Winston Riley (RIP) and Stalag 17

Reggae producer Winston Riley died this week. Plainly not everybody liked him:

'Winston Riley, an innovative reggae musician and producer, has died of complications from a gunshot wound to the head. He was 65. Riley died Thursday at University Hospital of the West Indies, where he had been a patient since November, when he was shot at his house in an upscale neighborhood in the capital of Kingston, his son Kurt Riley said Friday. Riley also had been shot in August and was stabbed in September last year. His record store in Kingston’s downtown business district also was burned down several years ago. Police have said they know of no motives and have not arrested anyone'.

But you've got to love the man who produced this...



...and this:




...not to mention this...


Stalag 17

Riley's Stalag 17 Riddim has been used as the basis for these and countless other reggae, dancehall and indeed hip-hop tracks (see for instance list at Jamaican Riddim Directory). I believe the original Stalag 17 track, recorded by by Ansell Collins and produced by Riley, dates from 1973. Riley himself put out a compilation album of versions called Stalag 17, 18 and 19, and later there was a tribute album Stalag 20, 21 and 22.

An intriguing question is why the orginal instrumental track was called Stalag 17 in the first place. Clearly it took its name from the 1953 movie about US prisoners of war in a German camp during World War Two; the film in turn taking its name from a real POW camp at Krems in Austria.

I suspect that the name simply reflected the continuing importance of World War Two in popular culture in that period. In England, children in the 1960s and early 70s grew up on a never ending diet of war movies and no doubt it was similar in Jamaica, from where thousands of people had left to fight in the war. Other Jamaicans had travelled to work in US factories and farms during the war - incidentally some of them being detained in camps and punished for 'breaking contracts', a policy that led to a 1945 riot by 1,000 Jamaican and Bahamian workers in Camp Murphy in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Of course The Skatalites had previously covered the theme tune to another war movie, The Guns of Navarone, getting a UK hit in 1967. Later, in 1978, The Clash reworked the theme tune from Stalag 17 - Johnny Comes Marching Home - as English Civil War.

Anyway, there's a sweet irony in the name given by the Nazis to a prison camp being appropriated by people they would doubtless have regarded as 'racially inferior' for not just one track but a whole sub-genre of African Caribbean music.

Billboard obituary here

Shashamene 1982

The news today from Ethiopia is grim, as it has been at many times in the past, with drought, food shortages, torture and political repression. Yet this place has also been the focus of utopian hopes, not least from the Rastafarian movement. The Face magazine (November 1982) featured a fascinating article by Derek Bishton about Shashamene, a township in southern Ethiopia where Rastafarians from Jamaica and elsewhere had settled in search of a better life.

As the article explains, the origin of the setlement was the 1945 Land Grant, whereby Ethiopian head of state Haile Selassie donated 500 acres of land to enable black people from elsewhere to return to Africa. This had followed discussions with the Ethiopian World Federation, a Garveyite organisation set up to support Ethiopia after it was invaded by Mussolini's Italy in 1935.

By the mid 1970s there were only about 15 Rastafarians living in Shashamene, but they were then joined by a second wave associated with the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the group that Bob Marley was associated with. The article documents their lives and hopes, as well as their struggles in the face of poverty, political tensions, and internecine quarrels. Not sure how life is now in Shashamene, but the Rastafarian settlement is still in existence.

For more on Shashamene today and its musical connections with Ethiopian reggae, see this great post at Soundclash

(click on pages to enlarge and read article)

Scientist: Dub from Obeah-Myal to Outer Space

For those who never stop complaining that there isn't enough dub in dubstep comes news that Tectonic Recordings are releasing a whole album of remixes by Jamaican dub producer Hopeton Brown, AKA Scientist. 'Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space' is out next month,and features remixes of tracks by Shackleton, Kode9 and King Midas Sound among others (full track listing at Resident Advisor News).

Scientist first came on to my radar during my Autonomous Astronaut search for interesting space-themed music, in particular his 1981 masterpieces Dub Landing and Scientist Meets the Space Invaders. Brown was only 21 when these came out, having served a teenage apprenticeship at King Tubby's Dromilly Road studio in Kingston. Thirty years later he is still in dispute with record companies about the royalties for these and other early albums (see this interview at United Reggae). With his evident interest in extraterrestial adventures, Scientist can be claimed for the reggae wing of the 'Afrofuturist' current, with their 'projections of Africanized technology, of dreadlocks as antennae, of blackness into space and the future' (Wayne Marshall, Trading in Futures: from Rastas in Space to Dreadlocked Aliens and Back, Woofah #4, 2010).

