Can't Stop Won't Stop Read online

  Now Seaga fingered the Back-O-Wall ghetto, the west Kingston yard where the camps of the Boboshanti and two other Rasta sects thrived. It was an area that had voted for the opposing political party, the democratic socialist People’s National Party (PNP), and Seaga wanted it cleared. So on the morning of July 12, armed police filled the air with tear gas, and dispersed the residents with batons and rifles. Bulldozers rolled in behind the police, flattening the shanties. “When the first raided camp was demolished,” Leonard Barrett reported, “a blazing fire of unknown origin consumed what remained to ashes while the fire company stood by.”3

  On the site, Seaga built a housing project named Tivoli Gardens and moved in a voting constituency of JLP supporters. He recruited and armed young badmen to protect the area and expand the JLP turf, a gang that called itself, appropriately enough, the Phoenix.4 The lines were now drawn for generations to come.

  “And I can see it with my own eyes,” Culture sang a decade later on “Two Sevens Clash.” “It’s only a housing scheme that divides.” Politics, apocalypse—some reasoned—was it a coincidence the two words sounded so similar?

  Globalizing the Roots Rebel

  In 1973, Jamaica’s record industry was on the verge of a major international breakthrough. Up until then, the island had produced occasional novelty hits, like Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop,” that crossed over from Britain’s growing West Indian immigrant community to the Top of the Pops and the American top 40. But with the twin vehicles of film and music, the Third World roots rebel made his global debut.

  Debuting in Jamaica in 1972, with wider global release the following year, Perry Henzell’s movie The Harder They Come was a portrait of the Jamaica few yankees would ever trod. The movie opened with a country bus navigating a narrow northern road, the coconut trees of the stormy coastline eerily headless, their fronds and fruits sheered off by plague. Singer Jimmy Cliff played Ivan O. Martin, a peasant making the well-worn trip from rural parish to concrete jungle, the metaphoric journey of a newly freed nation into modernity. But this was not to be a narrative of progress.

  Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin was a real-life fifties Kingston outlaw who renamed himself Rhygin and summoned Jamaica’s Maroon pride. The Harder They Come updated his story for a nation defining its postcolonial identity in and through its homegrown popular music. Cliff’s Ivan was to be exploited by a greedy music producer, reviled by a Christian pastor, and eventually tortured and hunted by corrupt police. A country bwai innocent remade into the urban renegade Rhygin, he shoots down a cop and goes underground. A picture of him posing with two pistols hits the papers and his song controls the airwaves. “As sure as the sun will shine, I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine,” he sings, “and then the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all.” The new legend of Rhygin would frame the island’s turbulent seventies.

  In another landmark 1973 film, Enter the Dragon, Jim Kelly’s African-American activist character Williams had gazed at Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong home from a sampan and said, “Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.” Like Bruce Lee, the Third World reggae heroes seemed to First World audiences an intriguing mix of the familiar and fresh. The soundtrack to Henzell’s film, and the debut album by Bob Marley and the Wailers positioned reggae as a quintessential rebel music, steeped in a different kind of urban Black authenticity.

  The Wailers’ album, Catch a Fire, would be a product of the sometimes giddy, sometimes halting dialogue between Third World roots and First World pop. When Bob Marley delivered the rough master tapes to the Island Records offices in London in the dead winter of 1972, a lot was riding on the getting the mix right.

  Just months earlier, the Wailers had been stranded in Britain, abandoned by their manager after a European tour failed to materialize. Island Records head Chris Blackwell, a prominent financier of Henzell’s film, bailed them out by signing them, advancing them £4,000, and sending them home to Kingston to record the album. They took their opportunity seriously—it was a chance for the boys from Trenchtown to bring the message of Jamaican sufferers to the world.

  Blackwell, a wealthy white descendant of Jamaican rum traders now living in London, was beginning to have success in the rock market, and knew he might be on a fool’s mission in trying to cross reggae over. But, emboldened by the success of The Harder They Come, and embittered by Jimmy Cliff’s snubbing to sign a deal with EMI, he was eager to see how far reggae could be taken into the mainstream. He gave the Wailers fancy album packaging and put them on tour with rock and funk bands. Most importantly, he sent the music back for over-dubs by rock session musicians, keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick and guitarist Wayne Perkins.

