A review of Norman C. Stolzoff’s Wake the Town and Tell the People : Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000).
Norman C. Stolzoff’s Wake the Town and Tell the People : Dancehall Culture in Jamaica is a comprehensive study of the controversial phenomenon of dancehall music which took Jamaica by storm in the late 1980’s and has continued ever since to dominate Jamaican music.
The title of the book accurately reflects its contents as Stolzoff’s main interest is Jamaica’s modern avatar of reggae, known as « dancehall ». This is one the book’s many strengths as there are very few serious studies of modern Jamaican music. In fact the only other book that could approach such depth is Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the « Vulgar » Body of Jamaican Popular Music, published in 1993. Nevertheless Stolzoff’s approach differs from Cooper’s text-based study of Jamaican culture. Indeed the writer chose to adopt a more sociological and anthropological method and his analysis is based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (the « field of cultural production » theory), Edward Kamau Brathwaite (the concepts of « syncretism » and « creolisation »), Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdige and Simon Jones (cultural studies).
Stolzoff insists on the necessity to focus on dancehall as « lived experience » and to take into account the influence of the social, economic and political contexts in the production of dancehall music. This approach puts the researcher in the position of a privileged observer who experiences the culture desribed first-hand, and Stolzoff did in fact carry out some extensive field work in Jamaica between 1994 and 1998. This gives his book the ring of authenticity and a certain authority as the writer quotes interviews with such legends of Jamaican music as Beenie Man, Luciano, and Tony Rebel.
The book’s first four chapters constitute a detailed history of the rise of dancehall music in Jamaica and include some wonderful passages about the role played by popular culture in Jamaica in the XIXth and XXth centuries as a force of resistance scoffed at by the middle and upper classes.
The next three chapters go into the complex process of music-making in Jamaica and into the social and economic importance of dancehall today, outline the various « career trajectories » available to and the « roles » played by today’s dancehall DJs and singers and give the reader an invaluable insight into how an aspiring artist enters the fray. The role of the recording studio, both as the place where dancehall music is actually « produced » and as an informal meeting place and « job centre », is highlighted, together with the established way of doing things in the ghetto ( how to approach a producer, how to make one’s mark by recording « specials »,etc). This wealth of information was obtained by daily contact with a ghetto « crew », up-and-coming DJs and singers, by hanging out for many hours at a local recording studio, and of course by attending dances and « sound clashes ». Chapter 7 actually includes a detailed account of a sound clash between two big sound systems, and this takes the reader right into the heart of the matter.
So the books has many strengths and despite the writer’s obvious love for dancehall music and culture, it remains fairly objective throughout, neither fully praising nor condemning dancehall music. Stolzoff quite frankly admits that some characteristics of dancehall culture like homophobia, the romanticisation of violence and mysoginy are difficult to reconcile with his love of the music, but, as he points out, these phenomena were not spawned by dancehall and can be found in other cultures. The problem of the social divide ( uptown versus dowtown) in Jamaica and its reflection in contrasting attitudes to dancehall is honestly addressed, and the author comes to the conclusion that dancehall music today in Jamaica mirrors the various social, economic and cultural tensions of society at large, sometimes even reinforcing them. Dancehall music has produced good and bad, « slackness » and « culture »,and is a living culture that keeps evolving.
My quibbles with the book are really minor and concern mainly the writer’s style, sometimes heavy with anthropological and sociological jargon. Likewise, a study of some of dancehall’s key lyrics could have laid the stress on the orality of this art form and its links with the slave past.
Overall, Wake the Town is a major contribution to the study of an often-neglected aspect of Jamaican popular culture, the culture that throbs in Jamaica’s ghettoes every Saturday night with little regard for what the rest of the world thinks « reggae » should sound like. It is a journey into the « real Jamaica », a place that very few « visitors » have experienced, and for that reason alone, it should be read by every serious student of Jamaican popular culture.