Sonic diaspora, vibrations, and rhythm: thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session

Abstract

The propagation of vibrations may provide a better way of understanding the spread of diasporas than the conventional focus on the circulation of products (Hall 1980, Appadurai 1986, 1996, Gilroy 1993a, Brah 1996). Jamaican sound systems operate as a broadcast medium and a source of CDs, DVDs, and other commercial products (Henriques 2007a). But the dancehall sound system session also propagates a broad spectrum of frequencies diffused through a range of media and activities – described as ‘sounding’ (following Small's 1998 concept of ‘musicking’). These include the material vibrations of the signature low-pitched auditory frequencies of Reggae as a bass culture (Johnson 1980), at the loudness of ‘sonic dominance’ (Henriques 2003). Secondly a session propagates the corporeal vibrations of rituals, dance routines, and bass-line ‘riddims’ (Veal 2007). Thirdly it propagates the ethereal vibrations (Henriques 2007b), ‘vibes’ or atmosphere of the sexually charged popular subculture by which the crowd (audience) appreciate each dancehall session as part of the Dancehall scene (Cooper 2004). The paper concludes that thinking though vibrating frequencies makes it easier to appreciate how audiences with no direct or inherited connection with a particular music genre can be energetically infected and affected – to form a sonic diaspora.

Keywords:

• sound system
• bodies
• bass

Notes

1. This paper is derived from my PhD research, Sonic bodies: the skills and performance techniques of the Reggae sound system crew. This is based on observation and in depth interviews with owners, engineers, selectors, MCs, crowd (audience), and followers (dedicated fans) mainly of the Stone Love Movement sound system, in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, all of whom I would like to thank for their time and support.

2. See for example the fanzine account of the clash, http://www.claat.com/article/articleview/1032/1/25/ (accessed 8 February 2006).

3. Contemporary research interest in Reggae and Dancehall as a popular culture has been pioneered by Carolyn Copper who founded the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Cooper's (1993) Noises in the blood and more recently Sound clash (2004) take a literary textual approach to investigate the lyrical content of the music, which has attracted some criticism. Debate has been encouraged and important issues raised in Small axe, a journal focused on Caribbean arts and politics (for example, Scott 2000; see also Scott 2004). The field of study is now being broadened with approaches stemming from social geography and with a new generation of scholars, notably Stanley-Niaah (2004a) and 2004b) and Donna Hope (2006). Further Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2001, 2006) brings some very welcome theoretical rigour with a phenomenologically inspired consideration of the dancehall session and Dancehall fashion. Sound systems have also featured in contemporary research and there is useful descriptive material to be found in Norman Stolzoff (2000) Lloyd Bradley (2000) and the very few studies of the Reggae genre, such as Kwame Dawes’ (1999) monograph. Then there are the more popular guides to the music such as Chang and Wayne (1998) and Barrow and Dalton (1997) and Salewicz et al. (2001), David Katz (2000 and 2003). On the musical front this includes Marshall and Manuel's (2006) journal article, Michael Veal's (2007) monograph devoted to the subject and Chude-Sokei (1997) and Andrew Campbell's (1997) very useful accounts of sound system crew practices in, as well as John Constantinides (2002). The recent documentary film Dub Echoes by Bruno Natal also makes an important contribution to the research field, see http://www.dubechoes.com/ (accessed 23 December 2007).

4. Interview with Mr Winston ‘WeePow’ Powell, 30 July 2002, at Stone Love HQ, Burlington Avenue, Kingston.

5. For many years ‘Daddy Pecking’ sold these records for his shop in West London, see http://www.downbeat-special.co.uk/tributetopecking.html, (accessed 15 April 2008).

