Abstract
Rastafari is an Afro-Jamaican religious and social movement, which has since the 1970s spread outside of the Caribbean mainly through reggae music. This paper contributes to the academic discussion on the localization processes of Rastafari and reggae with an ethnographic account from the Nordic context, asking how Finnish reggae artists with Rastafarian conviction mobilize this identification in their performance. The paper focuses on one prominent Finnish reggae sound system group, Intergalaktik Sound.The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition. In this field, Intergalaktik Sound attempts to preserve what they consider to be the traditional Jamaican form of reggae sound system performance. For the Intergalaktik Sound vocalists, this specific form of performance becomes an enchanted space within a secular Finnish society, where otherwise marginal Rastafarian convictions can be acted out in public. The author connects the aesthetic of this performance to the Jamaican dub-music tradition, and to the concept of a ‘natural life’, which is a central spiritual concept for many Finnish Rastafarians. The article concludes that these sound system performances constitute a polycentric site where events can be experienced and articulated simultaneously as religious and secular by different individuals in the same space.
Highlights
The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition
In its various forms, has emerged during the past decade as one of the most visible and vibrant forms of Finnish popular music. This Jamaican popular music form is in Finland in a process of increasing diversification, where it is articulated to different fields of cultural production
A number of bands and artists, such as Jukka Poika or Reino Nordin, have articulated the sound of reggae with the lyrical and musical conventions of Finnish pop music, creating a new musical genre named suomireggae – ‘Finnish reggae music’. Alongside with these local reggae artists, contemporary Jamaican dance music, or dancehall music, is enjoying unprecedented status in urban Finnish clubs. In contrast to these developments, a number of reggae aficionados are at the same time increasingly concerned over preserving what they consider as traditional reggae music, or roots reggae, which they see as integrally linked to the Rastafari Afro-Caribbean political and religious movement
Summary
My paper is based on the seminal work of Mark Slobin (1993), Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. The crux in Slobin’s study is the flow of music and performers between different cultural units or spheres To understand this process he uses the sociolinguistic concept of ‘code-switching’, which he defines, referring to William Labov, as ‘moving from one consistent set of co-occurring rules to another’. For example, might be a valuable resource in the context of reggae clubs, but if the speaker does not possess other more suitable language resources, and uses this form of English in a tax office in Finland, it can be seen as merely a sign of incompetence These patterns of authority and power emerge from real or imagined indexical centers, which have become increasingly polycentric in nature, with numerous indexical orders referring to different centers. To contextualize the Intergalaktik Sound performances within the wider Finnish reggae culture, I will use the interviews with two reggae promoters and organizers, who have been instrumental in forming the relevant performance sites for these vocalists
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