Rastafari is an Afro-Jamaican religious and social movement, which has since the 1970s spread outside of the Caribbean mainly through reggae music. This paper contributes to the academic discussion on the localization processes of Rastafari and reggae with an ethnographic account from the Nordic context, asking how Finnish reggae artists with Rastafarian conviction mobilize this identification in their performance. The paper focuses on one prominent Finnish reggae sound system group, Intergalaktik Sound.The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition. In this field, Intergalaktik Sound attempts to preserve what they consider to be the traditional Jamaican form of reggae sound system performance. For the Intergalaktik Sound vocalists, this specific form of performance becomes an enchanted space within a secular Finnish society, where otherwise marginal Rastafarian convictions can be acted out in public. The author connects the aesthetic of this performance to the Jamaican dub-music tradition, and to the concept of a ‘natural life’, which is a central spiritual concept for many Finnish Rastafarians. The article concludes that these sound system performances constitute a polycentric site where events can be experienced and articulated simultaneously as religious and secular by different individuals in the same space.
The political role of popular music has been nowhere as evident as in South Africa, where urban music genres were essential for the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) in building a popular opposition against the apartheid government. Later, urban music styles were also a way to envision the "African Renaissance", which Deputy President and future President Thabo Mbeki proclaimed as the guiding political slogan of the independent nation four years after the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1996. Musicians imagined in their sound and lyrics what this new African nationalism might mean in the genres of hip-hop and kwaito (Becker & Nceba 2008; Coplain 2001; Allen 2004). However, by the time that the icon of the South African independence struggle, President Nelson Mandela, passed away on the 5th of December in 2013, the South African state had arrived to a chronic legitimacy crisis. The general optimistic mood of the post-independence years had faded, as the ruling party and a former anti-apartheid resistance organization with roots in African socialism, African National Congress (ANC), remained in power with yet another landslide victory, despite the fact that the party had experienced one corruption scandal after another. The ANC has been widely criticized across the national media and it has lost much of its former credibility as the self-proclaimed torchbearer of the independence struggle, but no formidable political alternatives are in sight after the elections.
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