Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

interview by: Laura Gardner ©2001

Norman Stolzoff is white. There’s no denying it–he’s a Jewish kid from Orange County, California. But another thing is certain: he has recently published THE definitive work on Jamaican sound system culture, "Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica."

Do Jamaicans accept him? Do they accept his work? Does he act Jamaican? What kind of insights does he have, having lived in Jamaica for a year researching dancehall music? Does he speak patois? These are only a few of the questions I wanted to ask him.

Balford Henry reviewed Stolzoff’s book for The Gleaner, the daily Jamaican newspaper, and wrote, "I loathe supporting another exposé on Jamaican music and culture written by a foreigner. But, at least, I have to admit that Norman C. Stolzoff’s ‘Wake the Town and Tell the People’ is a genuine attempt to explain something we seemed to have overlooked." High praise and acceptance from the source. One question down, many to go.

When Norman Stolzoff, a cultural anthropologist, first entered graduate school in 1990, he was looking for a thesis project. Already interested in Reggae, he had done some previous fieldwork in Jamaica as an undergraduate. He realized that he had "read pretty much everything that there was to read on reggae at that point," so he obtained a small grant and spent a month in Kingston looking at the sound systems. That trip was the basis for orienting his Ph.D. research towards the study of dancehall. He was able to get another grant to spend a year in Jamaica in 1994, when he did the bulk of his research. Subsequently, he has returned to Jamaica numerous times, "After finishing my graduate work, I was fortunate to teach on the East Coast for two years, and being on the East Coast made it easier for me to get to Jamaica. I also taught a course through the University of California where I took students to Jamaica for a month, which I did for two summers in a row."

I spoke to Stolzoff in his Marin County home on December 10, 2000, where I was able to ask many of my burning questions, especially about the controversial nature of dancehall music. He was open and forthcoming about his expertise on sound system culture. Although he has been to Jamaica many times, he did not speak with a patois affect, nor did he play up his many accomplishments. Humble and unassuming, Stolzoff reminded me of the "guy next door."

Laura Gardner (LG): When you first arrived in Jamaica in 1994, how did you convince the Jamaican people that you had credibility and that they should talk to you?

Norman Stolzoff (NS): It was a process that took time! For one thing, I had made arrangements with the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and they were able to sponsor me as a visiting fellow, so I had some credibility through the organization with which I was affiliated. More than that, I had been to Jamaica before, and knew something about the culture and the people. My training in anthropology really helped as I was sensitized; you read a lot about what it means to go to another place and to establish a rapport with the people. Plus I think I have a real affinity for Jamaicans and Jamaica. Those things, coupled with patience, I was slowly able to meet people.

When I explained to people what I was doing, they were generally receptive because sound system culture, dancehall culture and even reggae have not really received that much scholarly attention. So, once they knew what I was about, they allowed me to interview them and I think people vibe you out in Jamaica. Once they sense that you’re "good people," they trust you with more information and they give you more contacts and so forth. Of course there was the exception.

There were some people who were non-cooperative or suspected my motives and/or wanted me to pay them some exorbitant amount of money, but they were the small minority. Many of these people were fellow observers of Jamaican music, formal musicologists or known as experts in the music scene. When dealing with another expert, especially a foreigner, there’s a sense of entitlement and encroachment on territory. As I discuss in my book, the information is power, and it’s economic. So I can understand not wanting to share intellectual property, as it were.

After many futile attempts to contact these people, I decided to work with the people who were willing and there were, fortunately, dozens of people who I was able to talk to. One of the things about anthropology is that it isn’t only interviews... We also participate. It’s called participant observation. We try to immerse ourselves in the daily culture. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people with whom I interacted with over the year that I was there, who I wasn’t formally sitting down and interviewing. Lots of people were interested and really generous with their knowledge and their time.

LG: I know that dancehall lyrics are often thought of, in American culture, as menacing–the misogyny, the homophobia. How did you come to terms with perhaps opposing beliefs between American and Jamaican culture?

NS: The first thing is that I tried to understand. Paul Gilroy is a very well known sociologist who studied the African Diaspora. He’s a Black British specialist on cultural politics. I draw a lot of inspiration from him and he says we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn or to celebrate. I took that as my operating principle and tried to step back and see: what are these lyrics? Who is generating them? Where are they being performed? Who likes them?

I realized that Jamaica is not a monolith. It is not, "Jamaicans love slackness or gun tunes." There are various positions within Jamaican society and different viewpoints about lyrics and dancehall in general. I tried to see controversial lyrics in a social/political/economic context rather than a literary, critical point of view where you find a song text and you break down the lyrics and say, "Well, that’s a misogynist lyric to be condemned." Ultimately, I dismiss myself from those things that I think are objectionable–the violent misogyny and homophobia and so forth. That’s just the starting point. I don’t think you then reject everything, so I really tried to delve in deeper.

LG: So expanding on that, where do you think these lyrics are coming from?

NS: There are categories of songs. One is called "gun tunes" or gun lyrics. Those became quite popular in the late 80s and early 90s with deejays such as Ninjaman and Cutty Ranks. Gun tunes are part of sound system culture and sound systems are based on clashing. Not only that, but the young deejays are in a competitive sphere themselves… Gun lyrics were a way that they could make a name for themselves with their combative lyrics so they were able to compete in a violent style. But that begs the question as to why gun lyrics are popular.

There’s a long history in Jamaica of the romanticized outlaw. Look at the hero of "The Harder They Come," the gunman who is seen as a Robin Hood type of figure. Also there’s the importance of gangs in the inner city of Kingston. Gangs have become a kind of local political authority.

There are many ways of looking at the role of the gunmen–there’s a positive perspective as the guardian of the community, as a provider. It’s somebody who is taking control of the situation. One must look at the context, which is that Jamaica is very violent, especially in Kingston where the police are notorious for their gun violence. Being able to defend oneself against the corrupt police is seen as heroic in the community. There’s something really defiant about them.

Some of the gun lyrics are incredibly stirring. Others are ghetto reportage… And the music is so compelling that it’s not necessarily that they’re endorsing the gunmen. Often the songs are morality tales about the bad things that will happen to you. There’s a kind of graphic quality to them that is part of the dancehall aesthetic. It’s about putting things in ultra-realistic terms. Lyrics contain everything from endorsing random violence, to a more political defense against the police, to outright critiques of gun violence. So even within gun lyrics you have a whole spectrum of different political positions.

I am a person who emphasizes complexity. I am not looking for a simple answer that gun lyrics are bad and songs about love and community are good and that’s it and we can go home [laughs].

LG: What are some of the other categories apart from gun lyrics?

NS: Other categories would be "informer tunes" and I link informer tunes to what Jamaicans call "battyman" [anti-gay] lyrics. They’re about someone who is seen as betraying the social collective either in terms of security (the informer who spies and reports back to the police), or the battyman, who breaks the code of masculinity that is strictly enforced in Jamaican lower class culture, and really throughout society as a whole.

I see these lyrics as a way of uniting against the outsider. Maybe the outsider is an insider who is expelled outside of the community. A clash is a very combative event where different people might be supporting different sound systems. When one of these songs comes on, it’s a way of bringing everyone in. That’s one of the darker and troubling aspects of the all-against-one unanimity that some of these songs are used for.

It’s a long, tedious process trying to figure out where homophobia comes from. It is deeply viewed in the Protestant tradition that was brought to Jamaica and inculcated into the masses. There are lots of different origins, but I tend to take the functionalist perspective: what are these lyrics doing in terms of a social component? Then there’s a psychological component of what does it mean for a Jamaican man to consider homosexuality other than an abomination?