PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Man, were we thrilled when Carolyn Cooper agreed to an interview with us! It’s all about Noises in the Blood! We were to conduct it around Fort Lauderdale. It was to happen after a conference panel: “Rap, Reggae & Revolution, Bring da Noise!” The conference was called “Florida: State of Black Studies and African Diaspora Peoples.” It was organized by African-New World Studies at Florida International University (Miami). They gets down! The panel took place at Broward County’s African-American Research Library and Cultural Center, which is nothing less than nice! But our Sista couldn’t make it and bring down the house because of illness. No matter. We built an electronic bridge and made it happen. Love is love, too: She was finishing up her new joint, Sound Clash (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004), yet still made time for us. Talk about Good Vibes! PROUD FLESH is proud indeed to interview Carolyn Cooper, on our three “R’s” (Rap, Reggae/Ragga…) and then some!

PROUD FLESH:

The fantastic work you’ve done, like the Dancehall music under study, is both famous and (for status-quo academicians) infamous. You speak briefly on this “dangerous liaison,” an intellectual committed to the massive, in the opening sections of your book Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 1995). What has this experience been like, representing for Ragga or African/Jamaican popular culture at large, as a Black woman intellectual in Diaspora?

CAROLYN COOPER:

I’ve been ’buked and I’ve been scorned! But me don’t make that bother me: Me just press on. About a decade and a half ago, I had a wonderfully affirming conversation with Lucille Mathurin Mair, a really important Caribbean historian and cultural activist who was the first Consultant Coordinator for the regional Women and Development Studies Project at the University of the West Indies; and who, before that, was Secretary General of the Second UN Conference on Women held in Copenhagen. Somewhat apologetically, I told her that I didn’t think my feminist colleagues were going to be too happy with my argument that the Dancehall was a potentially liberating space for women. And she advised me not to let the thought of what people might say about my work stop me from going where it was leading. Her wise words have continued to sustain me in the face of opposition. And some of my colleagues have seen the light. At least one of them cautiously admitted, about a decade after I gave a lecture for International Women’s Day on gender in Dancehall culture, “Carolyn, you know I’m beginning to think that you may be right.” And outside the academy, in my work as a newspaper columnist and television presenter, I’ve had substantial popular support – and some opposition – for my work on gender politics.

PROUD FLESH:

How did you later come to write “Hip-Hopping Across Cultures” (Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discoruses in Caribbean Culture, Eds. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards [Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002]), and how did it feel to write across “bridges of sound,” to quote Kamau Brathwaite? The “twinship” of Rap/Ragga is remarkable?

CAROLYN COOPER:

Once I’d decided that I wanted to write on the dispersal of Jamaican Dancehall culture, it was obvious that I’d have to explore similarities between Rap and Ragga. Though I’m not at all an expert on Hip-Hop culture, I could see that gender politics and language issues were clear points of comparison between Rap and Ragga. Both musics continue to be stigmatised in their country of origin and, to a lesser degree, in export markets. Yet, the appropriation of Black popular music across lines of race and culture confirms the marketability of commodified Black culture in the globalized recorded music industry. Indeed, profound issues of race, class and gender are re-presented in the noisy discourse of African Diasporic popular music. In the words of Chuck D, “Rap music makes up for its lack of melody with its sense of reminder.” Ragga, too often dismissed as noise, not music, tells its own story of cultural remembering. Similarly, the disturbing lyrics of ‘roots and culture’ Reggae sing of displacement, cultural alienation and the search for home in the Diaspora. Chuck D’s ominous sense of reminder is the bridge of sound that connects Reggae, Rap and Ragga to their multi-vocal, Middle Passage antecedents.

PROUD FLESH:

Do you have any favorite Hip-Hop artists? What Jamaican popular music artists would you listen to for “pure” pleasure!?!

CAROLYN COOPER:

I like Missy Elliot and Queen Latifah. I find the men much harder to relate to than the women. But I really haven’t listened broadly enough to define preferences. And I enjoy listening to such a wide range of old and new Jamaican artists that it’s difficult to come up with a definitive list. Just some names that come immediately to mind: The Skatalites, Peter Tosh, Ernest Ranglin, Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Beres Hammond, Buju Banton, Lady Saw.

PROUD FLESH:

Speak of the Goddess… How fantastic is “What Is Slackness” by Lady Saw!?! Isn’t this the best example we have of what you called “low theory” in Noises in the Blood? Can “Negro intellectuals” handle “low theory,” this concept, this reality, this song?

