Kristen Gyles | The dancehall chokehold

A number of prominent dancehall artistes are currently serving prison time for gun-related crimes. One dancehall producer was recently charged in connection with a triple murder in St. James, and, at around the same time, a prominent trap dancehall artiste was also banned from performing at public events in Guyana after a shooting started during one of his performances in the country.

You know what they say – one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and one country’s embarrassment is the pride of another.

Dancehall artiste Skeng performed at the Baderation concert in Guyana last month. The concert came to a premature end when some attendees who were apparently intoxicated with gun lyrics started firing gunshots. To put things in perspective, at the time of the shooting, Skeng would have been ‘singing’ something along the lines of “rinse out every ting outta di glock, hollow-point dat a lodge up inna bwoy head back”. This is one line from the song Protocol which he was performing when the shooting started.

Following the incident, Guyana’s minister of home affairs, Robeson Benn, announced that going forward, neither Skeng nor any other artiste with a record of promoting vulgar and lawless behaviour, such as was displayed on the night of the concert, will be allowed to perform at public events in Guyana.

In response to the minister’s declaration, Skeng’s management team defended him by saying he does not condone violence and explained that his music is only an expression of art. Well, that joke is only funny in some countries. In other countries, messages that promote certain deviant and violent behaviours, whether they are sung, chanted, hummed or whistled are considered noise pollution and a danger to the minds of the country’s unsuspecting children. This is so, whether you refer to it as art or not. On the bright side for many artistes, these ‘art’ pieces will always have an applauding audience here in Jamaica where some politicians use ‘bad man’ tunes to promote themselves when convenient and where some citizens are beholden to artistes who boast about how they kill grannies.

It seems dancehall has a real chokehold on some of the country’s leaders. It would really be good if the current crop of politicians could state the facts as we all see them and stop going around and around the mulberry bush in addressing the state of the music Jamaica is producing and the impact it is having.

Mixed messages are one hell of a thing. One minute, some politicians are condemning the violent lyrical content of the music that is freely played in public passenger vehicles and in other public spaces. The next minute, the nation is wrapped up in the Jamaica general election sound clash, where said politicians are using dub plates from the same ‘bad man’ artistes we all thought they had condemned.

With that kind of approach, there is no reason for any artiste to think it matters one way or another what music they produce. They know they will get support where it really matters, either way. When our leaders talk, it would be good to know they mean what they are saying and not just espousing an idea for the popularity of it.

Dancehall artistes seem to be pretty few in number and yet so many of the few have faced arrest at some point or another over their alleged involvement in some crime or another – crimes just like the ones they so aptly describe in their music.

Still, the social scientists say the music isn’t influencing anybody. It’s only mirroring the culture of the society. That is, the culture that mushroomed from out of the ground one day without trigger and has been here ever since.

PROBLEMATIC AND HARMFUL

Outside of a vested monetary interest in the promulgation of dancehall culture, there shouldn’t be a difficulty in seeing that the lyrical content of much of modern dancehall is problematic and harmful.

The entertainment sector repetitively complains about the lack of support and attention it gets from the government and the wider society, but perhaps one of the greatest reasons for the lack of enthusiasm (where there is lack) is the fact that the general quality of dancehall music has worsened. Much of dancehall music is no longer child-friendly and the artiste themselves have succeeded in branding themselves as criminals.

I don’t know what the Jamaica Festival Song Competition entries for this year sound like, but what is clear is that the country has undergone a drastic shift in its taste in music. Clean love songs and songs about loyalty, nationalism and all that outdated stuff, aren’t getting the ratings. Instead, the most popular songs feature artistes gloating about all the money they spend after a hard day’s work of ‘chopping the line’.

It is sad that the most popular artistes are the ones we are ashamed of - you know, the ones being banned from other countries and being arrested in connection with murders. That says something. What is needed is a culture shift.

I’m not sure how easy it will be to legislate against loud and lewd music in public spaces, since we’ll first have to agree on what is loud and what is lewd. It’s a dead-end kind of project that may only end up going down in history as a waste of time. A better approach might be to combat the influence of these harmful messages by at least refusing to endorse the music that contains them. The political class will have to lead the charge, but how many will risk the votes?

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.