UWI Professor Laments Lack Of “Critical” Acclaim Of Dancehall Sound Systems
Culture and development specialist Professor Carolyn Cooper is again lamenting the fact that more than 70 years after Jamaicans from Kingston’s inner-city invented the sound system the “revolutionary art form” has still has not received “the critical acclaim which it deserves” in its home country.
The University of the West Indies professor, who is a linguistics lecturer and the author of Sound Clash: Jamaica Dancehall Culture at Large, was writing against the background of the University of London’s Goldsmiths College Seventh Sound System Outernational (SSO) conference, which is to run online from July 12 to 16.
Professor Cooper who is author of the books, Sound Clash: Jamaica Dancehall Culture at Large and Noises in the Blood, noted in her weekly column in The Sunday Gleaner that, among other things, that people who ascribe onto themselves “elite” status, continue to disparage sound systems as being unworthy of academic or national respect, but that the Southeast London-based Goldsmith College has established its credentials as a focal point for sound system scholarship.
“If The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica had taken the initiative to establish an academic programme on sound systems, there would have been such a hue and cry about the waste of resources on ‘foolishness’,” Professor Cooper wrote.
“The Jamaican elite routinely dismiss sound systems as pure noise. They do not calculate the contribution that the multilayered culture of the sound system makes to the Jamaican economy. Nor do they understand the psychological and social benefits of the sound system as a way of building community,” she added.
Professor Cooper, who is a teacher of English language and literature said that even the global reach of sound system culture usually goes unacknowledged in Jamaica, even though “there are more sound systems in operation around the world than ever before” including more women’s sound systems, more aficionados, more practitioners and more interest across different countries around the globe.
“Sound systems are treated with such contempt that some of us simply cannot understand how this ‘buguyaga’ sound could possibly appeal to audiences across the world,” she said.
“Sound System Outernational has hosted six academic conferences which demonstrate just how ‘big an broad’ Jamaican popular culture is,” she wrote, noting that the theme of the first conference in 2016 was ‘Sonic Entanglements: Jamaica, Europe and Brazil’,” Professor Cooper added.
This week’s Sound System Outernational conference, will be held under the theme ‘Sound Systems At the Crossroads’, and will assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sector.
The conference which was first held in 2015, in Southeast London, the historic centre of the capital’s sound system culture, launched what Professor Cooper describes as an innovative research project led by Professor Julian Henriques and which is “an ongoing initiative of practitioners and researchers dedicated to recognising, stimulating and supporting sound system culture worldwide”.
Professor Cooper will be presenting a paper at this year’s conference which will zone in on what has been described as the COVID-19 lockdown’s “devastating consequences” which has “silenced the streets worldwide, freezing sound system activities and depriving practitioners and the wider community of their primary source of income”.
In her Sound Clash book, Professor Cooper who was one of the chief architects of the Reggae Studies Unit at the UWI Mona Campus in Kingston, which he directed for 15 years, had explored the internationalization of the Dancehall music genre, in what has been described by critics as a “definitive study of dancehall culture”.
The 10-chapter book, covers a myriad of topics including religion, music, gender roles and sexuality drawing from a wide repertoire of dancehall artistes and their musical archives.
In its review of Cooper’s publication, Volume! the French journal of popular music studies, noted that Cooper emphasizes the importance of understanding Jamaican Dancehall culture, which has been “frowned upon” privileged people especially “those whose area code remains well within Kingston’s so-called Golden Triangle” which spans Hope Road, Trafalgar Road, Old Hope Road and stops at Liguanea.
Volume! also noted that “the ever present Eurocentrism at play in the writings and arguments of those privileged individuals in their attempts to construct and deconstruct Dancehall culture”, was also trashed by Cooper.