Month: November 2013
Underneath It All: Reggae Dancehall
There’s a slim line between essentializing and claiming your own. Take aerobics, for instance: The bigger and bolder the signage for Zumba, Bollywood, and Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot Calypso, the bigger and bolder the draw for the instructor of a crowd.
No doubt, this kind of pump-up has its monetary and physical rewards.
But go past these visible externals: The underlying stereotyping that transfers from a genre to its populations to stigmatize and limit remains. And, of course, this tendency to limit and stigmatize based on genre and population is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Nonetheless to hear “America saved …Tessanne Chin” last night on The Voice was pure joy.
Like Dancehall or not, class it raunchy or not, like Lady Saw’s repertoire or like it not, underneath it all, there’s nothing like losing yourself in your own lyrics, in your own song. Your body claims it, the windpipe claims it. It is yours.
Let’s acknowledge fusions and hybrid forms, but at the base this is not your everyday clone.
Is the term “world music” still around? – that category coined to designate “ethnic” and non-Western? And whatever happened to the World Music Awards where the winners have been conventional and unconventional? From the origin of these awards, perhaps the tag and tie to the poor and underdeveloped, carried an unwitting message. Whatever has happened there, for the past two years, World Music Awards has been on hold.
However, to get back to Tessanne Chin’s choice and performance … it takes guts to choose against all odds, in an arena dominated by Western genres, to come out from left field and inhabit your body, your space, your throat, your own voice.
That is what making music is about. It needs no tag … but sorry for the contradiction, I’m glad that it does have one – Reggae, Dancehall.
Because it’s nice to play dress up, try on different styles of voice, but sometimes the way the body hug, the size, the shape, you just have it put it on. This goes way past essentializing. It’s a call.
So A Big-Up to Tessanne Chin!
Now for some Trinidad Chutney on The Voice.
Lest We Forget
One of the poems we learnt from our West Indian Reader Book 3 or 4 in my heyday:
YOU know, we French storm’d Ratisbon:
A mile or so away
On a little mound, Napoleon
Stood on our storming-day;
We strutted like the little man, legs wide apart, head bowed as we uttered these brave lines of Robert Browning’s “Incident of the French Camp” – a Victorian narrative poem meant to teach us loyalty, nobility and courage, in choral speaking fray.
We galloped in with the young soldier until we came to the awesome lines – awesome a word young people today have changed forever from its heretofore meaning:
You look’d twice ere you saw his breast
Was all but shot in two.
Yet still, our voice leapt with pride for an instant under the choral master’s baton; then softened into sorrow’s cadences, noting the swift change in Napoleon’s demeanour:
The chief’s eye flash’d; but presently
Soften’d itself, as sheathes
A film the mother-eagle’s eye
When her bruis’d eaglet breathes.
But stridently, chest high, with no dying breath, in the young soldier’s voice, we pridefully sounded:
… “Nay,” the soldier’s pride
Touch’d to the quick, he said:
“I ’m kill’d, Sire!” And his chief beside,
Smiling the boy fell dead.
Coda – Lest we forget:
- Black soldiers and their progeny of wars of the 19th and 20th centuries still experience the need to hold their own memorials today, fighting an uphill battle to be among the remembered, not forgotten.
- Do poets still write war poems? Or has the genre disappeared under the cloud of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”?