The LitBlog Co-Op reads Ngugi

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If you're a Bahamian nationalist, a Caribbeannest, a pan-Africanist, or just someone who doesn't believe everything that you see on TV or hear on the radio, you ought to be reading Ngugi wa Thiong'o.Ngugi is the reason I decided, decades ago, to begin writing plays. Ngugi, who was originally christened James in the colonial Kenya of the early 20th century, was once a novelist himself -- one of the greatest in all Africa. When Achebe ruled the west coast, Ngugi ruled the east. He was a Marxist, a Kenyan nationalist, and, during the war of liberation (otherwise known in the empire as the Mau-Mau Rebellion), chose to reject his Christian name in favour of the Gikuyu Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote four great novels in English, and then decided two things: one, that he would no longer write in the colonizer's language, and switched to Gikuyu, and then that he would no longer write novels, because the masses of people he was trying to reach inhabited an oral society, and theatre would reach more of them than novels.He impressed me, and I began writing plays.Now, after over 20 years, Ngugi has written another novel. And it's available in English. And it's been featured over at the LitBlog Co-Op, here, over the past month or so.

Just so we know we're not special

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In terms of racism and racist rhetoric, I mean, here's a tale about racism from Russia. A Russian Newsweek reporter and blogger, who is ethnically Kazakh, was attacked in Moscow by four young men.Here's an excerpt.

Most likely, it was an accidental attack by the neo-Nazis. Today, it may well be considered a routine crime ), or maybe not. Funny that on this very day I finished a piece on the [United Russia party] members who now have to love the “Russia for the Russians” slogan. A piece with some interesting bits on [the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the DPNI].

What's most interesting to me are the comments. They sound so very similar to what I hear regularly about Haitians. Most interesting is the go-back-home theme that keeps recurring.

... in your Motherland, an ethnic Russian journalist exposing local nationalists wouldn’t have survived even a couple of publications. And you go on living and exposing. So everything is fair and logical. And then, if you are such a fighter against Nazism, why don’t you do this in your homeland? And we’ll deal with nationalism here ourselves ...No one is keeping you here. You can move and live somewhere in Turkmenistan. Because it doesn’t make any difference whether there are Russians around or not. But to many people it does matter, and the Russian people mainly want to live in a country where there are 80-90 percent Russians, and not 10 percent. […] So 20 million Kyrgyz come to Russia, and 50 million Chinese, and 10 million Azeris. And they multiply. And as a result, only 10 percent of Russians will remain in the country. And this won’t be Russia anymore. All our history will have to be crossed out - what for have we been building the country for? […] The thing is, in a normal state, the state itself would’ve been involved in immigration policies.

Whenever the topic of Haitians in The Bahamas is raised, the rhetoric becomes predictable. It's predictable because it's the very same rhetoric that is used by all racists to justify their perspectives on people they believe don't belong among them. The following comments are usual:

  • "They" should go home to their own country

  • "They" shouldn't complain about what happens to them here because "they" are immigrants (usually the word illegal is added here)

  • "They" are using up all the resources "we" pay for

  • "They" multiply faster and more than "we" do and "they" will soon outnumber "us"

I'm not debating the truth or lack of it about any of these statements. But I am pointing out that they are not unique to us. They are not special to Haitians. They are remarkably identical to the kinds of statements made anywhere in the world by people whose environments are changing rapidly and whose reaction to that change is to blame the Other, rather than to adapt and move forward. The language, and the rhetoric, is fundamentally racist, and that is true of whether the person who is making the statement is white, black, orange, yellow, or pink.

The meaning of "black"

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In this year of commemoration, when we meditate (or ought to meditate) on slavery and its aftermath, it might be interesting to consider the fact that the connotations of the word "black" are not universally negative. On this blog (link got from Global Voices, again), two languages are considered in which "black" means freeborn or original, something with positivity and strength.It's worth remembering there are limits to our realities, especially when those realities denigrate who and what we are.Check it out:

Looking through Jeffrey Heath's 1998 dictionary of Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language spoken in and around Timbuktu, I was struck by the following entry:bibi * a) [intr] be black, dark [cf bii 2] [INTENS: tirik! T, fi! N] * be freeborn, noble (not a slave) *...

