Carolyn Cooper | Dancehall Grammy long overdue

The US National Recording Academy of Arts & Sciences (NARAS) needs to wheel and come again. NARAS, host of the Grammys, should acknowledge the fact that reggae and dancehall are distinct genres. It just doesn’t make sense for reggae and dancehall artistes to be competing in a single category called ‘Reggae’. Of course, Jamaicans have no control over the decisions made by NARAS. But we can certainly make a case for divorcing reggae and dancehall.

NARAS has a long history of flexing to suit the needs of the music industry. The Academy was founded in 1957 almost by accident. It all started with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The Hollywood Walk of Fame website reports that the president of the Chamber in 1953 was E.M. Stuart who had the idea to create the star-studded walkway. His vision was to “maintain the glory of a community whose name means glamour and excitement in the four corners of the world”.

Honorees were to be selected in the four categories of the entertainment industry: film, television, music and radio. But there was a problem with the requirement for nomination of the music honorees. They needed to have sold at least one million records or 250,000 albums. The music committee quickly recognised that many recording artistes who should be honoured would not fit the bill. And that’s how NARAS was created to develop an award specifically for the music industry.

That award was called the Gramophone, which was soon shortened to Grammy. The first Grammys were awarded in 1959. Believe it or not, the winner of Best Country and Western Performance was a white American folk and pop group from California who called themselves The Kingston Trio. According to the book, The Kingston Trio On Record, “The name, a reference to Kingston, Jamaica, was meant to evoke calypso music, which was popular then.”

From the inception of the Grammys, there were American imposters masquerading as Jamaicans. Well, that’s certainly what hardcore Jamaican nationalists would argue. SOJA’s winning of this year’s Reggae Grammy seemed to give them ammunition. Claiming the name of Jah was bad enough: Soldiers of Jah Army. The Grammy was the ultimate insult. I argued against narrow-mindedness in my column last week, ‘Jamaicans Do Not Own Reggae’. There was a flood of hostile responses on social media. One man admitted he hadn’t even read the column. The headline alone vexed him.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The distinction between creating and owning reggae was lost on many angry readers. To clarify, I made the comparison with children and parents. Children cannot be owned. They are independent of their parents who ‘created’ them. Similarly, reggae has a life of its own and is at large across the globe. Individual reggae songwriters and enginicians, for example, do own the intellectual property in their creative work. But Jamaicans don’t own the genre reggae. We like to boast about how our culture has gone to di world. But we want to jealously hug it up as exclusively ours.

Perhaps, even the members of The Kingston Trio were paying us a compliment by taking the name of our capital city. They must have realised that nobody in their right mind would believe they were actually from Kingston. But they knew where top-class music originated. It didn’t seem to matter that their hit song Tom Dooley was not calypso. It was a version of a famous folk song from North Carolina about an innocent man who was hanged for the murder of a woman. The song reminded me of Don Drummond who murdered his lover Anita ‘Margarita’ Mahfood. The circumstances were not the same but the crime of passion was similar. Songs of lament often cross borders.

I did get positive responses to the column, for example, from Dr Mike Hajimichael, head of the Department of Communications at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. He’s also Haji Mike The Outernationalist, a selector on Nice Up radio. Dr Hajimichael has written a book on Bob Marley and Media – Representation and Audiences, which will be published next year. He sent this email: “I feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about Reggae. Too many people want to declare themselves as more authentic, true to the game, original, chosen disciples etc etc.

“There is also a sense of machismo to all this as most of the people who bleat on about originality are often male and they have issues of insecurity. I even encounter them locally where people with sound systems declare themselves authentic because they only play vinyl and I am some kind of Judas because I play say an mp3. And it is so sad that it gets this petty. The point with any kind of music is to play it so it can be heard and, in the process, to keep forwarding the Reggae vibe, wherever it may be.

“Lately I have been linking up with dub artistes in Ukraine. It’s the least we can do, to just support their music works in these harshest of times. There’s some interesting stuff being made there. Please listen to Plusstepper and Mila Mazur – who has such a graceful voice: https://bit.ly/3rXDc7Z

‘IS JUST REALITY’

Over the last six decades, the number of Grammy awards has gone up and down from the original 28 to over 100. The success of The Kingston Trio’s single Tom Dooley forced NARAS to immediately establish another category: Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording. In 1984, Best Reggae Album was added. Black Uhuru was the first to win, followed by Jimmy Cliff, Steel Pulse, Peter Tosh, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers and Bunny Wailer.

Then came Shabba Ranks in 1992. His album, As Raw As Ever, signified that dancehall had arrived. It definitely wasn’t reggae. Dancehall is now an established genre five decades after its emergence and three decades after Shabba’s Grammy. Like reggae, dancehall is global. It’s time for NARAS to establish dancehall as an independent category. To quote Shabba, “Is just reality.”

- Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a teacher of English language and literature and a specialist on culture and development. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.