DANCEHALL WI DEH!By Jesse I (February 2004)
Despite the tourist board images, Jamaica is not all fun in the sun, but a land of great contrast. The natural beauty is breathtaking, but so are the conditions that many people are forced to live in. Extreme wealth rubs shoulders daily with extreme poverty, and you get the feeling that the regular influx of rich western tourists has done some strange things to the nation's psyche. The people can be gracious, warm and genuinely friendly, but also guarded, manipulative and openly hostile. The country's slogan seems to be "Jamaica, no problem!", but ask any Jamaican who doesn't work in the hospitality industry, and they'll tell you about more than a few problems the country faces.These contrasts also extend to the country's music - the reason I'd come to the island. As well as giving the world the conscious positive vibrations of roots reggae, Jamaica has also given us dancehall music with less spiritual concerns - the ghetto experience (complete with the glorification of guns and violence), the escapism of the dancehalls, and sex.
While the mainstream music press might have painted a different picture, reggae music did not die with Bob Marley. It has simply continued to evolve over time, reinventing itself in ways, but always breaking new ground at the same time. Reggae is just as dominant in Jamaica as always. It's inescapable; blasting from cars, buses and taxis, streetside vendors, shops, rum bars, and neighborhood soundsystems. All styles are still evident - in fact, if you sit on the right street corner you can hear classic 70s roots, early 80s foundation dancehall, and the freshest contemporary sounds all at the same time.
When I arrived in Jamaica for the first time, I felt like I was walking around in a dream, with reggae flyers and posters everywhere, and cars driving around with loudspeakers shouting out "Stone Love tonight! Stone Love tonight!". With Stone Love playing just up the road, how else could I spend my first night on the island?
Stone Love is Jamaica's biggest and most well known soundsystem, and couldn't have provided a better introduction to the true dancehall experience. Like most big dances in Jamaica, this was an outdoor affair, with giant stacks of speaker bins staking out the corners of a bare dirt and concrete yard. The first thing you notice is the bass, which can be heard clearly from blocks away, and then physically felt as soon as you step inside. A "yard dance" is an amazing scene - guys flashing lighters for big tunes, girls whining up in the middle, the crowded bars selling Red Stripe, Guinness, and Heineken, and the kitchen out back selling jerk chicken and hot goat soup. Vendors also roam through the crowd selling everything from peanuts and chewing gum to papers, lighters, and huge sticks of ganja.
While this was a peaceful mid-sized dance, the next one I attended was in a different league. It was a show called "Bus Ride", held in Priory, St Anns Bay. It featured a great lineup, with major soundsystems Stone Love, Metromedia, Katarock, and Rebel T; and a bunch of big artists on the bill, including Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Ghost, Elephant Man, and Bling Dawg. This was what is known in Jamaica as a "day-night affair"- a huge dance that starts in the afternoon with family entertainment, soccer matches and the like, and gradually transforms into a nightclub atmosphere as it gets late. Things really started to heat up after midnight with the arrival of "modeling" crews, teams of women in their skimpiest dancehall outfits shaking everything for the video cameras that roamed the crowd to record the event for posterity.
Each of the soundsystems came with their own speaker stacks, which were lined up in a huge circle around the main dancefloor and bar area so that patrons simply danced in the middle. As a soundsystem dance, this was first class, but when it reached 3.30am and there was still no sign of any artists, things got a little crazy. Someone got on the mic and apologised for the delay, saying that the artists were on contract, and should arrive any minute. The response from the crowd was a shower of glass beer bottles raining down upon the DJ control area, and then the gunshots started ringing out. This caused a stampede as everyone took off running, even ripping down a section of the fence to get out. My first stage-show dance in Jamaica, and it got mashed up! An amazing experience still, but not exactly the way I hoped it would turn out...
The next dance on the agenda was a complete change of pace - perhaps the sweetest session I've ever been to, and a far cry from the bling-bling badman scene at the Bus Ride. This was an "oldits" dance (aka "old hits") with a soundsystem called Jamintel playing the vintage classics for a crowd of all ages. The venue for this one was a big concrete "lawn" surrounded by a tall bamboo fence, situated right in the middle of a residential street in the hills of Steer Town, St Anns - I don't know how any of the neighbors got any sleep, as the bass could be heard booming from blocks away. There were no lights of any kind at this one, just the natural illumination of a beautiful warm night under the stars. Even when showtime started and special guest singer George Nooks got on the mic, he was just singing beside the DJ booth in the darkness - no spotlight antics here, just pure sweet reggae music as it was meant to be heard.
After the pure niceness of Jamintel, it was time to take in a proper soundclash, with two soundsystems going head to head to battle for dominance. At Windsor Lawn I saw GT Taylor take on the UK's David Rodigan, with the crowd voicing their approval for big tunes by shouting and whistling, and spraying flames in the air from aerosol cans. Here, the bulk of the music played was custom dubplate specials, songs especially voiced in order to extol the virtues of each side, while putting down the other. The Jamaican soundclash is best described as a cross between a dance and a sporting event, a unique product of this musical culture that has existed since the early days. For the record, GT Taylor took the honors, though Rodigan got the biggest "forwards" of the night (when crowd response to a tune is so great that the selector has to rewind and play it again from the start).
Other dances I've been to in Jamaica have ranged from the "ghetto people's Sumfest" of the Champions In Action stageshow (complete with virtually all of the current big artists performing live in one night) to the Players Ball (with some of the island's biggest gangsters and high rollers spending more than my monthly rent on one round of Crystal champagne) to the Red Stripe Summer Sizzle (all the beer you can drink included in the entry fee!) to Pon The River Pon The Bank in Trelawny (where the crowd hurled bottles at artists they tired of).
No matter what time of the year you go to Jamaica, you are guaranteed to find something happening. People don't seem to sit at home watching TV at night, but will go out instead, no matter what night of the week it may be - even if it means drinking, smoking and dancing until sunrise, and rocking up to work red-eyed the next day. Respect to that!