Fake or real -- a story of the blogworld

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I found this report on Global Voices very interesting. I'm not very familiar with the Brazilian blogworld -- the lusosphere -- but this week the big story from the big country in South America is about a Brazilian blogger who faked her own death, apparently because her blog presence was part of a study about social behaviour on the world wide web. The whole thing is found here, but here are a few excerpts:

... 2007 started with the Lusosphere being surprised by the announcement of the death of a well known blogger. MEG [Maria Elisa Guimarães] became famous as the editor of SubRosa, one of the first-generation blogs in Brazil, and also because of her relentless promotion of conversation among bloggers through an active and warm-hearted commenting and emailing activity. The eulogies performed throughout the Lusosphere gained a great deal of attention as MEG was darling to many of the first A-list Brazilian bloggers. Never-the-less, something peculiar about Meg’s announced death kept ringing in some of her closest friends.

and:

The first report about the presumed fatality appeared in a post [’My Woman Died’] from Paulo José Miranda, a Portuguese blogger who writes as if he were Meg’s husband, despite confessing that they met in person only once(!), during a weekend in Sao Paulo. There were details of a diagnosed cancer in Meg and a trip to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for specialized treatment. Contradictory signals started to arise when some bloggers found out that the IP address used by Meg in her ‘last’ posts and comments was not from a US ISP, but it was instead coming from some place covered by Telemar Norte, a company providing Internet access to the northern region of Brazil. Reactions to the growing evidence that Meg’s death was a hoax, and that she was now online with another name [Tereza Quetzal] turned a mourning blogosphere into a crossfire of judgments.

and:

The warning I make - as long as warnings have any practical usefulness — is: our blog is not our world, and is not our soul, and even less our heart. Our blog is just a space where we publish fragments of what we are. If we take it too seriously, it — the blog — will “kill” us, even though virtually. A big hug to you, Ina, and be sure to never be killed, ok?

and:

I have some information that I consider very accurate in relation to the facts. Meg is doing a study about human behavior in the Blogosphere. She is doing that and will soon launch a book which, according to my source, will be very good and enlightening. It can really provide an excellent x-ray about human behavior. When they heard that she died, everybody was praising her, she was the best person in the world, and now everything is quite the inverse. I’ve already ordered mine.

Ideas and comments from around The Bahamas on culture

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... and Junkanoo:Ian Strachan on culture

Mr. Smith: When you wrote "God’s Angry Babies" which was very sympathetic to the illegal immigrant population, my information now is the significant amount of sympathy that was there before has been some what eroded by the new image of the new illegal migrant. Any impact from that group on the new Bahamian?

Mr. Strachan: I think that the history of Haitian migration in the Bahamas is a lot longer than the casual observer might imagine. Really, the connection stems back 100 years, what we have now though is a more pronounced separation in terms of living conditions between the Bahamian of the 21st Century and the Haitian peasant who is risking his life to come here, their living conditions haven’t changed much in 50-70 years.

Mr. Smith: But there is also a new Haitian.

Mr. Strachan: I think he is a new Bahamian. That’s my view.

