Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2006

In recent decades, dancehall music appears to have surpassed its predecessor, reggae, as Jamaica's major cultural export. In her recent collection of essays written over the last decade entitled Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper continues the project she began in what is arguably the first seminal essay on dancehall culture.1 In this latter collection, Cooper offers the model of clash as a way of thinking through an array of issues surrounding the culture. The text presents the notion of clash in a variety of ways: clashes between conservative Jamaican insiders who fail to understand the worldview of lower class Jamaicans, clashes drawn along sexual and gender lines, clashes of words between competing DJs and sound systems, inter-and intra-religious clashes within Jamaican, as well as clashes between "foreign" and "native" decoders of the culture. As with any export, appropriation and expropriation of local meaning are inevitable, leading to mistranslations, different understandings, and hybridization as aspects of the culture are re-embedded elsewhere. In this article, I explore some of the problems Cooper's approach to the analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture raises by focusing on two key areas. First, I address the problems created by Cooper's privileging of the local voice over the foreign in the decoding of dancehall culture. I argue that while she appears to accept contradictory forms of meaning within dancehall lyrics, at the same time she rejects the possibility of plural interpretations occasioned by such semantic bifurcation. Secondly, I question Cooper's assertion that the violence in dancehall music is better understood as a metaphorical and lyrical game that 1.

Rantin from Inside the Dancehall is an epistemological look at Jamaican society through the prism of social critic and ethnomusicologist, Dennis Howard. A compendium of commentaries, Rantin is richly animated and offers an incisive look at a people, their history, achievements, struggles and shortcomings. Howard is committed to the advancement of a people -black people -through the appreciation and advancement of culture. Rantin bleeds identity, culture, nationalism and Afrocentrism. These are delicate, tricky subjects that are ably and compellingly discussed by Howard.

New West Indian Guide, 2013

Since their 1980s rise to dominance as a popular form of music and culture in Jamaica, dancehall music and culture remain critically under-researched and under-theorized in the academy, even while they continue to generate immense critical debate and social engagement in Jamaica and elsewhere. Carolyn Cooper's early celebratory feminist study (2004) stands as an important point of academic inquiry into this flashy and hyper-popular cultural form that has moved beyond Jamaica's borders through its diaspora, and into multiple transnational localities.

Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures, 2010