radio, studio, denham town lab

saturday morning we went to the market at papine. becca and i had been yearning for better produce than we could find at the supermarket, but we hadn't found an outdoor market accessible to us. we hopped in one of the shared cabs that run up and down hope, from papine to half-way tree, and cost JA$50 (US$1) a head. the market at papine was not huge (perhaps 20 stalls) but plentiful. we picked up onions, scallions, tomotoes, cho-cho, paw-paw (papaya), scotch-bonnet peppers, ackees, dried red peas, and some jamaican apples that taste like a cross between a pear and a plum (see picture). sometimes we were clearly overcharged but we're no expert bargainers and are still feeling our way around the prices of things here. plus, it was never more than what the supermarket would charge for inferior goods. last night i used our new veggies to cook up a jamaican version of my sicilian grandmother's marinara sauce as passed to me by my irish-scottish mother. it's quite a dish with jamaican ingredients like scallions, scotch-bonnets, and thyme. cooking continues to be fun here. we're working up a pretty good chicken curry at this point, too.

this sunday was the third sunday we have had in jamaica, and i must admit that i like sundays here. kingston is appreciably more quiet. not so many cars race up and down hope road, and hardly any businesses are open (which can be a bit annoying if you're in need of something). it truly feels like a day of rest. one of the most striking things to me is how much i find the radio programming to match the mood of the day. rebecca and i spent our first two sunday mornings making a big ackee and saltfish breakfast while listening to doo-wop, sam cooke classics, and tasteful big band jazz (ellington, ella) on the radio. i was struck both times by how appropriate the music felt for a relaxed morning. for a moment, i felt a bit guilty about listening to such comfortable american music--the kind of thing i heard on sundays growing up--instead of something "jamaican," something more germane to my research. i quickly realized, of course, that these air-wave offerings were as "jamaican" as anything else i might find on the radio, and just as important to my research as any other music people listen to here. when i first came to jamaica i was surprised by how much american hip-hop and r&b i heard here. i had somehow come along a different narrative of jamaican music in my studies and informal encounters: first there was good ol' cultural imperialist american r&b, then there was jamaican r&b, which soon turned to ska, which morphed to rocksteady, which became reggae, which became roots and dub and rockers and dancehall, which refers to the early 80s strain of one-drop reggae as well as the more rap-heavy, 3+3+2 beat, which recollects the rhythms of kumina as well as the kind of dub that, with its echo-on-the-drums breaks, foretold a baby called jungle (see augustus pablo, for example). there was certainly some kind of traditional/folk music that preceded american r&b, such as mento and its antecedents and a whole mess of traditions mixing the african with the european and the indigenous and later the asian, but their traces are harder for me to spot, so subtly are they now incorporated and so little preserved. (oh but you should have heard the jug band at the market: three old men--one playing a banjo, one a washboard, and one a PVC-pipe didgeridoo [actually, it was more likely a modern version of the jamaican boompipe, a single-pitch bass-instrument, blown into or thumped against the ground, and traditionally fashioned from bamboo]. they produced a real wash of sound and had quite the low-end for an acoustic group. very jamaican in that sense.) at any rate, while visiting jamaica for the first time in the fall of 2001, it seemed interesting that hip-hop should be so big here right now considering the strong local styles for which jamaica is known around the world. one of the big early questions of my dissertation, and one that i am still trying to get a hold of, concerns the extent to which hip-hop's popularity here represents a disjuncture with the previous historical pattern or a continuity. it is clear that american music has a strong and longstanding presence here. i believe it's influence truly was eclipsed by local productions (even if, ironically, produced in london) during reggae's heyday in the 1970s. and it appears to me that, though dancehall remains the dominant style of music for youth here (and for jamaica's projection outward), american tunes are once again clamoring for the attention of young people. (perhaps someone will soon give me some good counterevidence. i would not be surprised if michael jackson and madonna sold more records here during the 80s than, say, yellowman or black uhuru--and correct me if the latter are british in the first place. island records has warped my sense of who's coming from where.)