Maurice Tynes on Junkanoo

I have not participated in the junkanoo parades for a number of years. While sitting in the bleachers and watching the parades during this period, I have not been impressed. It appears that the groups, or their leaders, are losing and may have lost their creative edge. The regurgitation of themes, the similarity of costumes from year to year and from group to group, and the seeming difficulty of groups to define or stamp a unique brand has led me to this conclusion. The management and administration of the parades need major overhaul. For one thing I do not believe that junkanoo leaders can or should head the Junkanoo Commission. There seem to be too many inherent conflicts. It appears that one or two junkanoo leaders have the arrogant view that they own and should control every aspect of the parade. I believe that the postponement of the Boxing Day Parade was a direct result and manifestation of this arrogance. How could you postpone a national cultural parade twenty-four hours before the scheduled start of that parade? A weather system could stall, dissipate or radically change direction within twenty-four hours. We do harm to our cultural development locally and internationally when we make these selfish decisions. We all appreciate the time, effort and Labor of love that go into preparing for the parades, but the spectators have as much right to ownership of junkanoo as the leaders. The Junkanoo Commission should be headed by persons who are unattached to junkanoo groups and who have knowledge of junkanoo and possess the highest integrity. We do have such persons in the Bahamas. Some of these persons may have at one time been part of a junkanoo group, but have been unattached to the group for a number of years. Junkanoo groups should be represented on the Commission but in an advisory and consultative capacity.

Lynn on being an artist on the plantation

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Lynn Sweeting writes a wonderful post on art and the artist in a tourist economy.Some of you may be wondering why I called it the plantation. If you have, you're new to this blog, and you certainly haven't heard of Ian Strachan's book, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. It's worth a look if you haven't.Here's what Lynn has to say:

It so happens that for ten or fifteen years I was a house slave on the tourist plantation, I was a Maryann sifting sand in a comfortable place. I wrote and published many stories for the tourism masters. Some said I was good at it. I was rewarded with a little public acclaim, and a trophy. I quite forgot I was a slave. I remembered again (or realized for the first time) when a story I wrote for the masters turned out to be a complete lie, and was causing outrage in Exuma. Obediently I had written that this community was happy that a huge influx of foreign yachts was coming through their harbor, thanks to a new marketing campagne. The truth was that these enormous boats were causing an environmental disaster, pollution was threatening to ruin a pristine ecology, and for added outrage, the people aboard these floating hotels never had to set foot in town, they spent not a penny. The islanders were in an uproar to see a story in the paper that erased them so effectively and so cruelly. I was horrified, and ashamed. That was the last story I ever wrote as a house slave on the tourist plantation.

Now, from one point of view, it's important that we tell good tales to our visitors, that we describe the happiness that comes from the five million-plus tourists who come to our shores. The trouble is, as Lynn describes above, we run the risk of obscuring the truth by telling these tales. Worse, the message we give ourselves is that our experience is worthless, our experience doesn't count; what matters is the packaging, and nothing more.I could write about how the Ministry of Tourism often falls into the trap of selling packaging and nothing else, but I've bashed that venerable institution quite enough on this blog. You only have to go back a few months to see the last discussion, and since we haven't moved much further from that point, I'll leave it alone (if you want to find the discussion, just put "tourism" into the search box up there and browse on your own time). This time I'll just let Lynn speak for herself.

What culture's good for -- in real terms

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Now this is a radical idea.

All of sub-Saharan Africa receives just over $1 billion per year from the US in economic aid. If everyone in the United States gave up one soft drink a month we could double our current aid to Africa. If everyone gave up one movie a year we could double our current aid to Africa and Asia.We have an even better idea:If every American would buy 10 songs by African Artists -- We would DOUBLE the amount of money the US is currently sending to Africa. This is what we mean by 'Tune Your World'.

The danger of anchor properties

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Chris Lowe on Weblog Bahamas makes a point that's been concerning me for a while. The thing about the islands in which the anchor properties are going to be located is that there's going to be a radical change in the way in which people live. To wit:

The thing is that within their communities they are equals.

If I have water all have water. If one's power is off, all power is off.

If I'm eating fish, we all have fish. When the mail comes, it comes for us all.

It has been this way for generations, and there is a certain equilibrium that has been maintained with the common understanding that the burdens and tasks of this type of community life must be shared.

Now though, the Anchor arrives, crown land sold cheap by Nassau political opportunists who tout from the capital the benefits to the community of an oversized development smack dab in the middle of their idyllic existence, an existence little understood by the hooked developer who sees profits in the scenery unspoiled but by subsistence living of a few who know what they have.

