Jamaican rebel music

Abstract

Sometimes I cry when I see my people and ooe pure pain and poverty we black people suffering so and yet I know history will show how long we suffer so [1] Leroy Sibbles

Grime: Criminal subculture or public counterculture? A critical investigation into the criminalization of Black musical subcultures in the UK

“…Distinguishing itself from its stylistic predecessor, UK garage, which glamorized 'champagne and cars' (Dizzee Rascal, 'Showtime'), grime set out to portray the gritty, 'grim(e)y' reality of life in London's council estates in an almost ethnographic fashion (Barron, 2013;Bramwell, 2015aBramwell, , 2015bIlan, 2012). Instead of just being yet another mutation of previous Black British music genres, though it certainly evolved from them, grime made its mark on the capital's music scene by drawing its strength from its uncompromising attitude towards creating and disseminating music (mixtapes/grimetapes, DVDs, pirate radio shows, online blogs, self-released albums) and its fearless musical and lyrical content that sounds as rough as it is intended to; earning its stripes as a 21st century 'rebel music', as dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (1976) put it in his description of Jamaican roots reggae music. Grime's defiant pose becomes particularly audible in its lyrical performance (fast, urgent delivery), music production innovations (use of unusual software), ethos (DIY) and context (urban poverty, 'inner city' life), thereby creating a 'community' (Hancox, 2013: 1) which reflects the 'endless pressure' (Pryce, 1979) of living in stultifying urban environments that are shaped by a lack of opportunities and negative experiences of policing (Ilan, 2012: 42).…”

Fanon and Améry

“…As far as Britain is concerned, some years ago, the radical poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (1975Johnson ( , 1976) articulated a sharply Fanonian analysis of the 'bran new breed of blacks' that he had observed creating a sometimes nihilistic, lumpen vanguard in the political battles which opposed 'black youth' to the police. In Johnson's epochal narration of that historic situation, implosive, fratricidal violence born from the habitual oppression of this 'second generation' would be only an initial phase in their political becoming.…”

TheAbeng’s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

“… 1 1 The Jamaican dub‐poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1976 article “Jamaican rebel music” is instructive here. In assessing Jamaican popular music as expressive of the historical and contemporaneous suffering, pain, and violence faced by Jamaican sufferers he also sees in that same cultural production a strength and will to resist that characterises the suffer as a political subjectivity.…”

“…For Johnson, the “rebel” music of the Jamaican 1970s was the self‐authored expression of the sufferer and was the latest instantiation of deeper histories of Black creative expression in Jamaica. The Jamaican sufferer as an historical and political subject lives “a rebel existence” (Johnson 1976:399), living in spite of and determined to overcome the many hardships they face.…”