Forging Identity And Community Through Aestheticism and Entertainment: The Sound System and The Rise Of The DJ

Abstract

There would be times when the records playing would, in my estimation, sound weak, so I'd put in some peps: chick-a-took, chick-a-took, chick-a-took. That created a sensation! So there were times when people went to the record shop and bought those records, took them home, and then b[r]ought them back, and say: ? want to hear the sound I hear at the dancehall last night!' They didn't realize that was Machuki's injection in the dancehall!2 Count Machuki By the beginning of the 1950s, Uve band music's dominance,3 was lost to recorded units of electronically played music in the provision of music to dance goers in Jamaica. Electronically played recorded units of music emerged to dominate the dance floor in the provision of music to dance goers in two main ways: one, by way of the sound system and two, by way of the juke box. The role of the juke box in this context, along with its overall impact on the development of popular music, is addressed for the first time in discourses on popular Jamaican music, by Dennis Howard in the third essay in this volume of Caribbean Quarterly. My focus in this essay is on the sound system, a phenomenon which attracted around itself and engendered a pool of creative talents, and a culture of imagination and an agency, which eventually led to the genesis and development of popular Jamaican music and the island's recording industry. My specific focus is on the rise of the disc jockey or deejay/DJ-(Selector), a key ontological figure and agency in the operation of the sound system as art. And it was in the competition in the operation of the sound system as art that an art form was spawned, which today, appeared to be the music style in which most of the younger generations of Jamaicans have located their popular aesthetic sense, time and space. The catalyst of dus art form was Winston Cooper, better known as Count Machuki, while the development of his art into a viable audio recorded form, outside the confines of its indigenous birth place, rests primarily with King Stitt (Winston Sparkes) and Daddy U-Roy (Ewart Beckford). Count Machuki belonged to the first generation of deejays in the pandieon of the sound system. Others in this category were Vincent 'Duke Vin' Forbes, Leroy 'Cuttin's' Cole, and Red Hopeton. King Stitt and U-Roy belonged to the second generation. The sound system is an electronic mode of playing for mass entertainment, units of pre-recorded music analogically stored on gramophone or phonograph records4 spun on a turntable5 connected to an amplifier, from which an assemblage of speakers (sometimes called house of joy) are attached. A competitive sound system is one with first rate amplification and turntable(s) and an assemblage of good speakers, a growing unimpeachable stock of popular recorded music and a creative (warrior) DJ-(Selector) or team of DJ-(Selectors) who, among other things, has a charismatic appeal, the skill of timing, choreography, oratory, poetics and an improvisational and extemporaneous disposition. Socially, the sound system became a centrepole phenomenon, inciting and engendering creative imagination, consciousness and activism around which an unstated, informal national movement coalesced for aesthetic and ontological gratifications. In this respect, the sound system was able to do what live bands were unable to accomplish. Thousands of dance goers would turn out weekly, especially from Friday evening to Sunday morning to dancehalls and lawns and other ritualized dance spaces across Jamaica. From an iconic venue such as Forrester's Hall at Love Lane and North Street, Kingston, to the ubiquitous zinc or bamboo, or coconut frond (or any combination of these) enclosed space with or without roof annexed to a rum bar or by itself, dancehalls sprang up in large numbers across Jamaica, signaling the making of a cultural revolution that was to have a profound ontological impact on Jamaica and the world. Kingston was the mecca of the sound system. …