Read on.

The complex law about trademarks, globalized

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I found this story very interesting in my browsing this morning. In short, it's the account of the tricky law of trademarking, as practised in South Korea, and it affects everybody's favourite coffee chain, Starbucks.It interests me on two sides of the coin. First, the explication of Korean law is instructive. Second, the information that's gleanable about trademarking and copyright law in general is also instructive. For us, who haven't even begun to categorize and protect our collective intellectual property, it's worth a study.Here's a snippet.

People keep pestering me about Starbuck’s trademark problems in Korea. I cannot tell you how many times people who know me and role as a blogger have said “What’s going on in that Starbucks thingy?” The problem on commenting is twofold. One, my interest in the facts, let alone forming an opinion, is basically nil. Second, this really is about as close to straight-up trademark case you can get, it is what it is. However I thought the announced decision last week by the Korean Supreme Court against Starbuck’s appeal against Elfreya (dba Starpreya Coffee) coupled with announcement by Starbuck’s CEO in Hong Kong last month to vigorously protect its trademarks in Korea has prodded me into posting this.

Martin Luther King Day

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That's today.This is what the Writer's Almanac has to say:

It's the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., (books by this author) born in Atlanta (1929). It was 1955, early in King's new tenure as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on one of that city's busses. King was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was formed with the intention of boycotting the transit system. He was young — only 26 — and he knew his family connections and professional standing would help him find another pastorate should the boycott fail, so he accepted.

In his first speech to the group as its president of that organization, King said: "We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."

The boycott worked, and King saw the opportunity for more change. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which provided him a national platform. For the next 13 years, King worked to peacefully end segregation. In 1963, he joined other civil rights leaders in the March on Washington — that's where he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Here's a link to the speech.