CAROLYN COOPER:

Well, “low theory” would be a contradiction in terms for some scholars. But I’m very much interested in what “primary texts” can tell us about how the artistes/performers in Dancehall consciously elaborate the meaning of their work. So Lady Saw clearly understands ‘slackness’ in a much more sophisticated and politically astute way than one might assume. She interrogates conceptions of slackness that limit the meaning of the word to the private domain of individual sexual transgression. She deconstructs slackness, offering a provocative redefinition that expands the denotative range of the word to include the many failures of the State to fulfill its obligations to the citizenry. In this Dancehall subversion, slackness becomes a public matter of communal accountability and the spotlight of moral judgment is turned away from the DJ herself and on to her detractors.

PROUD FLESH:

So how did you come to see Lady Saw in terms of Oshun, Yoruba orisha? Your presentation at a Dancing in the Millennium Conference in Washington, D.C., “Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in Jamaican Dancehall Culture” (July 19-23, 2000) was next level! Isn’t it ironic that many nouveau Yoruba enthusiasts, strangely into bourgeois respectability, would find this identification shocking, since Western middle-class missionaries identified all these African deities with devil worship? They want to have it both ways!

CAROLYN COOPER:

Once you step out of spaces in which notions like ‘devil worship’ have currency, then you can view spirituality in a much more egalitarian way. And in trying to recuperate cultural practices like the celebration of the body in Jamaican dancehall, I turned to West Africa for legitimising models. In 1982 I had the pleasure of being an onlooker at the Oshun Festival held in Osogbo; and I was engaged by the notion of female fertility rituals which I’ve imaginatively applied to the African Diaspora.

PROUD FLESH:

We appreciate how you appreciate Lovindeer and Shabba Ranks as much as Robert Nesta Marley, in your lyrical analysis. Given Buju Banton, Capelton and Sizzla’s more recent emergence from the Dancehall itself (as “conscious” DJs), are there signs that the ‘roots and culture’/’slackness’ dichotomy will break down? Or do such spirited transformations tend to reinforce this dichotomy instead?

CAROLYN COOPER:

The so-called roots and culture/slackness ‘dichotomy’ is a sign of the wholeness of Jamaican popular music – combining both the carnal and the spiritual/political. There is slackness in even Bob Marley’s repertoire – for example, “Kinky Reggae.” Somewhat like Beenie Man’s ‘real ghetto gyal’ who gives the ‘wickedest slam,’ Marley’s downtown ‘Miss Brown,’ with her sugary boogawooga, offers exciting, kinky possibilities. And the Rastafari DJs like Buju Banton and Sizzla cut and mix carnality and ‘culture’ with great ease. In fact, Sizzla redefines his ‘slack’ lyrics as ‘songs of intimacy.’ So these two tendencies have always been evident in Jamaican popular music.

PROUD FLESH:

Cool. Too bad ‘professional’ and ‘lay’ critics miss this relation! Unfortunately, Hip-Hop does NOT have a Carolyn Cooper in the U.S. It is, however, superficially exploited by a few academic opportunists who know very, very little about it. There’s no one well-known (and knowledgeable) who represents for it hardcore. How have students, faculty and administrators at UWI responded to your profound engagement with Jamaican popular culture? You’ve built “Reggae Studies,” institutionally, correct?

CAROLYN COOPER:

Well, I don’t quite know what it means to be ‘a Carolyn Cooper!’ I’m sure some of my detractors would describe me as an ‘academic opportunist.’ But the idea of a Reggae Studies Centre at the University of the West Indies came to me in November 1992, when I gave a paper on “Cultural Implications of Marketing Reggae Internationally” at a symposium on Reggae music as a business. It occurred to me that the UWI ought to recognise the academic legitimacy of popular culture studies, particularly Reggae; and I garnered support for the project. A decade later it remains an under-funded enterprise. But the Centre has hosted an on-going series of public lectures and seminars in which local and international artistes, managers, producers, journalists and academics have freely shared their own vision of the global Reggae music industry; and a relatively large archive of recordings of these has been established. The Centre also benefited from the appointment of two research fellows, Garth White and Michael ‘Ibo’ Cooper, who were engaged to do research on the development of Jamaican music. The Centre is now attempting to institutionalise an undergraduate degree programme in Entertainment and Cultural Enterprise Management, conceived by Kam-au Amen, a graduate in Cultural Studies. Other academics on the Mona campus of the UWI have contributed to the consolidation of Reggae Studies: Dr Clinton Hutton, a political philosopher in the Department of Government, teaches an undergraduate course on reggae lyrics as philosophical and political texts; he also organises an annual Peter Tosh symposium and has established the Don Drummond Foundation. Dr Kingsley Stewart, an anthropologist, teaches a course on Dancehall. I have designed a course on “Reggae Poetry” which will be offered for the first time in the 2004-05 academic year.

PROUD FLESH:

Nice! Now, given the many and complex faces of empire, which you help us resist quite well, what would you say is the relationship between Jamaican nationalism and pan-Africanism in your work?

