by Wayne Marshall
Although
hip-hop’s dominant narrative typically begins with the introduction of
Jamaican sound-system techniques and technologies into the South Bronx, the Caribbean
presence in hip-hop tends to recede into absence after this originary moment.1 Despite an increasing infusion of reggae
into hip-hop over the last three decades, a hybridization reflecting New
York’s increasingly foreign-born black population, hip-hop histories
routinely downplay such “outside” influence. Narrative strategies that seek to validate
African American aesthetics against the denigration of mass media
representations have thus obscured a more nuanced account of hip-hop’s
social character, with far-reaching implications for our understanding of
such notions as race, ethnicity, and nation.
The failure to acknowledge Jamaica’s place in the hip-hop
imagination overlooks the context-specific identification practices through
which many performers have expressed the predicament of being both West
Indian and black in New York. Such an oversight, in effect, maintains
a discursive complicity with traditional, essentialized notions of race.2
This omission also fails to take note of important shifts
in the politics and the very boundaries of blackness. If we listen more
closely to the intersections between hip-hop and reggae—for instance,
at moments when New York-based performers adopt or conceal a Jamaican
accent—the contingent, dynamic character of race comes into stark
relief. By paying attention to the shifting significations over time of
Jamaicanness in New York, we can consider the ways in which historical
context, social demographics, and cultural politics inflect conceptions of
race and ethnicity. When Jamaican-born Kool Herc (aka Clive Campbell) loses
his accent in the early 1970s, KRS-One employs one in the mid-1980s, and Mos
Def goes “bilingual” in the late 1990s, music’s powerful
ability to mediate concepts such as race and ethnicity comes to the fore,
reflecting as well as challenging dominant and often stereotypical
representations. This article surveys the Jamaican-accented history of
hip-hop, focusing on moments where the performance of Jamaicanness belies
more stable conceptions of race and ethnicity.
Far from the aura of quasi-exotic cool that it carries
today, Jamaicanness in the Bronx in the 1970s carried such a stigma that some
young immigrants found it better to conceal their West Indian heritage. Kool
Herc recounts the dangers of such an outsider identity: “At that time
[the early 1970s], being Jamaican wasn’t fashionable. Bob Marley
didn’t come through yet to make it more fashionable, to even give a
chance for people to listen to our music. . . . I remember one time a guy
said, ‘Clive, man, don’t walk down that way cause they throwing
Jamaicans in garbage cans.’”3 Even before moving to the United States as a
teenager, Herc practiced an American accent by singing along to his
father’s record collection, which included records by Nina Simone, Nat
King Cole, and country singer Jim Reeves. He continued to mold his voice upon
moving to the Bronx in 1967, tuning to white rock and soul disc jockeys such
as Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack, and absorbing the cadences of Smokey
Robinson, the Temptations, and James Brown at house parties. Adjusting his
accent so as to be intelligible to classmates, by the time he reached high
school some of Herc’s Jamaican friends didn’t even know he was
Jamaican.4 This chameleonic process
extended to his performance practice, as he translated Jamaican soundsystem
techniques for his funk-oriented Bronx peers. No fool when it came to playing
to an audience, Herc selected “break” records—the hard funk
of James Brown, Dennis Coffey, the Isley Brothers, Michael Viner’s
Incredible Bongo Band—rather than reggae tunes, to move the crowd. At
that time in New York, Jamaican music was, as Orlando Patterson put it, still
“jungle music” to the ears of most African Americans, many of
whom, as first- or second-generation rural migrants from the South, still
sought to distance themselves from a “country” past.5
Although the number of West Indian residents grew
steadily in New York during the 1970s, due in part to British
anti-immigration acts passed in the 1960s and the U.S. 1965 Immigration Act,
which abolished national origins as the basis for immigration legislation, a
critical mass had not yet crystallized so that borough culture could reflect
such “foreign” infusions or so that normative blackness could
include Anglo-Caribbean or even Latin Caribbean versions. Perhaps it was
clear to recent immigrants like Herc that the best option for an individual
seeking to navigate this new world smoothly was to, in a sense, become
“black” (which is to say, African American) in walk, talk, and
outward style. Of course, Clive Campbell had always been black. But to be
Jamaican and black in New York in the 1970s signified something else,
something different and somehow incompatible with American blackness.