On Sousaphones, Junkanoo, and Emancipation

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Between Christmas and New Year's in The Bahamas, barring any major unforeseen events, there is really only one story: Junkanoo. Traditionally, Junkanoo is held on Boxing Day and New Year's Day every year, and the competition is stiff — so much so that I've grown notorious for suggesting that Junkanoo is a great Bahamian sport, and not the cultural event that people love to claim.As far as I'm concerned, the core and the root of Junkanoo is its music. It's the music that sets us apart from all other New World street festivals. And for those of you who are under thirty years old, I'm not talking about the brass and the tunes that are played during the parades. These are recent additions, developments that have taken place in the last twenty-odd years. Junkanoo music at its core is rhythm.When I teach, I explain it this way. What do you need to have the Junkanoo sound? Some people, young people mostly, might say brass, but they'd be wrong. The brass, the tunes, are the embellishment of the music, and when you have nothing else, you don't look for a horn to make Junkanoo. You look for a drum. And on that drum you play a basic rhythm (in fact, there are a score of different rhythms that are incorporated into Junkanoo, but that's another story). To that you may add another drum or two, each playing a different rhythm (or not). And then you add the cowbell. Then you stick a whistle in your mouth, and you have the music. It's only after you have laid down the rhythm that you look for the brass.Think about it. That's why there aren't many true Junkanoo tunes. That's why the music that people put on top of the rhythm is usually adopted from somewhere else, and arranged around Junkanoo. In the past, the only notes in Junkanoo were those that could be blown with a bugle. For those of you who don't know your brass instruments, a bugle is a horn without valves, and like the conch shell or the sheep horn or the black horn. Those horns can only play one or two notes, depending on the skill of the blower. Well, a bugle can play several, but they're several notes apart - hence the traditional Junkanoo tunes like "A-Rushin' Through the Crowd".And that's it. You can make Junkanoo music with a drum, a pair of cowbells, and a whistle and nothing else. The last thing you make Junkanoo music with is a horn.And yet.For a quarter of a century - almost from the moment the Music Makers brought brass to the parade and played tunes and revolutionized the way in which Bahamians at large thought about Junkanoo - the Junkanoo parades have been sucking more and more brass players into their presentations. We are at an interesting time in the development of Junkanoo, and it's this. We're at a point where young people, the set who take part in Junior Junkanoo, seem to believe that the horns, the brass, are the central part of the music. I have been at celebrations for Junior Junkanoo - most notably at the most recent awards ceremonies - where the music was begun by the sousaphones.Hello.This frightened me no end. The sousaphone, for those of you who don't know, is an instrument that was invented by Americans to allow a bass horn to be carried for long distances as part of marching bands. They're named after the great American composer of band music, John Philip Sousa. They are not Bahamian; they are not African; they are not integral to the tradition of Junkanoo, having been introduced in the late 1990s by musicians who had cut their teeth on the marching bands of the Church of God and the like.Now there isn't anything inherently wrong with them. I like the sound that sousaphones make in a modern Junkanoo line. Not as much as I like the sound that the bugle used to make, or the rhythm and off-notes of the black horns, but that's me. If a sousaphone, or a trombone (my own brass instrument) or a trumpet or a flugel horn or a euphonium or a saxophone or a tuba has a part in a Junkanoo parade, that's fine. Change can be good, and change is often healthy. But when change is indiscriminate, when it occurs in a vacuum, when the core is not understood or worse, not respected, then change becomes more than change. It becomes do-it-yourself imperialism.Let me be clear here. I'm not anti-Sousaphone; I'm not even anti-brass (much, any more). Just as long as we remember that the core of the rush is the drum, the cowbell, the whistle, and the two-note horn. Just as long we respect the fact that Junkanoo music is complete without the tunes; just as long as we understand that our preference for tunes is in some way evidence of our distance from the Africa from which this rhythm sprung.For African music does for rhythm and percussion what European music does for melody. Please understand me carefully. I am not claiming that Africans don't understand melody, or that Europeans don't understand rhythm. What I am saying is that these societies privilege the different elements of music differently. Where African societies developed a whole range of percussive instruments, and made music around textured polyrhythms and drums that talk and beats that convey information, European societies did similar things for their melodic instruments. (In Africa, too, melody was often carried by the voice, just as it was in the Junkanoo parades of the early twentieth century.) In the Caribbean, we marry the two, often seamlessly. Hence the famous Nettleford reference to "the rhythm of Africa and the melody of Europe".We Bahamians pay homage to Europe in different spheres - in our marching bands, in our choral traditions (which follow both our major cultural influences), in our popular music, in our ringplay and some of our dances. Our African heritage has been under threat for centuries. In the beginning, it was outlawed by our white brothers; later, it was out-preached by our own black selves. Until the 1980s, though, you could hear its rhythm in Junkanoo, in the drum.In Junkanoo, once, we remembered Africa. In Junkanoo, once, when the lead drum rolled over and the other drums joined in, we celebrated the land where the majority of us came from, and by which all of us have been changed. This still happens, by and large, in the senior parades. But in the junior parades, where we're grooming the Junkanoo of the future, the sousaphones start the rush. In our future parades, will our drums be drowned out by the brass our colonists brought?I trust not. For to believe without question that Junkanoo music can be started by a sousaphone - that symbol of the USA, the cultural imperialist par excellence - is a clear demonstration of how little pride we have in what is truly ours. I'm not talking about feelings of pride here; you can feel proud of many things that don't really deserve that feeling. I'm talking about real pride, the kind that transcends emotions and resides at the level of the brain, of consciousness. Not to know what a betrayal of Junkanoo it is to have the music start with an American brass instrument that was invented in 1893 - two generations after the emancipation of the Bahamian slaves, and easily a hundred years after we began celebrating Junkanoo - is a failure of some magnitude on the part of the Bahamian society and culture as a whole. And perhaps, just perhaps, it's an indication that slavery never really ended at all.

Geoffrey Philp on Caribbean Culture

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Well, it's not exactly Geoffrey; he's quoting Oliver Stephenson. But what he says has resonance not only for today, but also for here.