  The album’s leadoff track, “Concrete Jungle,” illustrated the perils and promise of translating Jamaican music for First World audiences. The opening notes drifted into a disorienting key, Robbie Shakespeare’s bassline seemed to omit more notes than were played, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh’s harmonies floated and attacked like rope-a-dope boxing. Marley’s lyrics described the unrelenting bleakness of the west Kingston yard. “No chains around my feet,” the Wailers sang, “but I’m not free.” It was utterly brilliant, but the music, Blackwell decided, sounded far too Jamaican.

  When he first played the music to Perkins, the Muscle Shoals guitarist couldn’t understand the riptide of riddims. But as the song built to the break, Perkins cut loose with a bluesy torrent, culminating in a ringing sustain. Blackwell and engineer Tony Platt hit the echo machine and the note fed back, soaring up two octaves. “It gave me goosebumps, it was one of those magical moments,” Perkins says.5 Marley, who had spent long, cold, destitute years in America pursuing his pop dream, thought so, too.

  Their album would only sell 14,000 copies in its first year, but the Wailers had taken the first step in turning their local music into an international phenomenon. Catch a Fire was a landmark moment in the globalization of Third World culture. Fulfilling the destiny the elder Rastas in Trenchtown had long seen for him, Marley was on his way to becoming a worldwide icon of freedom struggle and Black liberation—the small axe becoming the first trumpet.

  Sounds and Versions

  The pop audience demanded heroes and icons, but reggae, perhaps more than any other music in the world, also privileged the invisible music men, the sonic architects—the studio producer and the sound system selector. Together, during the seventies, these two secretive orders emerged as sources of power in Jamaica.

  One center, though it may not have seemed so at the time, was an odd backyard studio in the Kingston suburb of Washington Gardens. Lee “Scratch” Perry, its eccentric owner, was a diminutive man with a feverishly large imagination. Beginning in December of 1973, and continuing night and day for five years, Perry recorded an unceasing parade of harmony groups, singers, and DJs in the tiny, stuffy, concrete structure that he called the Black Ark. The music emerging from the Ark—including Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” The Heptones’ “Mr. President,” and The Congos’ “Children Crying”—was mesmerizing and shocking, and would soon reverberate across the globe.

  It was a gloriously weird place, this Black Ark, another autonomous zone. Its exterior walls sported a blue, red, and white image of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah, surrounded by purple handprints and footprints like a child’s finger paintings. The interior walls were painted red and green, and were crammed with Rasta imagery, Bruce Lee posters, Upsetters album jackets, Teac equipment brochures, Polaroid shots, record stampers, horseshoes, and other ephemera, all covered over by a dense layer of Perry’s obscure, signifying graffiti.

  Behind a cheap four-track mixing desk, which by the standards of the time was hopelessly outdated, Perry whirled and bopped and twiddled the knobs, imbuing the recordings with wild crashes of echo, gravity-defying phasing, and frequency-shredding equalization. Influenced by his work with Osborne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Perry used aging analog machines like the Echoplex to turn sounds over and back into thems
elves like Möbius loops. Melodies became fragments, fragments became signs, and the whole thing swirled like a hurricane.

  Upon his arrival in Kingston from his native northern countryside in 1960, Perry had headed straight for the powerful sound systems to try to find work, eventually becoming a songwriter for Duke Reid, then moving on to become a scout and operator for Reid’s competitor, Coxsone Dodd. According to dancehall historian Norman Stolzoff, sound system culture had evolved in Kingston after World War II when the ranks of live musicians dramatically thinned due to immigration to the United Kingdom and the United States and the rise of the North Coast tourist industry.6 By the time Perry came to Kingston, sound systems had largely replaced live bands.

  Outfitted with powerful amplifiers and blasting stacks of homemade speakers, one only needed a selector and records to transform any yard. The sound systems democratized pleasure and leisure by making dance entertainment available to the downtown sufferers and strivers. The sound systems championed the people’s choice long before commercial radio, and as independence approached, they moved from playing mostly American rhythm-and-blues to homegrown ska, rock steady, and finally, reggae.

