![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
“Johnny Reggae” began as an English pop-ska song in 1971. Written and produced by Jonathan King, it described a skinhead with that nickname through the eyes of his girlfriend. Subsequently, the song was covered in Jamaica, and then the name was used for characters in toasts by Big Youth, Dr Alimantado, and Prince Far-I, which were increasingly concerned with Rastafarianism. Ska was a Jamaican musical form that was transferred to England in the mid-1960s by the Jamaican migrants who had started arriving in Britain after the Second World War encouraged by the post-war labor shortage. Johnny Reggae moves from being a member of a racist white, English youth culture to being a black Rasta challenging the rule of Babylon. This article traces this historical development using postcolonial theory to examine the power dynamics that informed this cultural exchange between Britain and Jamaica.
Notes
1. Colin Larkin, ed., The Virgin Encyclopedia of 70s Music (London: Virgin, 1997), 217.
2. Paul Du Noyer, The Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Year-By-Year Illustrated Chronicle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995).
3. Lloyd Bradley, This is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove/Atlantic Incorporated, 2001), 256.
4. See LTM Pantomime, “1978/79 LTM National Pantomime Johnny Reggae,” Little Theatre Movement, n.d., http://www.ltmpantomime.com/pages/detailed/johnnyreggae.html.
5. On Chris Blackwell and the importance of his Jewishness, see Jon Stratton, “Chris Blackwell and ‘My Boy Lollipop’: Ska, Race and British Popular Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22, no. 4 (2010): 436–65.
6. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 414.
7. Jason Toynbee, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 145.
8. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 190.
9. King tells this story in detail in his autobiography. Jonathan King, Jonathan King 65: My Life So Far (London: Revvolution Publishing Ltd., 2009), 191–6.
10. Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987).
11. King, Jonathan King 65. Homosexual acts in private between consenting males over the age of 21 were decriminalized in 1967. In 2001, King was imprisoned for the sexual assault of underage boys in the 1980s.
12. King, Jonathan King 65. Homosexual acts in private between consenting males over the age of 21 were decriminalized in 1967. In 2001, King was imprisoned for the sexual assault of underage boys in the 1980s., 65.
13. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).
14. King, Jonathan King 65, 233. King tells the story of how he came to release the song using the name of the American revolutionary group.
15. King, Jonathan King 65, 233. King tells the story of how he came to release the song using the name of the American revolutionary group., 236.
16. “Hooked on a Feeling,” Wikipedia, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooked_on_a_Feeling (accessed April 20, 2011).
17. For one account, see Kevin O'Brien Chang and Wayne Chen, “Ska Ska Ska,” in Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 30–8. See also Garth White, “The Evolution of Jamaican Music Pt 1: ‘Proto-Ska’ to Ska,” Social and Economic Studies 47, no. 1 (1998): 5–20.
18. See Stratton, “Chris Blackwell and ‘My Boy Lollipop.’”
19. Dick Hebdige, “Reggae, Rastas and Rudies,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies University of Birmingham, 1976), 148.
20. Hebdige, Subculture, 55–6.
21. Hebdige, “Reggae, Rastas and Rudies,” 148.
22. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 256–7.
23. Mick Hume, “I Was a Teenage Walton Hopper,” Spiked, January 20, 2003, reprinted from The Times, http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DBF6.htm (accessed April 18, 2011).
24. See “Sham 69—History, Part 1,” n.d., http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/sham_69_history.htm.
25. King, Jonathan King 65, 240–1.
26. Dick Hebdige, “This Is England! And They Don't Live Here,” in Skinhead, ed. Nick Knight (London: Omnibus Press, 1982), 29.
27. Enoch Powell, qtd. in Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183.
28. Enoch Powell, qtd. in Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 185.
29. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, 190–1, note 42.
30. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, 201–2.
31. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 197.
32. King, Jonathan King 65, 237.
33. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 257.
34. See Jon Stratton, “Jews Dreaming of Acceptance: From the Brill Building to Suburbia with Love,” in Jews, Race and Popular Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 37–58.
35. King, Jonathan King 65, 237.
36. Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 80.
37. Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 81.
38. Erin Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures,” Cultural Critique 59 (Winter 2005): 24.
39. Michael Kaufman, Jamaica under Manley: Dilemmas of Socialism and Democracy (London: Zed Books, 1985), 49.
40. Hebdige, Subculture, 58–9.
41. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994), 110.
42. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 290–1.
43. Chang and Chen, Reggae Routes, 53.
44. Chang and Chen, Reggae Routes, 79–80.
45. For example, on Britain, see Nancy Forner, Jamaica Farewell: Jamaican Migrants in London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). In the United States, many Jamaicans worked on farms in the states along the eastern seaboard. In 1966, Bob Marley worked on the Chrysler production line in Delaware. The conventional migration pattern was for the men to move to the new country and, once established, they would send for their families.
46. “Dr Alimantado—Best Dressed Chicken in Town,” audiversity.com, April 2007, http://audiversity.com/2007/04/used-bin-bargains-dr-alimanatado-best.html (accessed August 14, 2010).
47. Toynbee, Bob Marley, 56.
48. Toynbee, Bob Marley, 59–60.
49. One introduction to Rastafarianism is Barry Chavannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
50. There is little discussion of this practice of colorism. One journalistic account, which includes a quotation from Henry Louis Gates Jr., is Bill Maxwell, “The Paper Bag Test,” St Petersburg Times, August 31, 2003, http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/31/Columns/The_paper_bag_test.shtml. For Gates's account, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Parable of the Talents,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornell West, The Future of the Race (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1996), 18.
51. On the Tainos, see Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
52. See LTM Pantomime, “1978/79 LTM National Pantomime Johnny Reggae.”
53. Kaufman, Jamaica under Manley, 105.
54. Toynbee, Bob Marley, 64.
55. Kwame Dawes, “Boyhood, Reggae, and West Indian Literature,” in Major Minorities: English Literatures in Transit, ed. Raoul Granqvist (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993), 121.