MARK WIGNALL

TAKE a large number of people from the bottom of the society. Let them be black. Recognise their African antecedents of drum, bass, rhythm, movement, storytelling. Place them in Babylon, keep them there. Replace white colonial masters with black roast breadfruits having too eager a penchant for locking shut the gate to social advancement only after they have entered it.

Repeatedly bypass this black, uneducated mass and frown on their lack of social graces. Pay special attention to them only when the constabulary is in a feeding frenzy and desires target practice.

Allow uptown, important men their sick frolics with under-age boys and girls, give the publicly respectable wives their fun-touching naked dancer boys on stage and call it all good fun because it is private and confidential.

Now let the despised, black mass relate their own experiences in song, in raw, unpretentious chat, in deejaying, in stage clashes and what will we have? Criticism by the uptown crew who have empowered themselves, forced themselves, pushed themselves on others to be the final arbiters of what is "good taste", what is acceptable.

Let me confess that the "brainwashings" I received at the hands of Douglas Forrest, while I was a schoolboy at KC in the 1960s, have not made me a fan of dancehall music. Fact is, I am much more comfortable with Debussy, Ellington, Marley and Israel Vibration than I am with Beenie Man, Bounti Killa and Capleton. Where I find myself eager to listen to and enjoy the former, I make it a duty to avoid listening to the latter grouping.

The sounds coming from Beenie Man, Bounti Killa, Merciless and especially Capleton are, to me, jarring to the nerves. I would imagine what one full hour of listening to these entertainers would do to me. Aggrey Irons, Ward 21, Bellevue. But then again, maybe if I should place all four of them in a room and make them listen to Beethoven's Fifth, they would themselves run out screaming mad.

While I do not like what they have to offer, I can understand why they use the material in their performances and why their on-stage rivalry gets violent at times.

It has to do with deprivation, injustice at the hands of the police, the language and the sounds of the ghetto and, their once forgotten state as the political system used them, abused them and consigned them to living on the edge of the pit of hell.

It has to do with rats, cockroaches, mosquito bites, too many breakfasts being left over, warmed-over rice from the night before, sex because it feels good and makes a man feel like a man in a hungry house of children not learning anything in school and an uncle who would provide something being shot dead by the police last night.

It has to do with a lack of hypocrisy and a stark understanding of justice. A man steals your money. That means that he wants your woman and child to starve. You are a man, therefore when you come upon that man you must inflict enough damage and pain to ensure that he will never do it again.

Your woman cannot tell you that she wants tenderness from you when all around you is a landscape of poverty, filth and crudity. So she goes outside the "home" and seeks another man's touch because it is easily available. You are tough so when you discover what she has done, you have to beat her up because it is the norm, the language, the behaviour and it allows you the return of your manhood or so you swear.

Years ago, when I dabbled in writing song lyrics, I wrote about new love, lost love, passion and deception. There was no "junjo" in the streets of my life, no hopelessness, no police beating down my door. Were it so I would have written about it.

What must the DJs speak of and act on? Gently rolling hills, a valley, the sounds of little streamlets? Daisies in the sun? Must they write of and "sing" about smiling children when their pasts and too much of what they still see around them are barefooted, hungry children with no fathers?

Worse, the audience of the DJ is made up of those who understand the deprivations and can move with the rhythm of the pain along with those uptowners seeking downtown entertainment for a few hours. The entertainer must play to his audience.

Most important, he must constantly stoke his ego. It was what kept him going when he was "walking and kicking stone" and he must constantly remind us all just who he really is.

All of this is not an excuse for the fact that the standards of Jamaican pop music has fallen over the years. Deprivation has always been there, injustice has always been there. It takes, however, a special talent to pen a song like Fire Burning by Bob Andy to capture the social inequities of the times while someone like Capleton need only scream and jump across the stage like an avenging angel, in the process torching everything in his sight and mind.

It is my belief that the slide started in the 1970s when a whole mood of socio-political awakening permeated the body politic. Out of this awakening came Marley but he had talent and did use it to make his protests in poetry/song. But along with this came the eager and the crass.

WHEN PNP minister of housing, Tony Spaulding, refused to remove his cap while drinking in the Skyline pub in the 1970s, another signal was sent that it was in vogue to be boorish. Around that time, Prince Buster did his Rainy Night in Big Five, the highly talented Max Romeo surprised us by singing Wet Dreams, and Lloydie and the Lowbites did the album Uncensored.

