[One of my favorite cultural works of the last year was Small Axe, filmmaker Steve McQueen’s anthology film series about the West Indian community in England from the 1960s through the 1980s. I’m not an EnglandStudier, but I think there are plenty of ways to apply the five wonderful films to AmericanStudying. So this week I’ll highlight a handful, leading up to a Guest Post on McQueen’s prior films!]
On the danger of
cultural appropriation and how to make sure we remain more inclusive instead.
By far my
favorite of the five Small Axe films,
and quite possibly my favorite movie I watched over the last year, is Lovers Rock, McQueen
and his co-writer Courttia
Newland’s tribute to the West London reggae house party scene set over the
course of one exhilarating 1980 night. While the film’s title refers in part to
the blossoming romance between Franklyn (Micheal
Ward) and Martha (Amarah-Jae
St. Aubyn) at its center, it also alludes (as I learned while researching
this post, a phrase that I’m sure will apply equally to every subsequent post
in the week’s series) to a popular
musical genre and movement in 1970s London. Indeed, that last hyperlinked
article goes so far as to call Lover’s Rock “reggae’s Motown,” an argument that
this English musical moment was as profoundly influential in terms of its
cultural and historical contexts as was that hugely significant Detroit
musical scene in America. Yet that same article’s telling subtitle adds
both that Lover’s Rock “influenced The Police” and yet that it “was sidelined
in its native Britain.”
Those two
phrases might seem contradictory, but I would argue that the opposite could
also be true—that the appropriation of a genre by white artists can lead, and all
too often has led, precisely to the sidelining of the genre’s original, foundational
voices and communities. I think we’ve seen a very similar trend play out when
it comes to reggae in the United States, with some of the genre’s biggest hits
being covers by white artists (like Eric Clapton’s cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the
Sheriff” and UB40’s
cover of Tony Tribe’s
reggae version of Neil
Diamond’s “Red Red Wine” [yes, the song was originally Diamond’s, but UB40 specifically said
they only knew Tribe’s reggae version when they covered it]). Moreover, reggae-inspired
white groups like UB40 or
Sublime have been the most prominent or at least best-selling artists
within the genre overall. Of course all those songs and artists are examples of
the cross-cultural and creolized trends I highlighted in yesterday’s post (and
that extend to the worlds
of rock and pop music more broadly in American history to be sure), and
aren’t in and of themselves a bad thing. But when it comes to the relative
obscurity of original
reggae artists in comparison, particularly artists of color, I think the
word “sidelined” would still be all too apt; Bob
Marley might be an exception, but if so he’s the exception that proves the
rule.
So how do we
push back on and reverse that unfortunate trend? The obvious answer, and not a
bad one at all, would be to listen to and share widely many more of those
original songs and artists, including all those in lists like
this one. But one of the best things about the film Lovers Rock is the way that it highlights the multilayered cultural
and social meanings of a genre like reggae, the spaces and communities—from an
individual house to the neighborhood of West London to multi-generational
trans-Atlantic families—that are part of every song, every artist, and most
especially every communal performance and party. So better remembering reggae,
in 1980 London and 2021 America alike, also means engaging much more fully with
all those cultural and communal layers, with all the ways that lovers rock.
Next Axe
application tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on Caribbean American connections?
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