Identity in this case was hard-won—at least among a
prevailingly African American peer group. Although Campbell certainly
reconciled such opposing identifications for himself when projecting a public
persona, in particular through musical performance, he found that the Bronx’s
social pressures called for a particular type of assimilation. Herc’s
adopted and adapted accent illustrates the contours of racialized
subjectivities at this time in New York. It is remarkable that Jamaicanness
and blackness were at odds at this point only because they seem so easily
reconciled today, but that shift would take place over the next three decades
in a circular pattern of demographic change and mass media representation.
Hip-hop, despite the way that its narrative restricts its Caribbean roots,
would constitute one of the major media outlets for these changing
perceptions of the difference and distance between African Americans and
various black others.
As Boogie Down Productions’ Criminal Minded
(1987) demonstrates, blackness in the Bronx could be tied to Jamaicanness
unproblematically by the late 1980s. KRS-One foregrounds his West Indian
heritage on what would become, significantly, a seminal hip-hop album.
BDP’s brash, dub-accented production, “ragamuffin”
language, dancehall-cribbed tunes, and glorified violence made an enormous
impression on the hip-hop scene and helped set the template for what would
later be called gangsta rap. It is especially telling that in one of
hip-hop’s most gloried turf wars—the contest between the South
Bronx and Queensbridge over rap’s place of origin, or “of how it
all got started way back when”—KRS-One could so effectively
represent “authentic” hip-hop with a style so heavily-indebted to
reggae and thus so marked by otherness.
Of course, what this demonstrates is that Jamaicanness no longer
carried the same stigmatized sense ofotherness. It had become re-accented, as
when BDP takes a classic reggae bassline and re-imagines it as a stiff,
breakbeat-saddled piano riff, or when KRS-One sings a Billy Joel melody in a
manner that recalls Yellowman’s fondness for ironic quotation. That
BDP’s expression could at once be so Bronx and hip-hop, and yet so
Jamaican and reggae bears witness to the degree to which Jamaican music and
culture had become part of the texture of New York life by the mid-1980s.
Indeed, one might even say that, especially in Brooklyn
and the Bronx, the Jamaican presence had become ubiquitous and, at times, dominant.
This cultural shift is undoubtedly tied to the high rates of migration from
Jamaica to New York during this period. According to sociologist Mary Waters,
“In the 1980s alone, Jamaica sent 213,805 people to the United
States—a full 9% of its total population of 2.5 million people.”6 45% of these immigrants stayed in New York.
And “[b]y 1996, it was estimated that 35.1% of the city’s black
households was headed by a foreign-born person—the vast majority from
the Caribbean.”7 This demographic shift was accompanied
by a powerful cultural visibility projected, on the one hand, through reggae
soundsystem culture which filled streets, parks, and clubs with the sounds of
Jamaica, and, on the other, by the rise of the infamous cocaine-running
posses, which quickly came to dominate the drug-trade in New York. Legendary for their ruthlessness and firepower, the posses quickly took
over corners across Brooklyn and the Bronx, and their powerful presence
undoubtedly realigned many people’s sense of what
Jamaicanness—and reggae—could signify. Far from the islanders
that were ridiculed as too “country” a generation before,
Jamaican New Yorkers in the 1980s epitomized a powerful kind of cool in the
dog-eat-dog world of urban America.
It is thus not surprising that KRS-One embraces the
signifiers of Jamaicanness on Criminal Minded, despite that his
personal connection to the Caribbean is through a biological father from
Trinidad who was out of the picture from an early age, having been deported.