CAROLYN COOPER:

These days “nationalism” is a discredited concept in some circles. But I think that a sense of place and local identity is essential (another bad word!) in the age of capitalist globalisation. I know that Jamaicans have long enjoyed a global African consciousness despite the small physical size of our island. As Peter Tosh put it so succinctly, “No matter where you come from, as long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African.”

PROUD FLESH:

Peace be unto him! Okay: Reggae, is it really “the ganja of the massive,” as you’ve indigenized Marx!?! We refer to “Hip-Hopping Across Cultures,” of course. Would this include Ragga? Can we not chant down Babylon and burn it down at the same time, in reference to Noises in the Blood?

CAROLYN COOPER:

I see Reggae and Ragga as one long musical continuum of both militant and conservative elements. And popular music has always functioned as a safety valve in Jamaican society. It is a space in which Babylon can be both chanted down and burnt down. I see the new policing of ‘bad’ words by the State, for example, as a foolishly authoritarian attempt to keep DJs in line. The more you attempt to regulate popular culture, the more defiant its practitioners become. Even a mainstream, middle-class artiste like Sean Paul has recently felt moved to use ‘bad’ words in performance in Jamaica as a way, it would appear, of identifying with working-class DJs who are routinely harassed by the police for using ‘indecent’ language.

PROUD FLESH:

Your “Lyrical Gun” (Massachusetts Review XXXV, 3&4 [1995]) is an extremely provocative and potent essay, absolutely avant-garde in the best way. It should be a watershed for us intellectually. Can you discuss how this piece had been received, from the vantage point of its author?

CAROLYN COOPER:

I have been much lambasted for appearing to sanction violent homophobia when, in fact, I was attempting to define a culture-specific context within which to understand Buju Banton’s articulation of anti-homosexual religious values in the inflammatory song “Boom By-By.” I also analyse the construction of masculinity within discourses of violence that make the phallus and the gun synonymous. Arguing that the language of dancehall lyrics encodes elements of verbal play, especially braggadocio, and cannot always be taken literally, I emphasise the metaphorical nature of the murderous discourse. On the locally produced 45 rpm record, the spelling of the song’s title is “Boom By-By,” representing the sound of gunfire. The song does not appear on any of Buju’s own CDs, as far as I can tell. On a later compilation CD, the ‘e’ is added, thus reinforcing the final farewell of death. For political reasons I privilege the original spelling. I also examine the ideological implications of marketing Dancehall lyrics internationally – outside of the immediate context of primary cultural production and meaning. I pay attention to the resulting sound clashes that do occur when indigenous Jamaican/Dancehall values cross borders and enter cultural spaces that cannot accommodate them.

PROUD FLESH:

We are really quite interested in your interventionist concept of “heterophobia.” As colonialism/neo-colonialism gets formulated in “heterosexist” and gay and lesbian ways, Western bourgeois ways that would force us to discuss our erotics in alien, alienating language. Could you elaborate on “heterophobia” (for those of us who listen), this concept which recasts white liberal discourses on “homophobia” and such worldwide?

CAROLYN COOPER:

I coined the term ‘heterophobia’ as a politically neutral label for a whole range of anxieties that plague all peoples in all cultures: phobias which are reducible to the singular fear of difference. Differences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, age and sexual orientation all generate phobias. ‘Heterophobia’ is not the straight ‘opposite’ of homophobia; it is an inclusive, generic designation whose multiple applications incorporate the current definitions of homophobia. Heterophobia goes straight to the heart of the problem of cultural difference.

PROUD FLESH:

Please, finally, tell us about your new book! What is it called? When will it be out?

CAROLYN COOPER:

It’s called Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large and it documents a series of forays I’ve made across the shifting borderline between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ territory. It’s not an encyclopaedic study of Jamaican Dancehall culture. I just try to make sense of the border clashes that characterise much of contemporary Jamaican society, and which are chronicled in popular music. For example, I compare the representation of female sexuality in the lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks and conclude that Shabba is less patriarchal than Marley. I examine Lady Saw’s lyrics and argue that she’s a feminist. I look at what I call erotic disguise in the films Dancehall Queen and Babymother – one set in Jamaica, the other in the UK – and examine the ways in which marginalised working class women reclaim their sensuality in the masquerade of the Dancehall. I compare the use of the metaphor of fire in the lyrics of Bob Marley and Capleton to underscore the continuities between Reggae and Dancehall. I analyse the work of the Black British DJ Apache Indian to demonstrate the ways in which Jamaican Dancehall culture adapts itself to new contexts of production. And I examine the role of the Jamaican creole language in defining a global Jamaican identity. Sound Clash is quite an eclectic mix and it will be published early in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

PROUD FLESH:

Many thanks! Much love!

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 3, 2004