6. See http://sunsite.queensu.ca/memorypalace/parlour/Small02/ (accessed 19 September 2005).

7. Moreover, Small has a philosophical debt to Merleau-Ponty's (1962) phenomenology in two respects. The idea of musicking involves the kind of immersion in the phenomenon for which the being-in-the-world, or dasein, of phenomenology is named. Furthermore, musicking has a helpful emphasis on action and the relationship between the agent and the world, where he describes the intimacies and intensities of this relationship as a chiasm or intertwining (Merleau-Ponty 1968), or a doing-in-the-world, to gloss Merleau-Ponty's term.

8. Describing this apparatus of the sound system session, that is, how it propagates vibrations, is one of the subjects of ongoing research.

9. For this reason, many domestic music systems only need a single bass speaker, but retain stereo for the mid and top.

10. I would like to acknowledge the impetus to reconsider this idea of bass culture as being Linton Kwesi Johnson and Paul Gilroy's talk at Goldsmiths Centre for Arts and Learning, African consciousness, Reggae and the diaspora, 20 November 2007.

11. Interview with Dennis Rowe, Burgess Park, London, October 2005.

12. Ellision's appreciation of music, Jazz, and technology has been comparatively well documented. See Weheliye (2005) and Maxwell (2004).

13. Visit http://www.hyperdub.com/. The low end theory was also the title of A Tribe Called Quest's 1991 album.

14. Indeed, Roads (2002) develops theory of musical sounds based on granules.

15. The French classical composer Claude Debussy is said to have made a similar such discover of new tonal and harmonic qualities on hearing a Javanese Gamelan ensemble at the Paris Exposition of 1889.

16. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/sound/timbre.html (accessed 15 April 2008).

17. Personal communication while he was composing some of the music tracks for my film feature Babymother.

18. Listening on ipods provides an example of the importance of such locating and scheduling. The phenomenon of flash mob raves in the UK and USA evidences the appetite for such a shared social listening enviroment, where this is juxtaposed with private hearing. For these events ipod listeners arrange to meet at a particular public venue, such as a railway station, in order to dance together – but without anyone necessarily knowing what music others are listening to. Visit for example, http://www.geocities.com/londonmobs/

19. See note 1, above.

20. The metal coil of a ‘slinky’ toy provides a model of compression waves: when a section of the coil is compressed, and then released, the intensity of a compression wave travels along its length. These compression waves are distinct and different from both the transverse of the electromagnetic spectrum, which in the case of light waves require no medium, as well as from the flow of objects suspended in a medium, as with silt particles in a river, or the distribution of commercial products.

21. It also provided Thomas Kuhn's (1962) with his metaphor for now widely accepted concept of paradigm shifts in science.

22. Johnson (1980).

23. Within Europe musical and social issues are framed in the relationship between melody and harmony, instrumentalised in classical antiquity in the tension between lyre and flute. The several-stringed lyre was Apollo's choice representing social harmony, that for Bacchus, the satyrs or Pan, was the flute or pipe, capable only of a single melodic line, and therefore considered as a disruptive influence (Connor 2001). Titian's Flaying of Marsyas, a satyr, shows graphically who was victorious.

24. As I was informed by choreographer L'Antoinette Oshu Ide Stines.

25. Another approach that have attempted to forge a relationship between Jamaican research material and European philosophical traditions of enquiry is Huon Wardle's An ethnography of cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000), where he describes the inner-city dwellers as acting out the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

26. The importance of vibrations can also be located a broader research tradition that includes the Gestalt school of psychology from which Kurt Lewin (1952) developed his field theory and Fritz Heider (1926) his concept of the connective tissue of a medium; the pressures and intensities that animate Deleuze and Guattari (1988) concepts of the Body without Organs and the refrain; Michel Serres’ (1982) concept of milieux as that which is always in medias res, in the middle of things; current work on social and emotional contagion (see Hatfield et al. 1994) such as ripple effects, copy-cat behaviour, word of mouth and Web.2 social networking and the transmission of affect (Brennan 2004).

27. This idea of ‘memes’ has more recently been developed by Blakemore (1999) and Dennett (2007).

28. It could be added that this is coming at a time when, as a result of these global trends Britain, for example, is going through what has been described as a crisis of identity.