The question is, when will we start to recognize the power and wealth in our cultural arts? Hasn’t history taught us anything? How long are we going to dwell on “a prophet is never appreciated in his own lifetime?” Indeed, our artists are truly the visionaries,, of any society.How much longer are we going to dwell solely on bauxite, tourism, cigars, rum and ganja as our mainstay? There should really be no excuse for any talented West Indian to be wandering the streets of Port-of-Spain, Kingston, Georgetown, Kings Town or Port-au-Prince neglected.An initial incentive must be given to the cultural arts for our artists and would-be artists. Not just a shoddy cultural arts program, not lip-service, but something solid and tangible that one can actually experience in its reality. Scholarship programs should be offered by foreign investors, like the scholarship programs that some bauxite companies offer to those interested in engineering and chemistry. The same should be done for the arts.In Jamaica, it is true that there is a new cultural arts center where people are being trained in dance, music, drama and painting, but then where do these people go with their acquired skills after they have left the institution? Where do the musicians, singers, dancers and playwrights go? They either take the sheet of paper that they have received to try and find your standard 9-to-5 job, or they go abroad.We in the Caribbean treat our cultural arts with such condescension that it is not only heart rending, but pathetic. Our artists in the Caribbean suffer whether we want to accept this or not, it is fact.

More here.

Belated Happy New Year

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And there're many reasons why 2007 is an important year for The Bahamas:

  • Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (March 25, 1807)
  • Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the 1942 Burma Road Riot/Uprising (June 1-2, 1942)
  • Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the introduction of the Secret Ballot in New Providence (1942)
  • Forty-Fifth Anniversary of the First Votes cast by Women (January 10, 1967)
  • Fortieth Anniversary of Majority Rule in The Bahamas (January 10, 1967)
  • Thirtieth Anniversary of the First Woman Elected to Bahamian Parliament (July 19, 1977)

And here's a specific reason why 2007 is an important year for my family:

  • 20th anniversary of my father's death (August 24, 1987)

We thought you'd like to know.

Posting, or not (a Junkanoo meditation)

