Versions, rewinds and dance argument

A dancehall crowd is not a passive audience. The rewind — the selector snatching a record back to the start because the room demanded it — is a public verdict delivered in seconds. Around it sits a much longer argument about taste, respectability and what Jamaican music owes its listeners.

Eight bars to decide

A record drops. The room recognises the first bar, and something happens — a roar, a hundred lighters, a wall of horns from phones, or nothing at all. If the response is big enough the selector will pull the record back and start it again, sometimes twice, sometimes five times. That is the rewind, and it is the most consequential piece of music criticism in Jamaica, delivered by people who are not critics, in about eight bars.

The verdict is immediate and it is binding. A tune that gets forwards in a few big dances will be pressed, played and voiced over; a tune that meets silence is gone by the weekend, whatever anyone thought of it in the studio. Producers have always known this, which is why the dance rather than the radio has been the real test market for most of this music's history.

It also makes the audience a participant rather than a target. The crowd is not being asked whether it enjoyed something afterwards; it is being consulted while the record is still playing, and its answer changes what happens next in the room. Very little popular music anywhere operates with that short a feedback loop.

The most consequential music criticism in Jamaica is delivered by people who are not critics, in about eight bars.

Slackness and culture

The longer argument concerns what the records should be about. From the early 1980s a strand of dancehall built on explicit sexual boasting — slackness — became commercially dominant, with Yellowman its most visible figure, and it drew immediate condemnation from churches, newspaper columnists and much of middle-class Jamaica. Against it stood cultural lyrics: Rastafari themes, social criticism, uplift.

The division was never as clean as the argument implied. The same artists moved between modes, sometimes within one record, and the sound systems that played slackness at midnight played roots at dawn. What the quarrel really tracked was class: which Jamaica was allowed to represent Jamaica, and whether a music made in the poorest parts of Kingston had to be respectable to be defended.

The pendulum swung publicly. The mid-1990s brought a widely noted turn towards conscious lyrics, with Garnett Silk, Luciano and Sizzla prominent and Buju Banton's Til Shiloh in 1995 marking the shift in a career that had begun somewhere very different. Critics called it a return; it was at least as much the same performers responding to the same argument.

Who gets to judge

Academic writing eventually took the dance seriously on its own terms. Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood, published in 1993, and her later Sound Clash argued that dancehall's language, humour and bodily performance constituted a literature with its own rules rather than a failure to meet somebody else's. The books were themselves controversial in Jamaica, which rather proved the point.

Meanwhile the dance kept judging without reference to any of it. A selector's reputation rests on being right about a tune before the evidence exists, and the crowd's authority comes from having nothing invested — no label, no advance, no column to file. Between them they have decided the fate of far more Jamaican records than every critic and playlist committee combined.

The argument travels

Both the mechanism and the quarrel exported cleanly. The rewind is standard practice in British sound system culture and in the club forms that grew out of it, from jungle to grime, where an MC calling for a reload is doing exactly what a Kingston selector does. So is the argument: every one of those scenes has had its own version of the slackness debate, usually conducted by people who had never heard the word.

It is worth noticing what the rewind assumes. Stopping a record and starting it again only makes sense if everybody present already knows what the record is worth — if the room is expert. Jamaican music has been made for forty years in front of an audience that is treated as knowing more than the person on the microphone, and much of what is distinctive about it follows from that.