Growing up in the Bronx or Brooklyn at this time could forge personal
connections to the Caribbean that go beyond family heritage. Underscoring the
power of this symbolic association, KRS alternately refers to Boogie Down
Productions as the “BDP posse,” an appropriation of the powerful
gang signifier, which itself was, in a fine stroke of irony, a term borrowed
from Hollywood Westerns, which have long been popular in Jamaica. Fittingly,
mainstream media projections of Jamaicanness at this time—from the
dreadlocked alien hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator (1987) to
the vicious, demonic Rastas in Steven Segal’s Marked for Death
(1990)—served to reflect as they informed the stereotyped public perception of Jamaicans: a
“cool and deadly” figuration which would later be reproduced in
hip-hop films such as Hype Williams’s Belly (1998) and in dozens
of hip-hop songs where
“rude bwoy” becomes an accented shorthand for gangsta.
Two years before Criminal Minded, Run DMC hinted
at the degree to which Jamaican sounds had already permeated New York by
collaborating with dancehall star Yellowman on the track “Roots, Rock,
Reggae” (1985), which takes its name from a Bob Marley song. Indeed,
DMC (aka Daryl McDaniels) acknowledges that Yellowman’s music was
already ubiquitous and influential in the hip-hop scene by that point:
“We grew up worshipping Yellowman, loving him, loving all of his records;
what he said, how he sounded, how he looked, he was just cool. The Roxy,
Harlem World, Union Square, Latin Quarter—they were all playing hip-hop
and they were all playing Yellowman.”8 But, revealingly, in comparison to
KRS-One’s seamless incorporation of dancehall style, Run DMC sound
awkward rolling their r’s and clumsily riding a chintzy,
quasi-Caribbean beat. On the other hand, by the early 1990s, Brooklyn-based
groups such as the Fu-Schnickens, Das EFX, Black Moon, and
Smif’n’Wessun were performing in a style that spoke from a kind
of creolized subject position, containing as much patois and ragga-style flow
as more traditional hip-hop stylistic markers, although almost always over
hip-hop beats. Meanwhile, artists such as the Notorious B.I.G., Jeru the
Damaja, Gang Starr, and A Tribe Called
Quest more subtly incorporated West Indian references and slang, and reggae
lyrics and melodies into their borough-accented rap.
Such hybrid expressions demonstrate the degree to which
Jamaicanness and blackness begin to overlap in New York by this point, no
longer appearing as oppositional identifiers. The increasingly audible
integration between what were previously ethnic enclaves refigures blackness
in a more transnational sense, perhaps bringing hip-hop’s expression
more in line with a pan-African articulation of “modern
blackness,” as Deborah Thomas calls it, which Jamaicans in Jamaica had
long been proposing through their own embrace and “selective
appropriation” of African American styles.9 Ironically, once Jamaicanness, as embodied
in reggae musical style, becomes such a common feature of New York-based
hip-hop, it almost recedes in audibility.
One begins to hear a Jamaican accent as a New York accent, or a black accent
or a more general hip-hop accent.
A decade after Criminal Minded, Mos Def
would channel the sounds of Jamaica via the Bronx to make a Brooklyn-based
statement about hip-hop that many listeners would hear as pure hip-hop
classicism—a testament to the deep degree to which, by the late 1900s,
the hip-hop lexicon had absorbed a reggae accent. On Black Star’s
“Definition” (1998), Mos Def brings a dancehall-indebted style to
his flow, employing steady, staccato rhythms, a sing-song delivery,
consistent end rhymes, and stuttered singing. He borrows the same melody that
KRS-One borrowed from Yellowman, and throws in some Jamaican slang for good
measure—e.g., “Lord have mercy,” “Follow me
nuh.” Ironically, “Definition” takes hip-hop soul-searching
as its subject as it centrally employs a sample of BDP’s “Remix
For P Is Free” which happens to contain the same sample that BDP
selectively appropriated from Jamaica’s heavily versioned “Mad
Mad” riddim.10 Riddim,
like beat in hip-hop parlance, is Jamaican shorthand for a
singer’s or DJ’s musical accompaniment in a particular song,
which may include a distinctive bassline, drum beat, and/or other
recognizable musical figures. Such
layered allusion, however, stops for many listeners at Criminal Minded
precisely because BDP’s accented album has attained a canonical status,
a fact which almost by default commits KRS-One’s voluminous borrowings
from dancehall songs directly to hip-hop’s vocabulary since the
majority of listeners at this point lack acquaintance with the Jamaican originals.
