Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In Jamaica music is the vital expression; night and day, amid the heat and narrow lanes of downtown Kingston, rap, ragga and reggae boom from giant loudspeaker cabinets, a heavy musical beat.
Finally, Bass Culture by Lloyd Bradley.
Bradley covers the development of popular Jamaican music from ska (a speedy, jazz-tinged shuffle beat) to its languid offshoot of rocksteady (a rhythm said to have been adapted from waves hitting the sides of a slave ship), and finally into reggae, which, with its slowed-down, marijuana-heavy beat, would absorb happily into middle-class hippie culture. What I particularly like about this book is that it concentrates on ska music, which was an authentically commonwealth music, in that it took hold in the British cities where there was a concentration of West Indians in the 50s. This music, this ska, was absolutely electric, and it brought a taste of a Trenchtown, a sort of Kingston swagger, to Britain. Singers like Derek Morgan and Desmond Dekker – these are far greater exponents of Jamaican music than Bob Marley. Bradley in this book says precisely that: that Marley, to a lot of middle-class white people, is reggae – and it isn’t at all. It’s the kind of airbrushed version of reggae, with rock music overlaid. Not the same at all.
If you look back over the history that you’ve covered with us today, where would you say we are in the present moment?
Well, from the musical point of view, we’re in the pits. This digital, computer-generated, dance-floor ragga stuff borrows a lot from American rap and hip hop. Not that all of that is awful, not at all, but it’s rather sad the direction that that music has taken. I think that music has lost its moral compass. None of that morality from the classic period of reggae is there at all. And I think you could say it reflects where Jamaica is today; it’s a country that’s absolutely ridden with crime, and it’s a sad story.
Because the British sucked it dry and left it to rot?
Well, there’s a sense in which Britain has abandoned this country, and I think a lot of Jamaicans do feel that. I think that most Jamaicans look to America now, and no longer to Britain. Something’s been lost there, for sure. And something gained, as well – because this old imperial view had to change.
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Ian Thomson is a writer, critic and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: A Life (Hutchinson, 2002), which won the Royal Society of Literature’s W H Heinemann Award in 2003. His account of contemporary Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber in 2009. ‘I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems,’ he says. ‘Although, in my experience, in Jamaica when they say “no problem” there is one. The other side of all of this is that it is quite an uptight culture in many ways, and there’s a lot of Victorian morality, particularly with the churchgoing population, which is massive in Jamaica. There is a lot of what they call a “fenky-fenky” attitude towards sex, which is actually quite prudish.’ He says 1950s Britain was unmindful of the Commonwealth and disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war, selling ice cream and confectionery, were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. And yet Jamaicans, British subjects, were not treated as such.
