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CONSTANT REFERENCES TO GUNS in Jamaican dancehall music have resulted in an increasing tendency to criminalize the music and the culture both locally and in the international marketplace. For example, Tom Willis, writing in the British Sunday Times of April 4, 1993, attempts to establish an invidious comparison between loving Bob Marley and hateful Shabba Ranks. Shabba Ranks is demonized as "a black pop star who last year asserted on TV that homosexuals 'deserve crucifixion,' and expressed support for such peers as Buju Banton and Tippa I-Re, whose lyrics favour the quicker method of shooting."(1) Conversely, Bob Marley is canonized as the non-threatening, emasculated singer of "lilting love songs."
Rewriting history in an article entitled "Ragga to Riches," Willis proceeds to elaborate his sense of a clear distinction between the love lyrics of his reconstituted Bob Marley and the high profile hate Lyrics of all of the performers of contemporary "ragga"(2):
Not that ragga, born in the violent dance halls of mid-1980's Kingston, bears much relation to Marley's lilting love-songs of the decade before. Rather than sing, the vocalists "toast" in high-speed verse; patois lyrics have often celebrated misogyny, homophobia, gangsterdom and guns.(3)
Willis's generalization articulates a series of clear cut oppositions: hate ragga versus Bob Marley's love songs; 1980's violence versus 1970's peace (presumably); toasting versus singing; "lilting" versus "high-speed"; [English] love-songs versus patois lyrics--the contrast with English is implied in Willis's pointed reference to "patois" Lyrics; hateful "misogyny, homophobia, gangsterdom and guns" versus love, love, love, love, love.(4)
Not only is Willis's characterization of the ethos of Bob Marley's revolutionary music woefully deficient; he fails to recognize the existence of a tradition of stylized, ritual verbal violence in Caribbean popular culture of which Bob Marley, the incendiary, bull-bucking, duppy-conquering, Tuff Gong Rastaman is an essential part. Bob Marley's songs of emancipation from mental slavery are a powerful, revolutionary chant against Babylon. Babylon in Rastafarian iconography is the biblical whore of St. John's apocalypse; in the Jamaican socio-political context Babylon is, as well, the code name for the police as symbol of a repressive political state in which all power is invested in the "bald head."
Frequent references in dancehall songs to the maligned "informer" who betrays the community of which s/he pretends to...