Amina Blackwood Meeks
WELL, SEE it dere now. Corporate giants threaten to withdraw support from the music industry. This, according to one source quoted in The Gleaner of Saturday, October 2, 2004, in response to 'recent concerns about the tone and content of some the music.'
Well, I don't exactly know how to compute recent. I do know that while I lived in the Eastern Caribbean I was appalled at the calibre of performers, both in content and form who kept pouring into the region, and still do, billed as 'the hottest thing to come out of Jamaica.'
The tragedy of that is that there is an entire generation right here in the Caribbean, not to mention around the world, who have no idea of the kind of music that once made Jamaica proud, that walked Bob Marley into the millennium dome, and which some Jamaican musicians still create, but nobaddi naw pay fah.
Maybe one Bob Marley is all we can take, one Louise Bennett, one Peter Tosh enough talk of equal rights and justice!
BLATANT RACISM
I know that on one of my visits to Jamaica in the summer of 1993, I was shaken by the blatant racism, the violence against women, the glorification of classism I saw on morning television in an extremely well-made music video featuring a rising, now fully risen Jamaican star.
I wrote in my journal, 'I have seen the devil. He invaded my bedroom via local television this morning'. I know the pre-Bushian shock and awe I experienced when I finally returned to live in Jamaica in 1997, at the kind of offerings from the music industry, since not all of it can be called music, that received airplay.
The fact that it received airplay at all hours of the day and night is a separate consideration. There were few station managers, producers or whoever happened to be on duty who did not hear from me whenever I heard something racist, sexist or violent.
I know I am not unique in this. Other individuals have been speaking and writing on the issue. Women's Media Watch has certainly been doing the battle for more than 16 years.
We seem, however, to delight in living on the brink, taking too little action too late. It matters not whether it is about the music, the crime and violence, squatting, people living on dangerous gully banks, constructing buildings without and before requisite approvals or the so-called deterioration in values and attitudes.
The central lesson in all of them seems to be that if you refuse or are incapable of regulating self, you are bound to be regulated by others. Even if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
Very often, as is the case with the music, deregulation comes via demonetisation. Money talks and although I don't quite understand what it is saying, since me an it don't have frequent or lengthy conversations, it does provide an opportunity to try to figure out what exactly it is saying.
WHO IS IN CHARGE
Firstly, who controls the music industry? Who a de owna fe de business? The musicians, the producers, the writers or the performers? Few of them stage shows which are not 'sponsored'.
Few of the sponsors lack significant international Connections with a big C, Big See, Eye Fe Open. Seen? So it might be okay when a only we wan annedda we nyam up. When we start to mash adda people carn an teck it meck asham, de story bump up, like me an Joan Andrea Hutchinson head. From day one, Man-In-De-Street, re-christen a December Musical Offering as Fling. And every year more tings fling, more performers clash, more patrons dash and more of all and sundry join in the fray.
So what if it happens at fling or the greatest reggae festival in the world? That would be after the gate done receive what it is to receive, right? And there is a loyal clientele that will still come back the following year and bring their friends.
Sting we a sting and a shock we a shock Sponsorships still come, along with couple muted apologies and couple promises to be more stringent, most of them including financial penalties. Money talking again. Well if you working for $1million per show you can more than afford to answer $5,000 in a courthouse, right? You know dance flop if you are not the headliner on the event that features your genre of 'music'.
Furthermore, who can stop you if you just hand de microphone to your entourage of unlimited, unnamed numbers an nuh emcee, promoter, producer, sponsor, patron can touch a button till de whole a dem buss, seen? You are a star, 'cebrelity', you run tings. Moving right along.
It's not really about the misbehaviour, the indiscipline, the deteriorating attitudes and values in the society mirrored in and sometimes given new life in the music industry it's just all about the money. And maybe that is the full story a society that worships at the shrine of materialism. Money is no object and from you have money, no one can object to you.
'Giants', (read people with money) in the public and private sectors still use 'giant' entertainers to endorse this or that message or product as soon as they get a 'hype' no matter what values they promote, what attitudes they have to our own local sensibilities, we can always withdraw them when they go too far. Next!
WANTING TO BE SMADDY
Nuff a dem hungry fe money and popularity, that elusive sense of 'smadditisation'. Besides, they're only helping us to sell, we really don't have tea with our sales staff, they don't come to our dinner parties; heavens they would not know which silverware to use for what. Punchinella little fella! None of that matters, though. Dem still have dem independence awards, excellence awards, heritage week awards, awards fe heng up round den neck into de national colours and we kean teck dat back. Ah baay! Sometimes we pay dear for high company. Sometimes we hop on the wrong train, knowing full well it is the wrong train, but money gives us the confidence that anytime we choose we can hop off. Is so it go.
What about the moral authority to lead or to regulate? Where do we stand on price gouging, for example? Is it okay within the same corporate world that seeks to clean up the music? Is it okay to allow the exigencies of the free market to determine who eats and who starves even as we seek to lock down the market on the kind of music that's made accessible? What, free market nuh work fe de music?
It certainly has not worked for women who have been bawling out about the connection between the way this society undervalues, exploits and brutalises its women and children.
BLEACHING
It has not worked for black people who turn in desperation to dangerous bleaching products because independent Jamaica has taught them that nutten naw gwaan fe black people, regardless of where dem live or which school dem go to, without unconventional assistance.
Ask Hyacinth Bennett. And it does not work for decent, hard-working, honest Jamaicans who live and die unknown and who see picture of areas leaders on the front page of newspapers and magazines making statements to the press, and who listen to criminals on radio and television talk-shows discussing the nature and implications of their criminality, their refusal to yield turf while giants in the public and private sectors behave as if they have just made a scientific discovery that will pay all our international debts and leave us in unending prosperity. An police still sey dem wanted.
So, what would be happening now, if the entertainers were financially independent? Suppose they were the ones with the international connections to continue to be up in our faces with that which we say we do not like? Hell, the late Lloyd Richardson informed us that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, many of us didn't like it but the ones with real power made us stuff it, anyway. What mechanisms need to be in place for regulating self towards positive growth locally, respect and pride internationally?
COLLECTIVE INTERESTS
Where is the sense of what is in our collective interests from the day we are born to the way we pursue our chosen vocation? How is this sense engendered, discussed, shared, developed, sustained? How do we know when we have it and when it is under threat?
Ah tink ah hear Steel Pulse asking 'Ah who responsible'? On what kinds of principles are we building this rock? Ah who responsible for the way those principles manifest at any point in time? Who really are the star makers in this kingdom of laissez faire? And what makes it fair or right?
From the writer, to the performer, the producer, the marketing specialist, the promoter, the station manager, the disc jockey, the patron, the sponsor, the ideological defendants of this or that trend, ah who have the sense of responsibility and the moral authority fe tap i before it gets out of hand?
Yep! I think I hear Money talking. Well it might be about time but what is it saying exactly? And what will it be next time? I would like it to be about cleaning up all aspects of our entire being, simultaneously, so that we worry less about what is reflected in the music.
