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Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. CAROLYN COOPER. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. v + 348 pp. (Paper US$ 22.95)
Sound Clash documents the increasingly fiery debate surrounding the compositional character and social merit of popular culture in Jamaica. The social, sexual, and sonic clashes in question are linked with Jamaican verbal and musical traditions, past and present, celebrated and scorned. Carolyn Cooper's articles, columns, editorials, lectures, and media appearances have provided fuel for these cultural and ideological debates and the powerful "border clash" metaphor she embraces. It is within these hostile border zones that "rival [Jamaican] politicians, area dons/community leaders, and their followers contend for the control of territory, both literal and symbolic" (p. 35). Indeed, Sound Clash demarcates many zones of conflict.
Cooper's introduction offers an updated version of a viewpoint she formulated in Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1995). She argues that "slackness" within Jamaican dancehall culture cannot be reduced to graphic sexual behavior. Dancehall is, unquestionably, "a dedicated space for the flamboyant performing of sexuality" (p. 3). However, its DJs and supporters also represent "a radical, underground confrontation with the patriarchal gender ideology and the duplicitous morality of fundamentalist Jamaican society" (p. 3). Rather than a devaluing idiom, "dancehall culture at home and in the diaspora is best understood as a potentially liberating space" (p. 17). Cooper mounts evidence to support this perspective throughout the book. However, documenting additional viewpoints/voices from dancehall supporters and detractors within the Jamaican public would have been useful.
In Chapter 1 (co-authored by Cecil Gutzmore) the...