Dancehall is at the centre of Jamaican musical and cultural life. From its roots in Kingston in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1980s, Dancehall has conquered the globe, spreading to the USA, the UK, Canada, Japan and beyond. This is its definitive story.
The book features hundreds of exclusive photographs and accompanying text that capture a previously unseen era of musical culture, fashion and lifestyle. Dancehall is a culture that encompasses music, fashion, drugs, guns, art, community, technology and more. Born in the 1950s out of the neighbourhood jams of Kingston, Dancehall grew to its height in the 1980s before a massive influx of drugs and guns made the scene too dangerous for many.
Beth Lesser's book tells this story from its roots to its heights. Throughout the 80's, she photographed and documented a cultural explosion as producers, singers, DJs and soundmen made a living out of the slums of Kingston. In the early 1980s, as Jamaica was in the throes of political and gang violence, Beth Lesser ventured where few others dared and this book is a never-before-seen record of the exciting, dangerous and vibrant world of Dancehall
Singer Gregory Isaacs in Kingston, Jamaica in the Eighties. Photograph: Beth Lesser
Find star, shoot, follow star, shoot: it's the M.O. of many a music photo book. But to attempt to capture the Jamaican scene that way would be to miss more than the supporting cast: it would miss the point. 'Idlers are the heart and soul of Jamaica in many ways,' says Beth Lesser, whose book explores that period between the death of Marley and ragga's conquest of America. 'Everywhere you go people bring their entourage, so unless you keep weeding them out it's overrun with idlers.'
Lesser and her husband travelled to Jamaica throughout the Eighties, she interviewing musicians for her Reggae Quarterly fanzine, he snaffling up records for his weekly Toronto radio show. But it was a very different sound, the roots and dub of Augustus Pablo, that first took them down there in 1981. 'Pablo kept saying, "I don't want you to just do Rockers [his label], I want you to do every artist." Most artists were, "Me, me, me!" But he was very dread Rastafarian, very humble,' she recalls.
Although hedonist dancehall was already supplanting strident roots as the island's dominant sound, it was the advent in 1985 of Wayne Smith's 'Under Mi Sleng Teng', produced by Prince Jammy and the first fully computerised hit, which revolutionised the dancehall industry. 'Real' musicians were out, kids with computers and keyboards were in, as was Jammy's studio, which instantly installed a huge gate to keep the hangers-on at bay. Says Lesser, 'After that you came in to do your voicing, your business, and that was it.'
Lesser's book is a vibrant anthology of all that mattered: the soundsystems, studios, producers, singers, DJs and, yes, the idlers. But very few women. 'Dancehall was extremely patriarchal, there was very little room for women,' she admits. 'There was nothing wrong with women going into the studio and singing, but to go to a dancehall you'd have to get on the truck, sit on top of the equipment, probably sleep in the truck. Jamaica is a very conservative society and that was not an acceptable lifestyle for women.' But they were welcomed as non-participants, proving a surprisingly receptive audience for highly-sexed 'slack' lyrics. Lesser says, 'Slackness then was not like it is now, angry and violent, it was more funny, on a first-grade level, a lot of bathroom humour. Women appreciated the humour, it was a change from the Seventies "fire, dread, Babylon fall" stuff.'
Dancehall also brought out the extravagance in the performers. Eek-A-Mouse, a failed singer who reinvented himself as a toaster, appeared in huge sombreros (accentuating his giant stature) or billowing Arabian pants, inspiring the likes of King Kong to don a gorilla suit and Tiger a... you can probably guess. Bestriding the whole decade was Gregory Isaacs (pictured above). An aloof character whose talent was ultimately compromised by cocaine abuse, he began the Eighties as the Cool Ruler, the king of lover's rock, and finished it with colossal hits such as 'Rumours'. His profile declined around the time Lesser and her husband stopped visiting Jamaica in the early Nineties, after they had their daughter. 'You can't walk around there with a baby,' she says. 'Also, the new stuff doesn't appeal to me at all, the people sound angry.'
Steve Yates, The Observer, August 10 2008
Sly and Robbie lean ostentatiously against the wall of a small studio in a dusty street. Nearby, in the middle of the road, reggae star Eek-a-Mouse smiles for the camera, wearing a trademark waistcoat-and-bow-tie get-up in red, green and gold. In Chancery Lane, a young Gregory Isaacs holds a plastic cup while someone fills it from a beer bottle. Chancery Lane, Kingston, that is. The photographs in Beth Lesser's new coffee-table book, Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture, depict a society so obsessed by music and so suffused with a can-do, DIY spirit that its disproportionate presence on the world stage seems inevitable.