  The fiercely competitive sound systems—including Duke Reid’s Trojan, Coxsone Dodd’s Downbeat the Ruler, Prince Buster’s Voice of the People, King Edwards the Giant, and Tom the Great Sebastian—fought for audiences; some of them even sent thugs to shoot up their rivals’ dances and destroy their equipment in fits of anger or desperation.7 More usually, they distinguished themselves from each other with “specials,” records that no other sound system had, songs that mashed up their competitors and drew away their audiences. They even sometimes “clashed” live in the same hall or yard, song for song, “dub fi dub.”

  Early on, selectors made frequent trips to America to secure obscure exclusives. As the Jamaican music industry expanded during the sixties, sound systems began to record local artists’ songs onto exclusive acetates or “dubplates.”8 In 1967, a sound system head affiliated with Duke Reid named Ruddy Redwood stumbled onto Jamaican music’s next great innovation.

  One afternoon Redwood was cutting dubplates when engineer Byron Smith forgot to pan up the vocals on The Paragons’ hit, “On the Beach.” Redwood took the uncorrected acetate to the dance that night anyway, and mixing between the vocal and the dub, sent the crowd into a frenzy during his midnight set. Rather than apologize for his mistake the next day, Redwood emphasized to Reid that the vocal-less riddim could be used as a B-side on the commercial release of the singles. Reid, for his part, realized he could cut his costs by half or more. One studio session could now produce multiple “versions.”9 A single band session with a harmony trio could be recycled as a DJ version for a rapper to rock patwa rhymes over, and a dub version in which the mixing engineer himself became the central performer—experimenting with levels, equalization and effects to alter the feel of the riddim, and break free of the constraints of the standard song.

  Dub’s birth was accidental, its spread was fueled by economics, and it would become a diagram for hip-hop music. A space had been pried open for the break, for possibility. And, quickly, noise came up from the streets to fill the space—yard-centric toasts, sufferer moans, analog echoes—the sounds of people’s histories, dub histories, versions not represented in the official version. As musical competition was overshadowed by violent political competition, dub became the sound of a rapidly fragmenting nation—troubling, strange, tragic, wise slow-motion portraits of social collapse.

  Roots and Culture

  Every Jamaican politician knew what every Jamaican musician knew—the sound systems were crucial to their success. During the seventies, the fight for political dominance between the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and leftist People’s National Party (PNP) seemed inevitably to turn on the mood of the people in the dance. All any prime minister had to do to gauge the winds was to listen closely to the week’s 45 rpm single releases; they were like political polls set to melody and riddim.

  The message was becoming decidedly roots and radical. In the fall of 1968, the JLP-led government had banned Black-power literature and icons like the pan-Africanist leader Walter Rodney from the University of the West Indies campus, then violently crushed the political riots that ensued across the city. But this did not stop the electorate from moving hard left. Intellectuals high on Malcolm X, socialists stricken by Castro, middle-class strivers impatient for price stability, poor strugglers facing dim prospects, even Rastas traditionally reluctant to participate in what Peter Tosh called the Babylon shitstem all clamored for change. Sufferer anthems took over the sound systems. The resistance to roots reggae finally gave way on JBC radio, as listeners came home from the yard dances to demand that tunes like Delroy Wilson’s “Better Must Come” and the Wailers’ “Small Axe” (cut with Perry) be played during daytime hours. Burning Spear summed up the mood of the time: “The people know what it is they want, so they themselves go about getting it.”10

  Compared to Seaga, who had worked the nexus of culture and politics for years, Michael Manley, the democratic socialist PNP candidate, was a late-comer. But as Manley geared up for the 1972 elections, he began appearing at political rallies with his “rod of correction,” a staff that he said had been handed to him by Haile Selassie, in explicit recognition of the influence Rastafarianism held among the poor. The rod, he said, would lead him to redressing injustice. Befitting his new image, he spoke of reggae as “the people’s language,” and selected Wilson’s “Better Must Come” as his campaign theme. The following year, the PNP swept the JLP out of office. In Laurie Gunst’s worlds, Jamaica in the ‘70s was “a fever-dream of raised consciousness and high hopes.”11

  But better never came. The twin downpressing forces of Cold War positioning and global economic pressures ripped Jamaica apart.