at any rate, i had plenty of chances to notice during my month here last summer that people's musical tastes are as wide-ranging in jamaica as anywhere, though the predominant sources are american and jamaican. so i turned back to my sam cooke with new appreciation. it reminded me again of trevor rhone's bellas gate boy, which features a recurring doo-wop motif--a nagging, if sweet, reminder of the way that music, even from foreign sources, so often becomes a part of the texture of everyday life and of memory. as the doo-wop motif subtly suggests, trevor's play puzzles over identity in a post-colonial world: the country-born jamaican protagonist experiences true self-discovery through the confident words of an african-american (muhammed ali) while studying in london and picking up plenty of british manners in the meantime (forgetting, as one of his mentors advises him, to "forget half" of what they would teach him in drama school). present-day kingstonians rapping like harlemites seem to pose the same riddle. people embrace what is around them, what is familiar, what ignites the imagination and elicits empathy. nevertheless, there are important implications to these choices.

but back to sunday morning music. i decided yesterday to make a recording of the sunday morning airwaves in order to represent the mood that i found so striking, with the idea that i could do so for every night of the week. flipping through the stations with my mini-disc and mic pointed at the clock-radio, i recorded about 12 minutes of material, once at 9:30 and again at 11. it is my intention to create a shorter montage of the bits, akufen-style, to make the experience a compact and listenable thing--yet another interesting expression of what i'm observing, interpreting, and representing here [2/13 - here it is]. today, as i went through the sounds, transferring them to my laptop, i was struck by the variety of musics that i found. i expected doo-wop, jazz, reggae, gospel, preaching, BBC news, and cricket-scores. i did not expect soca, merengue, quiet storm, and everything else in between. there is still a restful and celebratory character to the whole thing, but it's less mellow upon closer examination. i hope that the sunday morning radio will reveal itself to be as different as i feel it to be (or is it just my mood), once i compare it to, say, a saturday night song.

yesterday evening we had the opportunity to hang out at a local studio for a while during a recording session. i headed over to mak's, from where we would leave with philly, an aspiring r&b singer from pennsylvania. philly has recently become involved in the jamaican music scene and has set up a home-away-from-home-base here for her recording projects. she has been voicing tracks over at king of king's studio, the kingston institution responsible for the double-cd martial arts riddim on greensleeves records (london). we proceeded to the studio, which was a short cab ride from mak's apartement complex. a few djs and hangers-on were sitting in the main room, along with everton, the engineer, and scrum d of multicast, who greeted us at the door. the studio was well-equipped if non-descript: the main room contained a number of consoles, a few large mixing boards, and plenty of digital techonolgy; the recording booth is in an adjacent room, separated by a window, and situated close enough to the engineer and the onlookers to provide much feedback for the vocalist. makonnen, eric, and eva played a cd with three rhythms on it so that philly could identify the one to use for her song. after some dispute, philly decided to record on the second of the three rhythms, a track that i had left with multicast last summer, chill anova minute from like the moon (wayne&wax, 2000). i didn't blame her: it's a sweet r&b track; just a simple eight-bar loop (one of my most egregiously long samples) from some cheesy fusion-jazz, with some tasteful drums, cymbals, and shakers layered on top. i was glad that mak felt free to offer my rhythm to her. i am very interested in hearing other people riff off of my music (as i have riffed off--some might say ripped-off--others). i was delighted to hear that the first rhythm on the cd was a beat i had co-produced with scrum dilly last summer. the guys have told me that a couple of "big artists" (whose names i should currently withhold) have recorded on it already, though they want to clean up a bit of the guitar part before releasing it. the third rhythm was one of multicast's, but in the end, after much debate, philly chose the second.

the recording began. philly wrestled a bit with the demanding melismatic phrases of her song. eva flipped through the system non-chalantly but with great skill and some speed. he had her retake an occasional phrase if he, or she, or mak or eric (scrum d) thought she had gone astray. before we could get very far, the power went out (which, i was told, is rare for the studio). five of us walked next door and played pool while we waited for the electricity to return. eric asked me if i could play, and i told him, "on a lucky day, i am very good." i didn't have much to worry about, though. eric was a shark, but the rest were beginners. it was a fine way to spend the time, though i missed the music. about an hour later, we began again. becca joined us at the studio, and the same process continued. it was fascinating to observe the dynamic in the room. mak and eva strove to encourage philly to do her best, affirming her singing throughout the process, while doing their best to push her to get it "right"--which is to say, according to varying ideas about what the imaginary melody (it was largely improvised) should sound like, albeit with much common ground. it was an interesting experience, though i am quite curious about how the dynamic would differ with a different kind of rhythm, whether hip-hop or dancehall, and a different cast of vocalists.

