways in which those figures reflect wider concepts of the self, gender relations, power, and freedom.
The notion of "slackness" serves as an overarching subtext throughout. The chapter on Lady Saw is quite simply a must read, as are chapter 2 comparing the classical reggae lyrics of Bob Marley to the dancehall DJ Shabba Ranks and chapter 9 explicating dancehall in the South Asian Diaspora via the rhymes of British DJ Apache Indian (born Steve Kapur). Lady Saw in particular has been maligned by Jamaican bourgeois society much the same way that heretical European women had been marginalized by men historically in their respective cultures. Yet Lady Saw is the ultimate folk philosopher who has managed to use her lyrical prowess to destabilize conventional notions of womanhood, thus transform our understanding of concepts through the epistemological slackness she wields. As Cooper observes, "Lady Saw's brilliant lyrics, reinforced by her compelling body language, articulate a potent message about sexuality, gender politics, and the power struggle for the right to public space in Jamaica...It encompasses the cunning strategies that are employed by outspoken women like Lady Saw who speak subtle truths about their society" (p. 123).
Cooper devotes time in the Introduction to rebutting criticisms leveled against her by other dancehall commentators, one of whom is Norman Stolzoff. Stolzoff is the author of another seminal text on Jamaican dancehall, WAKE THE TOWN AND TELL THE PEOPLE (2000)--a book that I suggest readers interested in Cooper's work should also consult. Wherever you stand on the debates between Cooper and her critics, you must take those conversations as a healthy indicator of the increased awareness about dancehall and the reality that the principles of those living dancehall inside and outside Jamaica offer their own notions of universalism. In closing, I highly recommend SOUND CLASH to all those seeking to understand how a cultural form of life can indeed change the very way we view politics, theory, the world, and ourselves.

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