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This is just was supposed to be a brief post. I'm surprised that the last post I made was last Friday! I hope those of you who check here regularly had a good Christmas.I began a post on Junkanoo, which I thought was good this year, once the general chaos that surrounded the change of date because of "weather", but it was getting so long I decided to move it to Word and rework it as an essay. The strange thing about it is that the post seems to be a little long for that purpose, Essays on Life averaging around 1,000, and the post looking like it wants to stretch out to 1,500. Nevertheless. I need an essay, so that's it.But that's not ready, so here's this one for size. This year's Junkanoo stirred a little excitement in me for the first time in a long, long time. I'm someone who has not only been attending Junkanoo off and on all my life, but who has rushed and judged and worked as an administrator and had a brother and cousins and uncles who were Junkanoo fanatics. But the last time I was truly excited by what I could see as innovation on the parades were the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the off-the-shoulder dancers were evolving into major elements of Junkanoo, when 3-D costumes were blowing people's minds, before tricks were able to hide the sloppy pasting of costumes and when choreographed dance was only just beginning to slide into the parade.I am one of those Junkanoo aficionados who disliked much of what happened in the 1990s, starting with the moving of brass from the periphery of the parades to the centre, the speeding up of the rhythm so that drummers were required to do no more than imitate drum machines, and the centrality of tricks. Some stuff I did appreciate were the emphasis on cowbells, and the development of a whole new way of cowbelling — the one musical development that I regarded as evolution rather than selling out — and the accompanying development of the beller costumes. And what I really did respect about the 1990s was the development of groups other than the Valley and the Saxons — because the 1980s were really a two-group show for most of the time.But anybody who knows me well will know that I have been saying for a long time — in my head it's almost ten years, but I may have been articulating it only for about five or six, since the turn of the millennium — that Junkanoo is going through a creative and organizational slump. The great leaders and innovators, the people who created this new parade are growing old, losing energy and struggling with internal politics, and not creating what they were, and the younger generation didn't seem to be having the same audacity and breadth of vision. People were content with playing it safe, it seemed; those people who were innovating and pushing boundaries often found themselves at the peripheries of their groups because the groups and the fans wanted victory, not creativity, and the judging system, and the philosophy behind it — which is more of a philosophy of popularity and mass appeal than one that empasizes quality and innovation — was extremely conservative.But this year, something changed.There have been clues to what's been happening for years. The major radicals in Junkanoo over the last 10 years have been the members of the B group category, many of whom have an entirely different agenda from the A groups, and who, having nothing really to lose, have introduced many concepts to the parade that have caught on and revolutionized the A groups' presentations.The musicians who dropped out of the parade at the end of the 1990s because the music of Junkanoo had been relegated to the back seat by the major leaders, have been extremely critical of what has happened to Junkanoo music for some time, as have I. Most of the Junkanoo leaders are visual artists, not musicians, and for some time it's been common to make the absurd claim that trained musicians are not capable of judging Junkanoo music, which is entirely different from all other music in the world.The main criticisms that musicians responded with stemmed from two primary sources. One (which I have often argued) is that what makes Junkanoo unique in among carnivals and street parades in general is that it is a music which is at its core a rhythmic conversation. The central instrument is the drum, and the secondary instrument is the cowbell. Everything else is an embellishment. Melody is not a primary part of Junkanoo music, which is only right, given the very direct connection Junkanoo has with West African music, where the primary impulse is usually rhythm, and where melody is secondary.The other (related to the first, but not necessarily in agreement with it at all times) is that musical identity is measured not only in rhythm but in tempo and emphasis, in harmonic progressions and in melodic choices. The core Junkanoo beat is rhythmically similar to the Brazilian samba — which didn't surprise me when I first heard about it, because I know the strong Yoruba tradition in both countries. However, Junkanoo is a slower beat, and the rhythmic emphasis falls in a different place. In samba it falls on an off-beat; in Junkanoo it falls on the downbeat. This is what gives samba its swing and what gives Junkanoo its strong marching impetus. The speeding up of the rhythm in the 1990s, and its relegation to support of tunes rather than its placing at the core of the celebration, eroded the distinction between Junkanoo and samba and threatened the very survival of the unique Junkanoo beat. (Here I'm talking about the basic beat, not the variations that once marked the different stages of a Junkanoo participation, or the adaptations that distinguished the different Junkanoo groups and let you know who was coming by the rhythm alone. That is a different complaint altogether.)Anyway, coupled with this speeding-up was an empasis on the bass drum, which is a relatively new innovation in the city parades, and a real one (adopted from the Fox Hill Congoes, who have always had a strong bass core to their music, as opposed to the city groups, who relied far more on the tenor drums). Those people who were new to Junkanoo and were learning to beat in the real-fast days and who sometimes couldn't master the more complex lead rhythms were often assigned to play the bass beat, which is primarily a two-note beat. In true Junkanoo music it's supposed to sound like the words "da FOOT", with the emphasis on FOOT, and a nice short clipped "da". But many of the bass drummers are young people who listen to a whole lot of hip-hop and so they are playing an entirely different rhythm, one which they've learned from abroad. And so the rhythmic base of Junkanoo, once again, was in danger of being lost.And the introduction of melody into the parade and its newfound centrality was a decidedly mixed blessing. For some reason I won't go into here or now, current generations of Bahamians seem to have lost the ability to distinguish tunefulness in melody. In other words, there's a massive tolerance for music that is horribly out of tune; and Junkanoo is the worst offender. What is overlooked is that for many people, music that is played out of tune is physically painful (I'm one of them, but thank heaven my pain is minimal, and out-of-tune notes just make me screw up my face and want to stick my fingers in my ears). I have known individuals, though, who have to leave a room when they hear notes that are not right because their heads hurt or their stomachs turn. For years, brass players in Junkanoo appear to have simply begun blowing their instrument, without bothering to make certain that their horns were in tune with everybody else's, with the result that the music was often painfully off. (It still is at many of the tourist events, which is one reason I avoid Cafe Johnny Canoe on Friday nights).Finally, and this is a criticism raised by those people who understand not only Junkanoo as a so-called cultural expression but also in its historical context as a channel of social protest, 99% of Junkanoo has sold out. It doesn't criticize anything any more, but rather perpetuates a shallow and complacent view of society and the world that emphasizes the pretty and the whiteman friendly and that doesn't offend anybody at any time. There's plenty of prettiness, of tune-choosing and colour-matching, but little to no observation of social ills, no interpretation of Bahamian society to its audience, no showing of ourselves to ourselves, no critique, no edge. Sting is the obvious exception, as were the P.I.G.S. before them, but even Sting is growing vanilla. The difference between the Toters and the Civil Servant song is wide.This year?Let me say this. This Boxing Day, most of my criticisms melted away.The rhythms were tighter, and more obviously Junkanoo. The speed of Junkanoo music has slowed down considerably, and drummers are once again able to do more than beat four strokes. The best of them are being given the scope to provide the rhythmic variation that adds texture to the music, and fewer of the bass drum players are playing hip-hop rhythms, though some of them still are falling into that trap. And almost every A group had a horn section that was at least in tune, and that had sensibly arranged music. Finally, it seemed to me, brass had found a fit with Junkanoo, rather than the other way around.The costumes were more thoughtful, better finished, and better executed parade-wide than they have been for a long time. The themes seemed to have been more carefully selected, and their interpretation was worth waiting for; each group provided something actually to think about. And of course, this year, the younger groups not only came into their own, but they were recognized for having done so by the judges at long last.The only thing that still holds true is that Junkanoo has very little edge. It's still a celebration of prettiness, a hailing of all the icing in the society, but with no critique of the recipe that made the cake. The Music Makers, who were the group one looked to for the social commentary back in The Day (when their theme Law, Order and Discipline hit the streets back in the early 1980s, they were taking a risk, because they were satirizing the rhetoric of a government in which corruption was rampant, and which was in the process of being exposed), went safe, providing history without critique.But you can't have everything. At least this year I can say that what I saw in Junkanoo was art as well as sport.We've come a long way; we're climbing out of the canyon, and we're heading for a mountaintop.I hope it's not too soon to rejoice.