But Robert Beckford has also linked Scientist to the African-Caribbean past:

'What I find most interesting at this juncture in the development of the genre is that Brown, who made his name at the Randy's studio, used the self-description 'scientist'. Those familiar with Caribbean religious cultures will know that this is a designation for an indigenous healer or Obeah-Myal practitioners... Brown infers that dubbing, in this culture at least, is a holistic enterprise involving mind, body and spirit'.

Beckford sees dub as healing, part of 'the pharmacosm of sound in African cultures', and further that 'dub as an act of deconstruction' involving 'taking out and bringing in' sonic elements draws on 'healing practices in Jamaican folk culture'. He describes 'the Obeah-Myal complex' as an 'African religious survival' practiced by the slaves and their descendants in Jamaica: 'Obeah involved the deployment of malignant spirits on adversaries through a variety of tactics and techniques. To combat Obeah, Myal, the good medicine, was sought. Myal medicine provided protection against the bad spirits and returned the individual and community to equilibrium' (Robert Beckford, Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change, Routledge, 2006).

A similar point has been made by Lloyd Bradley, who Beckford quotes: 'It's an ancient African medicine that splits the body up into seven centres or 'selves' - sexual, digestive, heart, brain etc. - and by prescribing various herbs and potions would, as practitioners always describe it, 'bring forward or push back' different centres: remixing, as it were, a person's physical or mental state into something very different... In the same way by adjusting the controls at the mixing desk, a tune... can be reinvented' (Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: when Reggae was King, Pluto, 2001).

Anyway here's some medicine:

Stop the Tivoli Gardens Massacre

The precise details of what's going on in the Tivoli Gardens area of Kingston, Jamaica are still unclear. But it is already established that at least 44 civilians have died in a massive police/army operation to arrest alleged gangster Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Doubtless some of the dead are unofficial soldiers in some gang or other; doubtless too many are entirely innocent. Meanwhile residents of the area are trapped in their homes, some without food, water or medical care.

In the poverty-stricken parts of Jamaica off the tourist trail, people have long since been caught up in the crossfire between the interlocking miltia of the 'security' forces, gangsters, and the main political parties. In May 1997 for instance, three women and a six year old child were shot dead by state forces in Tivoli Gardens (see Amnesty International report). In July 2001, at least 20 people died there in a similar operation.

Tivoli Gardens has an important place in musical history. Aside from its role in reggae and dancehall (including the weekly Passa Passa street parties), it gave its name to a whole genre of UK drum and bass: 'The term "jungle" first emerged on a Rebel MC sample in 1991. This terms is associated with an area of Kingston, Jamaica, called Tivoli Gardens, known as "the Jungle" and frequently cited in"yard tapes" (Les Back, New ethnicities and urban culture: racisms and multiculture in young lives, 1996).

Here's a couple of old classics, sadly still relevant.

From 1978: U Roy - Peace & Love in the Ghetto:



From 1976: Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves ('in the street, scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition').

Keep it Tight

Some interesting reflections on tight trousers, masculinity and sexuality cropping up.

The always excellent Pop Feminist has the remarkable tale of (then) Black Panther Party fugitive Eldridge Cleaver and his 1975 attempt to launch a range of clothes in Paris in keeping with his theories about black supermasculinity. I've only reproduced a bit of the picture, you must check out the whole thing

'The pants that men wear now will be looked upon as girls' pants after my models are sold' (Eldridge Cleaver)

Meanwhile Wayne&Wax wonders about the influence of gay style on the sometimes homophobic world of Jamaican dancehall, with the superbly titled post (Tight)Pantshall & Metro Cool, or “How Mi Look?” “Gay!” . He has also posted on the response this has generated, and has linked to a story from earlier this year about the distinctly homophopic No Tight Clothes track by Brooklyn rappers Thug Slaugher Force.

What would these tight-trousered guys make of it?

"Well you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man, no time for talk"