Jamaican reggae has sprung a nasty little offshoot called, by its detractors, "murder music". It has been allowed to flourish in a blind spot of white middle-class liberalism. And it has taken gays, who are the prime targets of this new breed of Jamaican dancehall music (reggae with a rock bass beat), to blow the whistle.
By Luke SlatteryMuch of the focus of late has fallen on Jamaican reggae star Beenie Man, whose lyrics, in patois, are an incitement to violence. Chants Beenie Man: "Hang chi chi gal [lesbians] wid a long piece of rope", and "Tek a bazooka and kill batty-f---er [gay men]." Gay groups in Europe and the US, loudly decrying the emergence of this murder music, are beginning to get some airtime and some results: cancellation of dancehall gigs on both sides of the Atlantic -- MTV last week cancelled Beenie Man's appearance on one of its live video awards shows -- and withdrawal of big-name sponsors such as Puma.
Beenie Man, whose new album was released in Australia on August 23, is one of several Jamaican reggae-style dancehall performers cut from the same cloth. Misogynistic, gun worshipping and homophobic, they posture as pop outlaws. Here is fellow Jamaican reggae star Bounty Killer's Mr Wanna Be: "Hear this likkle punk guh sing battyman concept/To kill dis yah fool, to me dat is no stress/Murder dem fast just like a Federal Express." Or: "Hear this little punk who sings a queer song/To kill this fool, to me that is no stress/Murder him fast, like Federal Express."
American rap and hip-hop has been glamorising guns, glorifying violence and dissing gays for more than a decade. As audiences have become desensitised, hate music has become almost normalised. Endorsing gun violence has done Snoop Dogg, who recently played the supercool crime boss Huggy Bear in the retro comedy Starsky&Hutch, no harm at all.
The protocols of multiculturalism have always made this a delicate issue for liberals who are pro free speech yet anti-violence, respectful of human rights and sensitive to minority rights. It has taken another minority group, unimpeded by multicultural decorum and emboldened by fear, to tell it like it is: hence the label murder music. Amnesty International has since taken up the cudgels to campaign against homophobia in Jamaica.
A press release from the gay rights group Outrage recently sounded the alarm. "We urge gay and human rights activists across Europe to monitor the black and music press to determine when and where these singers are performing. Their concerts should be cancelled on the grounds that they incite the murder of gays and lesbians, and that their performances may lead to public disorder and to homophobic hate crimes."
There are a couple of things that can be said in the defence of Beenie Man, Bounty Killer and their ilk. The first is that their lyrics are delivered with an underlying tone of stagey humour (a joke that's obviously been lost on the gay community); the second is that this type of music is "ghetto-centric". It speaks of, and to, a racially defined subculture.
Lloyd Bradley, in his pop history Reggae, the Story of Jamaican Music, concedes that much of the content of this music -- misogyny, homophobia, gun glorification -- is cause for concern. He is also inclined to dissolve any moral disquiet by celebrating reggae and its offshoots as indigenous cultural expressions.
"Modern Jamaican music is people's music," he writes. "It has been since ska usurped American R&B, and it has remained that way to such a degree it's probably the last, still-evolving, genuine folk music -- or at least it's the one with the highest profile." A young and geeky Beenie Man explains in an interview for the book how his first experience on stage fused his music to his community. "I was five years old, and being a kid in the dancehall, I've got lots of love from the people ... The people really appreciate me and the applause was great, greater than even anybody else who was there. They treat me as theirs straight away, and it give me the courage and the encouragement to pursue a career." Beenie Man is, then, simply feeding back to his community its own home-grown prejudices.
Bradley explains how reggae's international success in the 1970s through performers such as Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff created, ironically, the impetus for the more insular and uncompromising style of reggae that we're seeing now. After its international boom years, "reggae creativity withdrew to downtown Kingston and emerged in a form that root reggae's wider, somewhat hippified audience couldn't begin to come to grips with. Then when they did they were more than likely offended."
Instead of "No woman no cry", we now have: "Bun a fire pon a kuh pon mister fagoty" [burn the queer]. But is the defence of "indigenous expression" legitimate? Short answer: No. To comprehend the underlying sociology of murder music is no reason to pardon it. There may be historical and social conditions underpinning the vicious side of black machismo, but that should neither mollify liberal unease nor silence humanitarian opposition.
Homophobia is deeply entrenched in Jamaican machismo culture. Its violent expression received worldwide attention when the country's most prominent gay activist, Brian Williamson, was murdered at his home in June. Shortly before his death 30,000 people had crammed a concert hall on the island to hear a band sing: "Kill dem battyboys haffi dead, gun shots pond 'em ... who want to see demn dead put up his hand". Kingston police say they believe the murder was a robbery gone wrong -- even though the victim's throat was slashed and his body mutilated. Gay activists and human rights groups put Williamson's murder down, instead, to a perverse and pervasive climate of sexual hatred. Indeed, Williamson had written to the Jamaica Observer explaining that Jamaican homosexuals were seen as "the devil's own children", shunned, ignored, "or beaten to death by our fellow citizens".
Black music obviously has a special place in the history of popular music, as the bearer of the blues and its mutation into soul, R&B and rock. Reggae, which inherited that spirit, became a powerful voice of social discontent and an entrancing music of protest.
One of the most dispiriting things about the music of dancehall artists such as Beenie Man is its alliance with the viciousness, directed at both gay men and women, within in its own society. The music of a people oppressed by white rule has become a music tainted with black-on-black hatred. To hear this music now is to catch the sad strains of cultural corruption.
