Can't Stop Won't Stop (6 page)

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.

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.

During the tribal wars of the mid-sixties, the Wailers had cut “Simmer Down,” a tune encouraging rudies to “control your temper.” Now Bob Marley met Lee “Scratch” Perry at the Black Ark to record another track that might cool down the ghetto, “Smile Jamaica,” and agreed to do a free concert bearing the same name on December 5. Hearing this news, the PNP scheduled elections for December 20, and made a show of sending armed guards to watch Marley's up-town compound at 56 Hope Road. Marley was enraged. Like many Rastas, he had supported Manley and the PNP in 1972, but now he was disgusted with where
politricks
had led the country.

Two nights before the show, the armed guard mysteriously disappeared. Minutes later, six assassins entered the mansion. Rita Marley was shot in the head,
and manager Don Taylor took five bullets destined for Bob, whose chest was grazed as the last bullet entered his left arm. But on the night of the show, Bob was wheeled into National Heroes Park, where a crowd of 80,000, including Manley and a large PNP entourage, had gathered. Marley played a triumphant concert, then left for the Bahamas in a self-imposed exile.

Rumors spread that the JLP, perhaps even the CIA, was behind the hit. The point had been made: violence was striking dangerously near the heart of the people.

And so they sang of clashes, of war. From imagining distant and free African skies in songs like The Abyssinians' “Satta Massa Gana,” The Mighty Diamonds' “Africa,” Junior Byles's “A Place Called Africa,” or Bunny Wailer's “Dreamland,” they moved to plead for relief from the violence borne of “isms and schisms.”

Leroy Smart's “Ballistic Affair” was a tragic dispatch from the fire-scarred danger zone of Seventh Street, the militarized border between Rema and Concrete Jungle, a PNP yard whose Junglist gang was thought to be behind much of the violence:

We used to lick chalice, cook ital stew together

Play football and cricket as one brother

Now through you rest a Jungle

A you might block a Rema

You a go fight ‘gainst your brother.

Max Romeo and Lee “Scratch” Perry captured the moment's treacherous flux. As Romeo told David Katz: “I had this song ‘War In A Babylon' where me say, ‘It wicked out there, it dread out there.' I took it to [Perry], said, ‘You like it?' He said ‘Yeah!' with excitement, ‘but no dread and no wicked, it
sipple
out deh!' So I said, ‘Yeah that have a ring to it', because sipple mean slippery, it's slidey out there.”
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In his new chorus, Romeo asked “So wha fi do?” and the answer came, “Mek we
slide
out deh.” As the song climaxed, Romeo retreated high up to the Rasta hills as Kingston exploded under the burning sun:

I man satta on the mountaintop

Watching Babylon burning red hot

Red hot!

Here was
The Harder They Come's
Ivan, a reef fish battling the ocean current, a flash of color in the tidal surge, pursued by police and enemies, making a last run through the ghetto, leaving graffiti tags on the concrete walls that mocked, “I was here but I disapear (sic)”—laughing mightily, knowing that he'd already become indelible in the public imagination, that even politics could not erase him—and, like a premonitory smoke above the shanty roofs: “I AM EVERYWHERE.” Celebrating survival itself was the point.

While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae—the mostly wordless music of dread—ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry's “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo's vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs—“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”—as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim—which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don't worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing's gonna be alright”—was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry's sound was the epitome of
sipple
. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?