Slackness and culture: dancehall's long argument with itself

The recurring 'respectability' frame through which middle-class and institutional Jamaica has judged dancehall's lyrics, dress and dance, a central analytic lens in the scholarship of Carolyn Cooper, Donna P. Hope and others for reading the culture's controversies.

Professor Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican literary and cultural-studies scholar whose work reclaimed Jamaican popular culture, orality and "slackness" from dismissal as vulgar and reframed dancehall as a legitimate object of scholarship — work that has led her to be described as the "queen of dancehall and reggae studies." Born 20 November 1950 in Kingston and raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household, she attended St Hugh's High School and won the Jamaica Scholarship (Girls) in 1968. She holds a BA in English (1971) from The University of the West Indies, Mona, and an MA and PhD (1977) in English from the University of Toronto, where she studied on a Canadian International Development Agency fellowship. After teaching at Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts (1975-1980), Cooper joined the Department of Literatures in English at UWI Mona in 1980, rising from Lecturer to Professor over 37 years there before retiring in 2017. She was Campus Coordinator of the Women's Studies Working Group (1982-1992), Head of the Department of Literatures in English (2000-2003), and Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (2005-2008). In 1994 she established the Reggae Studies Unit at UWI Mona and led it for more than a decade, and in 1997 she founded the annual Bob Marley Lecture. Her first major book, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, argued that Jamaican popular forms long dismissed as crude — dancehall lyrics, proverbs, Anansi stories — carry serious cultural and political meaning. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) extended this reading to the sound-clash arena and dancehall's global reach. She co-edited Bob Marley: The Man and His Music (2003) with Eleanor Wint, and edited the collection Global Reggae (2012). Beyond the university, Cooper was a long-running weekly columnist for the Sunday Gleaner and co-hosted broadcast programmes including Man and Woman Story on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, Question Time on CVM Television and Big People Sup'm on PBC Jamaica. In August 2013 she was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction for outstanding contribution to education. Also known as Carolyn Joy Cooper.

The dancehall and older mento tradition of double-entendre, coded double-meaning wordplay that signifies sexual or pointed content while evading literal censorship, a craft skill at the centre of the 'clever versus crude' slackness debate.

Marion Marie Hall, born at Galina in Saint Mary on 12 July 1969, was performing on local sound systems at fifteen and took her name in 1987 from Tenor Saw, whose singing she had grown up on. Working the Stereo One system in Kingston, she made her way into a dancehall in which slackness was a male franchise, and matched it — explicit, unapologetic, and funny — which got several of her performances banned in parts of Jamaica while equally lewd men were left alone. That double standard is most of what her career is about. "Smile", cut with Vitamin C in 1999, went gold; "Underneath It All" with No Doubt in 2002 went triple platinum; the Grammy it won went to No Doubt, on whose record she was the featured vocalist. On 15 December 2015 she was baptised, left dancehall, and has recorded gospel since as Minister Marion Hall.

Rexton Rawlston Fernando Gordon, the deejay who took dancehall to the American mainstream and paid for it. He was the first dancehall artist to win the Grammy for Best Reggae Album, and won it twice consecutively — As Raw As Ever in 1992 and X-tra Naked in 1993 — on a major-label deal with Epic that no Jamaican deejay had held before. The gruff, bass-heavy delivery and the "Mr Loverman" crossover made him the most visible Jamaican artist in the world for a period in the early 1990s. His American standing collapsed after homophobic remarks in a 1992 British television interview, and the commercial consequences of that moment are part of the record. In 2020 Reggae Sumfest announced he would be crowned King of Dancehall at the festival.

Garnett Silk (Garnet Damion Smith, 2 April 1966 - 9 December 1994) was the voice of the early-1990s return to roots and Rastafari, at a moment when dancehall had moved decisively the other way. He was born in Manchester parish and started at twelve on the microphone as a deejay, billed Little Bimbo and later simply Bimbo, working sound systems including Conquering Lion and Destiny Outernational and chatting alongside Tony Rebel. The turn from deejaying to singing is the whole story of his career: Steely & Clevie renamed him Garnet Silk for the smoothness of the voice he had been hiding behind fast chat. Working with Bobby Digital he cut It's Growing (1992), and with King Jammy and others built a run of records — "Hello Mama Africa", "Zion in a Vision", which went to number one in Jamaica, and "Mama" — that gave the cultural revival a singer people could organise around. Gold followed in 1993. He died at 28, with his mother, in a fire at their Mandeville home, after a gun discharged accidentally and struck a propane tank. The scale of what was lost is measured by how quickly the singers who came after — Luciano, Sizzla, Capleton in his Rastafari turn — were understood as continuing something he had started.

The enduring Jamaican debate contrasting 'slackness' (sexually explicit, transgressive dancehall lyrics) with 'culture' or 'conscious' lyrics (social comment, Rastafari and morality); scholars such as Carolyn Cooper have argued slackness can carry subversive social meaning rather than being mere vulgarity, while critics tie it to moral decline, making it a defining argument about the music's values.

The Jamaican term for explicitly sexual and transgressive lyrics, and the pole that culture lyrics are measured against. It is not a modern arrival — mento was full of it — but it became a defining argument in the dancehall of the 1980s, and the pendulum between slackness and consciousness has swung repeatedly since. Which side a record falls on has often decided whether radio would play it.

Conscious sing-jay deejay (Patrick Barrett, b. 1962) whose 'Fresh Vegetable' and 'Sweet Jamaica' led the early-1990s cultural revival; founder of the Flames Productions label and the Rebel Salute festival, he is a respected foundation-to-ragga deejay.

Winston Foster, born in Kingston on 15 January 1956, was abandoned as a child and raised at Maxfield Children's Home and Alpha Boys School. He had albinism, which in the Jamaica of his childhood meant open rejection, and he built the whole act on it — Yellowman, the name and the joke, taken up before anyone else could use it against him. He came second in the Tastee Talent Contest in 1978 and won it in 1979, worked the dances with Aces International, and by the early 1980s was the most popular deejay in Jamaica. In 1981 he became the first dancehall artist signed to a major American label, Columbia; roughly twenty albums followed in that decade alone, including Mister Yellowman (1982) and Zungguzungguguzungguzeng (1983), whose hook has been quoted by rappers for forty years. The 1984 Columbia record failed when the label pushed R&B and disco at him and he went back to his own sound. Skin cancer was diagnosed in 1982 and spread to his jaw; surgery between 1984 and 1986 permanently altered his face, and he returned to performing in 1987. Yellowman has said it was Starky, a PNP-affiliated Arnett Gardens figure, who ensured he got his chance on the microphone, at a time his albinism otherwise limited his opportunities.

The mid-1990s resurgence of 'cultural' and Rastafari-influenced 'reality' lyrics within dancehall, associated with singers and deejays such as Garnett Silk, Tony Rebel and Luciano and with the era's conversions, widely read as a swing of the slackness-versus-culture pendulum back toward conscious themes.

Carolyn Cooper's 'Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the Vulgar Body of Jamaican Popular Culture' (1993), a foundational academic study that read Jamaican oral and dancehall culture, including slackness and the body, as legitimate gendered cultural expression rather than mere obscenity.