At that time, it was also the fashion to do many versions of one song. With the "versions" came another signal that creativity was not the focus, making money was. Later on, music producers who were no more than street toughs who had learned the business through an exercise of muscle and made money probably via ganja export got in on "producing".

Knowing little about music or the techniques of studio production, the blind entered the business of leading the blind. Pretty soon a half-baked DJ or singer would do one cover, the producer would buy him a bike or a gold chain, set him up with a browning and convince him that "him buss".

Then the entertainment media got in on the act. An interview with a newly "buss" DJ would go something like this. Interviewer: "Now, Plug Ears, now that your first single is all the rage of the town, what can we hear next from Plug Ears." DJ Plug Ears: "Well, yu wan si every wey mi go de people dem a bawl fi mi. A just me dem want. Mi haffe gi de people wey dem want. Right now mi inna de schudio a work pan mi album."

Interviewer: "Plug Ears, keep up the good work and we anxiously await your album."

A year later Plug Ears cannot even get inside the recording studio because he is a spent force.

The fracas at Sumfest and the stupidity of summoning some performers at the recently held Champions in Action is indicative of societal hypocrisy. It also smacks of class prejudice and, one suspects, politics has entered the fray.

In the 1950s, it was the fashion among upper-crust society to have a token rastaman present whenever they held a party or had a garden gathering in suburban St Andrew. In similar fashion, uptown Jamaica has supported "slackness" in the dancehall revues, not so much because they adore and respect the performances but mainly because it gives them comic relief.

Of course, there is the herd instinct like what obtains at carnival time among the brain-dead middle class; "So what happen girl, you going jump later?" "Can't miss it, darling".

The language of the ghetto is Jamaican expletives, the language of dancehall as it has evolved is Jamaican expletives. If the mood of the ghetto may appear to be love, it really is pent up rage.

DJs on stage are considered the closest representation of ghetto vibes, ghetto protest and just plain anger that the uptown crowd will receive and ride with the illusion that it is art and creativity. In my view, it is a sort of controlled reality and, by that definition, it could be considered creativity and, I may be wrong in my assessments.

In the Champions in Action Show, the police set up three roadblocks along the way to the venue and, I have been reliably informed that close to 70 per cent of the patrons turned back in frustration. It is not a secret that the promoters of the show are a grouping called the Presidents Click with headquarters in Tivoli Gardens.

Again hypocrisy always creeps in whenever sex is involved. Lady Saw is raunchy, sexy and in her deliveries, she sells sensuality, the unexpurgated kind. Hers is no peck on the cheek or genteel, uptown Sunday afternoon, "how is the hubby" greeting. Lady Saw is pure groin.

IF people do not want to see her or hear her, for God's sake stay home and surf the pornographic net. Why pick on Lady Saw? What do they want her to do? Mimic Kathleen Battle?

I last attended a dance towards the end of the 1990s. It was at a "lawn" on Mannings Hill Road. At that dance nothing fascinated me as much as what I saw a fully-clothed couple doing against an oversized speaker box.

In the loudness and cacophony, they were lost in each other, their heads in the midrange, their midriffs against each other and their feet knotted together near the bass. Such is the dancehall, raw and honest. A few years before that at Corletts Road in Spanish Town, a shapely young lady whom my brothers strangely called "Big Ethel" took a fancy towards me.

One night at a dance she took one of my arms and led me to a darkened room where couples were dancing to a slow song. I actually expected that we would dance and assumed that because the other couples were vertical, some semblance of dancing would take place. In the dancehall, however, honesty is the keyword and foreplay is the objective.

Like most of my uptown friends, I am offended by dancehall music but for me, not because of its lyrics but moreso because of its atonal character. Melody seems to be dead and a whole generation of poor people have grown up believing that what they are hearing is the epitome of music.

There is a space for the risque, the gritty, the raw and the desperado-like deliveries. But there must be the talent which can give us back the melodies of say a Johnnie Clarke of the 1970s or a Tenor Saw of the 1980s. Can we find it?

If we do it is my belief that untalented DJs, who are only into the business of cussing each other, will be relegated into a far second place.

Shaggy & Friends take a bow

Two-day Gathering of the Peacemaker in Negril

Patrons rang in the New Year with gusto at 11:59