  Manley’s democatic socialist government pushed through key social reforms, including lowering the voting age to eighteen, making secondary and university education free, and establishing a national minimum wage. But when Manley moved to reestablish relations with Cuba and build solidarity with leftist leaders in the Caribbean and Africa, CIA surveillance sharply intensified, and First World leaders withdrew aid and investments. In 1971, Jamaica received $23 million in aid from the United States. By 1975, that amount was down to $4 million.12

  The worldwide oil crisis-fueled recession hit the Jamaican dollar hard, unleashing economic chaos. Prices tripled while wages declined by half; a paycheck suddenly bought one-sixth of what it used to. Labor unions unleashed an unprecedented number of walkouts. Between 1972 and 1979, there were more than three hundred strikes.

  North American banks refused to renew aid loans. Jamaica’s debt doubled between 1975 and 1980 to $2 billion U.S., the equivalent of 90 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.13 After a bitter internal fight, the PNP reversed course and finally agreed to accept emergency loans for Jamaica from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who imposed severe austerity measures that caused goods shortages and massive layoffs. The IMF’s plan wreaked long-term havoc on the island’s economy, wiping out entire industries. To pay off the skyrocketing debt, the PNP raised taxes, causing other businesses to flee the island.

  In 1973, gun violence broke out between rival gangs in the Kingston yards. Manley first placed the island “under heavy manners,” expanding police powers to search and raid, and stepping up joint police-military operations. He then established a special Gun Court, where gunmen and illegal firearms traffickers faced mandatory indefinite sentences for their crimes.

  By the end of 1976, when Manley declared a State of Emergency—the Jamaican equivalent of martial law—it was becoming clear that much of the violence was politically motivated. In the Kingston yards, gangs had divided and mapped their turf. As Seaga had long understood, gang leaders were useful to party machinery—they delivered a yard’s votes in election years, fought the ground war during the off years. In turn, politicians granted jobs, favors, and
programs to the area dons, who organized the youths into work-groups or militias.

  Bounty Killer, the dancehall DJ who grew up in the Riverton neighborhood during the 1970s and ‘80s, says, “We used to love politics. When time de MP (Member of Parliament) come an’ say, ‘Bwoy, we a go gi’ weh dis an we a go gi’ weh dat’—we interested.

  “A poor people—weh a look a likkle help an’ a look a hope inna Jamaica—a listen when de Govament a talk,” he added. “But no hope no deh deh. Dem haffi hold oonu (everyone) inna dat position so dem can get oonu attention.”14 In 1974, singer Little Roy went into the Black Ark to record an anguished plea for peace, “Tribal War,” a tune whose cyclical revival over the next three decades spoke to the permanence of political gang violence.

  While Seaga and the JLP officials turned up the rhetorical heat on the Manley government in Parliament, the JLP gangs lit up PNP yards with Molotov cocktails and gunfire. PNP gangs retaliated in kind, fire for fire, blood for blood. When firefighters arrived in Rema, a JLP community, in January 1976, they confronted youths tossing stones from behind roadblocks of blazing tires. The shanties were left to burn.15 Manley felt he saw a design to the violence—a devil’s bargain between the CIA and the pro-U.S. JLP, Washington bullets in the Kingston streets. He wrote in his memoirs, “I have no doubt that the CIA was active in Jamaica that year and was working through its own agents to destabilise us.”16

  With guns and money flowing to the opposition party, the tribal wars rose to a new pitch. Smoke thickened the heavy air in the zinc yards, and Rhygins in JLP green or PNP red raged through the ghetto. In May, the warfare peaked when gangsters surrounded a tenement yard in West Kingston at Orange Lane and set it ablaze, trapping five hundred residents inside. Gunmen blasted away at the police and firemen who arrived at the scene, and eleven perished in the conflagration. As debate raged in Parliament over which party was responsible for the carnage, and the elections neared, hundreds more were gunned down.