How did I miss this?

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Marlon James on How To Make A Jamaican Music Video.It's hilarious.  Here's a taste.

Come to think of it, forget, the ghetto; you must shoot in the uberghetto. Remember that poor Jamaica is the real Jamaica. Forget high-rise buildings, Taino tribal grounds, the second oldest railroad track in the world, and the most fascinating network of underground caves in the Caribbean. You need bad roads, shit running down the side walks, zinc fences, tenements and gunmen, because this is the real Jamaica. Please have the locals stack 12 speakers together, 3 in a row and have the natives come out to wind their waists and slam dominoes on the table or your viewers will think that it’s Haiti. You must shoot in district of Waterhouse. This will be in your contract for Waterhouse is the music video ghetto of choice, probably because the quick to be violent blackies aren’t so violent there. But be sure to buy the men in mesh merinos a hot Guinness or you might not make it out of there alive. Remind yourself that if Alicia Keys can shoot there, you can too.Should you meet a gunman make sure to genuflect in the usual fashion. But feel free to pass off an offensive comment so that the Jamaican crew can never shoot in that place again. The nature of that comment is up to you but forgo the racial for Jamaican Negroes are not black. Make sure you have extra film left for the midnight dance so you can remark how bestial and sexual the natives can be while dancing. Listen as the Jamaican producer remarks that this is in keeping with our African culture, even though he or she will not do such things until after the wrap when they take you to Quad Nightclub where uptown people grind each other. Try a dance yourself but restrict it to hands, you don’t need to remind us that white people cannot dance for us to remember that we’re still safe. Because once you take our dances we’ll have nothing left! Don’t forget the smiling children.