this afternoon we got the opportunity to go to a community computer lab in denham town, one of the poorest "garrison" communities of the downtown area, a place ravaged by crime and political territorialism, but a place with the same vibrancy that i encounter frequently here. we were put into contact with arthur mckinley, a local businessman and teacher who has a hand in running the technology education program there. mr. seaga had mentioned denham town as a sister facility to tivoli gardens high school, so we were happy to get a chance to see the place and give a demonstration and workshop. on our drive downtown, arthur told us of the proverbial "two jamaicas," uptown and downtown, the haves and have-nots. occasionally, arthur added, the problems of downtown people ignite in war and so spill over into the international, and then the uptown, purview. but the attention is always fleeting, even from just uptown, so the cycle continues. at any rate, becca and i were excited to get to another site, especially one that provided such contrast to the demography and geography of st. andrew's.

the lab looked good: about fifteen computers, at least two-thirds of which were occupied by neatly-dressed young men and women. i did my digital music demo, and together, using sounds created by ourselves and the objects in the room, we came up with an original denham town computer lab riddim, employing a rather melodious cellphone tone. because the computers in the lab are not yet equipped with the right software, we had a one-man hands-on workshop, using my laptop as projected against the whiteboard, with several onlookers providing suggestions. a brave volunteer named sean stepped-up and began constructing a beat with some basic building-blocks: kicks, snares, hi-hats, and a bass. i showed him where the other samples were located and before long he had added a nice clavinet sound and some beatbox clips. when i showed him the melody-tool, he turned the clavinet sample into a jagged, compelling figure. i showed him how to make a quick intro and encouraged him to build a related but contrasting pattern for the chorus. at the end of an hour, seanmad, as he called himself, had created the seanmad beat and, in a simple but possibly profound sense, had become a music producer.

we had a nice dinner of festival and jerk chicken with arthur, his wife, and a son and daughter of theirs. we talked about jamaica--about music (arthur was surprised and proud to hear of kool herc, hip-hop's jamaican founding figure) and migration (there are as many jamaicans living outside of jamaica as in jamaica, and with open communication channels; arthur says, not really exaggerating, that 99% of jamaicans have family in new york) and cable tv (arthur reaffirmed my sense that the huge shift in media here has accompanied a shift in jamaican ontology). arthur described the change--as expressed through contemporary dancehall music, which, like much hip-hop, often lacks the uplifting, affirming qualities that reggae or soul had--as a kind of desensitization to formerly "immoral" subjects and acts. for him, jamaica has become less conservative, in terms of good christian morals, because of cable tv. from what others have told me and what i have myself observed, i think there is a good deal of truth to this causal characterization. it may leave out some messy details, but it is certainly an important part of the story. the jamaican imagination would undoubtedly shift in response to such a glut of programming, not to mention a couple million relatives living abroad. if one were to describe the shift in contemporary academic terms, one might call it an increase in the range of suggestive subjectivities available to jamaicans. at any rate, it raises the same questions once again about identity and community. and it places music at the center of the conversation.

before arthur drove us home, his teenage son got in the car with becca and me. i was supposed to give him a demo and get him building rhythms, too, but it was getting late after the conversation and the jerk chicken. he told me that he had written a few songs and that he freestyled as well. i asked him which artists were his favorites. "jay-z, nas, jadakiss," he intoned with a jamaican accent. the usual suspects. i asked him to kick something for me and gave him a beat. his flow, accent, and language were straight out of new york, complete with references to "niggas," a word not really found in typical jamaican parlance. it was fairly derivative, but it was a start--certainly no worse than my early efforts. he stopped, seemingly embarassed, when his father reached the car. i apologized for beatboxing too slow (it was clear he had a quicker tempo in mind when composing his rhyme), and told him that soon i would show him how to build his own beats to flow over. i was happy to find yet another young kingstonian demonstrating the same fluidity with the hip-hop idiom. the more people i meet like this, the less contradiction i see in it. but this doesn't mean the questions become less interesting to ask. their implications simply shift. what does it mean for young kingstonians to embrace mainstream american hip-hop as a primary mode of creative expression? the answer opens out into the realm of the imagination, of identity and community, of the effects of movement and media, of empire/globalization and of what may be a postnational way of being. in these ways, the story of hip-hop and jamaica makes a fitting narrative for the beginning of the twenty-first century, a narrative, it would seem, best told through the overlapping textures of individual, idiosyncratic lives.