Lesser first visited Kingston in 1981 as a wide-eyed 28-year-old Canadian reggae fan. She found the big new thing, the scene everyone wanted to be involved in, was dancehall. "You wouldn't have known this was going on," Lesser says, "looking at Jamaica from the perspective of Canada or the US, but when we got there, it was so huge you couldn't possibly avoid it." She spent most of the decade travelling to Jamaica and back.
"Until you go to the live dances, you can't imagine what it's like," she continues. "You never knew what would happen. I remember the dance in 1985 when [the producer] King Jammy was playing the Sleng Teng versions, and just when it was getting exciting the police came, looking for guns, and closed it down." There was one night even more memorable than that, though. "My husband and I got married at a dance," Lesser says. "[The DJ] Major Stitch played the Michael Prophet record Here Comes the Bride."
The 1980s are seen as the golden age of dancehall, when the serious political messages of Rastafarianism gave way to a boisterous music that drew the whole community into the party. At sound clashes, rival sound systems would unleash their most powerful weapons against each other: the latest dubplates (one-off pressings of tunes), the most experienced selectors (who choose the records) and perhaps a hot new DJ (who talks over it) with a fine line in bawdy patter.
Though in earlier times the two roles of selector and DJ were taken by one man, in dancehall the DJ was a vocalist, who would talk over the gaps between songs and also over the instrumental sections of the records, like a prototype rapper.
A double CD of the same title accompanies the book, giving an overview of dancehall from 1977 to 1993 – from the dub style replete with horns and delay effects to the smooth R&B rhythms that artists such as Chaka Demus and Pliers took around the world in the 1990s. The album reminds you how this inventive musical era still echoes through the sounds of today – even in mainstream hip-hop and R&B.
Lesser found the people who were making this music more than willing to be photographed as soon as they saw "a white woman with a camera". Even established artists were welcoming. "What made a big impression on my first visit was that everything was so accessible," she recalls. "You could go down on Orange Street, go to Pablo's record store [Augustus Pablo, the acclaimed producer], and they'd say, 'Pablo will be around soon', then he would come in and chat. It wasn't like you had to go through his secretary and make an appointment."
In some ways it was amazing that people got anything done. The unavoidable marijuana question brings incredulous laughter from Lesser. "It was unbelievable," she says. "In [the producer] Sugar Minott's yard, they'd wake up in the morning and light up the chalice, and everyone would disappear in a huge puff of smoke. Wherever you went, everybody was smoking all day long."
Kingston had a friendly atmosphere but there was an edge of danger. One day she and her husband were in a cab and another driver committed a minor infringement. "They were yelling at each other, then the cab driver pulls out a gun," she says. "The other guy drove off and the cab driver put away the gun and said, 'It's okay, I'm a police officer.' "
Political tensions were still high after the troubles of the 1980 election, and you had to be careful what colours you wore in certain areas. Black and red meant you were a socialist; if you wore green, you were a Labourite. In the exhaustive history that accompanies Lesser's evocative photos, she paints a vivid picture of a scene that, despite its eventual global influence, was almost comically parochial at times. Its contained nature was also one of its strengths, as new ideas would develop rapidly. Lesser recounts a long-running gag about bicycle wheelies: "Early B had the one-wheel wheelie, the bicycle with one wheel in the air; then Chaplin came along with the four-wheel wheelie; and then somebody came with a lyric saying, 'Four-wheel wheelie? There's no such thing – you'd be flying.' And then [the DJ] Junior Reid finally came along with Poor Man Transportation, saying he just walks everywhere ."
No doubt if you played the song Under Me Sleng Teng now, it would sound cranky; but the Sleng Teng rhythm was the first to be produced with synthetic instruments rather than a band, and it blew away the opposing sound system when King Jammy unleashed it at a sound clash in 1985. It was recycled hundreds of times. Two tracks on the Dancehall album use it, and when you hear them, it is quite obvious that a small Casio keyboard was the beginning and end of the technology behind them. With a little imagination, though, you can take yourself back 20 years to a warm night in Kingston and a revolution that ranks among the most exciting moments in popular music – the constabulary allowing.
Rob Nash, The Sunday Times, November 2, 2008
