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.The gun is an offen-sive or defensive weapon but is as well a symbol of liberation and mas-culine or personal power.It is also a tool of extreme and final violencethat has remained one critical component of the performances in thismale-dominated music culture and continues to be reified and uplifted inthe lyrics and performance of many contemporary deejays.1 Theirallegedly close involvement with guns and violence in their real socialrelations, coupled with their role as dancehall artistes and cultural gri-ots, means that while staging and mimicking violence in the dancehallthese artistes are simultaneously involved in making meanings of social86Bigging Up Dons and Shottas 87and political practices that form a part of Jamaican inner-city reality anddancehall world view.Within the wider Jamaican society, force and violence have long beena vibrant part of the country s political history and culture.There arenoted instances of the liberating use of violence in the numerous slaverevolts against the British colonists, including the 1833 Christmas rebel-lion led by Sam Sharpe and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion led by PaulBogle, as well as the 1938 upheavals when Jamaican workers riotedagainst low wages and severe working and living conditions.2 In thepost-independence era, violence in the Jamaican society escalated signif-icantly and can be disaggregated into six distinct types: violent crimes,political violence, drug violence, domestic violence, inter-personal vio-lence and gang violence.3Fuelled by the fallout of structural adjustment, criminal activity inJamaica underwent restructuring in the late 1980s: the accelerated tradein marijuana as traffickers sought to exploit the economic political cri-sis facing the country and the resort to organized high-intensity politicalviolence as the country became ideologically polarized under the PNPand JLP political parties.This restructuring of criminal activity has, overtime, resulted in declining levels of property crimes and increasing levelsof violent and fatal crimes.Violent crimes increased by 33 per cent from1974 to 1996 while property crimes decreased by 55 per cent.Othercrimes such as fraud, drug crimes and illegal possession of guns allincreased by 1 per cent, 3 per cent and 14 per cent respectively for thesame period.4 This consistent increase in violent and fatal crimes is themain factor that underpins the disorienting fear and near panic thatcharacterizes the debate around crime in Jamaica.Violence as a phenomenon is not confined to Jamaica s urban centresor among its poor people.Nonetheless, more attention is paid to violentcrime and this type tends to be geographically concentrated in poor,urban communities.More than half of all violent crimes committed inJamaica are concentrated in the urban centres of Kingston and StAndrew, with other urbanized areas in St Catherine and St Jamesaccounting for large figures.During the period 1984 to 1992, total crimeaggregates were 20,715 in Kingston, 40,756 in St Andrew, 22,105 for StCatherine and 10,816 for St James.Whereas St Andrew records the high-88 Inna di Dancehallest number of serious crimes, disaggregated figures show that KingstonCentral s crime rate of 7,075 was the highest per capita for the entireperiod.In the 1950s and 1960s, murder rates for Jamaica were approx-imately 7 per 100,000 persons.By 1980, this had increased to 236.5Between 1961 and 1963, the number of murders was 183 and this fig-ure ballooned to a reported 981 cases in 1989 90.6The 1997 World Bank report on Jamaica noted that violence exacer-bated poverty and that urban poverty could lead to increased violence.In relation to the inner cities of Kingston, the report noted that lack ofemployment creates violence differentiated by gender.For men, espe-cially young men, unemployment, frustration and idleness often result ingang involvement, violence and encounters with the police.For women,a lack of income increases their dependence on men and often results inearly and multiple pregnancies.This in turn results in domestic violenceaimed at partners and children.The study linked poor, inadequate or atotal lack of parenting skills, especially among young parents, to observ-able violent tendencies in their children, who later tended to become vio-lent adults.Inadequate and poor housing conditions accompanied bythe overcrowding associated with poor, urban communities further con-centrated several social problems into these confined areas, resulting inan aggravation of and an increase in violence.The 1980s emergence and rise to popularity of dancehall artistes fromthe bowels of Kingston s inner cities provided a stage on which individ-uals could lyrically and symbolically project an intense fascination withdifferent forms of violence  gun violence, sexual violence, violenceagainst women, as well as violence against self and society.The imagesof violence that are disseminated by these artistes have been identified aspurely metaphorical: a kind of lyrical, social commentary.7 My ownresearch in the belly of the dancehall reveals that this lyrical violence isoften tenuously linked to real acts of violence, particularly when dance-hall narratives reflect the realities of violence in Kingston s inner cities.The close relationship between lyrical and real violence is particularlyevident within the sociopolitical and economic realities of the innercities, because the lives and practices of individuals in these communitiesimpact directly on the flood of violent symbols and messages that areemitted in the dancehall s lyrical and cultural output.Bigging Up Dons and Shottas 89As the dancehall dis/place developed from the early days of the 1980sinto the 1990s, the violence that was idealized and symbolized in its lyri-cal outpourings and interaction of the stage-audience and audience-stagedialogue moved farther away from the type of violence encoded in thereggae music that infused the earlier genre of Jamaican popular culturein the 1970s.This was the rude bwoy era typified by the characterRhyghin in the movie The Harder They Come.Ivanhoe Martin, themodel for the role that Jimmy Cliff played in the movie, had becomefamous around 1948 as the ultimate rudie, following a series of gun bat-tles with the police.8 In the movie, Rhyghin was a rural transplant to theurban centre of Kingston whose ultimate ascent (or descent) into rudebwoy status parodied the hopes and dreams of many poor, young menfrom the rural areas of Jamaica who left their homes to seek their for-tunes in the city during the promising post-independence era [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]