Beats & Riddims Across the Atlantic

Great reggae music, or any reggae music for that matter, rarely comes through Minneapolis. Though Duluth hosts a great reggae festival each summer (http://www.bayfrontreggae.com/), the Twin Cities reggae music scene is fairly sparse. So it was with some real anticipation that I arrived at the Mad Professor, London’s brilliant Dub Master, show last night at the 7th Street Entry. And he did not disappoint.

The Mad Professor is a dubmaster, which means that he stands on stage with a sound system remixing & recreating reggae riddims and beats, emphasizing drum & base, creating something truly magical, spiritual, and mind/body altering.

I fell in love with reggae in a chilly Vermont fall back in 1997. As the leaves turned their brilliant yellows, reds, and oranges, I was learning to sway and move my body to the island sounds of Jamaica. It is with some awareness, including the self reflexive kind, of the ironies of a lower middle class white girl from Connecticut living in Vermont, the whitest state in the Union, that I found myself pulled by the 3/6 downbeats of the Kingston ghetto. And I was not the only one. Burlington, Vermont, has a truly vibrant reggae music scene, with venues such as the Higher Ground and the Metronome as well as the now defunct Vermont Reggae Festival playing host to some of the greatest reggae artists of all time. As I grooved to the sounds of the Mad Professor last night, I reflected on how lucky I’ve been to see acts like Burning Spear, Anthony B, Augustus Pablo, the Abyssinians, and many, many more. When these class acts are not traveling through town, a number of home grown (mostly white) DJ’s fill the city’s many downtown bars with the sounds of roots, dancehall and dub, and the college radio station has a regular cycle of reggae.

Attending reggae events in Vermont, I was always struck by the primarily white audience, who of course included me, in contrast to the largely black faces on stage.  Witnessing a sea of white faces and white bodies dancing and grooving with a modestly quintessential reggae sway, erupting into cheers shouting “Jah Rastafari” or “Irie!,”  I do not think that I am alone in feeling that this is a jarring juxtaposition between a primarily black musical form, politics, and religion and an almost exclusively white audience who seems to feel entirely at home and comfortable in their enjoyment and consumption of this musical event.

And so it was last night…Though there were more black bodies in the crowd, the venue was still dominated by a white audience who, for the most part, floating across the Jamaican riddims laid down by London’s Mad Professor while he spoke of slavery, Africa, and the middle passage, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying and enamored by the Professor’s complex beats and disjunctured remixing. As I found my own groove, I immediately realized the difference between the Mad Professor’s beats and riddims and those of the white dude dub master before him, from the Twilight Circus Dub Sound System (http://www.twilightcircus.com/index.html). Whereas the latter mixed up some good sounds, there was nothing particularly surprising. It was easy to find a groove, to see where he was going with the remixing. But not so with the Mad Professor. He found beats and riddims that I could only just feel the edges of, bringing my mind and body to a wholly different place. I came to realize that there were many nuances and complexities of the threads he was pulling through these remixes that I was probably missing entirely. And that these sonic affects were very much intertwined with space and place, traveling and flowing through the global diaspora of the displaced and disposessed, but also through the heart of Babylon.

These thoughts brought me to thinking about my own research on racialized media space and neighborhoods in New Orleans, and to Congo Square in particular. Congo Square is a historic space in the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans, where slaves used to gather on Sunday to play the drum. It is in Congo Square where many say that jazz originated, as a form of communication, memory, resistance, and performance between slaves. I could not help thinking last night, here in Minneapolis, that these beats that I could only just catch a glimpse of, were not intended for me, as the beats on the drums of the slave were not intended for their masters. Or at least, that my own experiences, histories, memories, and culture would of course make it very difficult for me to catch them. As Paul Gilroy and others have noted, this aspect of the multiple significations of reggae and other forms of black cultural production are what make it such a powerful form of communication and resistance. At the 7th Street Entry, we were not so far from Congo Square. Yet, we were also a world away.

This is indeed a reflection of the complex interweaving between the histories of the global flow of the international slave trade and its resistances and the global flow of the international music industry. The music industry is like most other industries—it is a corporately owned business whose sole motive is profit.  Globally, the music industry is run by large international conglomerates and their subsidiaries, who tap into local and regional markets to find talent that can sell to an international (or cross-over) audience.  Reggae’s global cross-over to international audiences, fostered in large part by the marketing and popularity of Bob Marley, has spurred a lively debate about whether such crossing over has watered down its political messages against the twin forces of racism and global capital, or Babylon.  On the other side of this debate, however, is the argument that it is precisely these same forces that lend themselves to the commodification and commercialization of reggae music, aimed at this cross over audience, that enables the spread of reggae’s political and religious messages to reach a truly global audience.  This, some argue, enables reggae to reach its goal of ending domination and oppression and to serve as a nexus of coalition among diasporic blacks.

I have no intention of settling this debate here, but I am truly thankful to the Mad Professor for coming to Minneapolis and jogging these thoughts and feelings in my brain/body once again. Though I’ve come to love Minneapolis, I have indeed been hankering for  the mountains of Vermont and its fall colors that served as the backdrop for the other thing I miss most about my time there–reggae music. Reggae in Minneapolis has given me another layer to think about, with the unique local conditions of the Twin Cities and its racialized geographies,  its connections to the global music industry, and even the 7th Street Entry venue which is attached to the famed 1st Avenue where the legendary Prince earned his hometown respect…These complex interweavings of space, place, culture, travel, and flow at the very least suggest that reggae music is more than a set of textual messages. Its sonic practices are also deeply spatial, existing amongst a complicated terrain of cultural geographies and affects that are inextricably bound to a history of the global flow of bodies, cultures, practices, riddims, and beats.