Ready for the world

Can reggae really cross over again? Jamaican producer Jeremy Harding sizes up the post-Shaggy world.

By Jeff Chang

The real ting

In Jamaica you drive on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car. In Montego Bay, the main urban center on the North Coast, you hug the curves on narrow two-lane roads. Even at rush hour you slow for cows and goats chewing grass along the gutter side, because apparently all the animals in Jamaica are free-range.

It's Thursday, a school night, and the youths have taken over Mobay's narrow streets. Traffic is backed up along the roads leading into and out of the town, and transactions at Sam Sharpe Square, the unmetered taxis' drop-off and pickup destination, are slowed by the weight of teenage bodies.

They stream like tributaries toward the ocean, where, in a waterfront spit of dirt called Urban Development Park, 10-foot-high columns of speakers encircle a small stage. They pass dice games by kerosene lamp, higglers selling Red Stripe and Ting. They ripple through the 6:30 p.m. commute – concrete mixers, oil trucks, family vans – caught bumper to bumper on Bottom Road, and through a small gap in a low barbed-wire fence. Smoke from dozens of portable roast peanut and jerk chicken carts hazes the half moon.

They have come to honor the life of Shorty Malcolm, a Mobay football hero with the Jamaican National team, the Reggae Boys, in song. A free show has been set up, and all of the countryside has shown up. Waitresses in uniform stride off their shift and into the dance. Young denim-skirted mothers with toddlers on their arm mingle with the Tupac-shirted boys and spandexed girls. A turbaned Boboshanti rests in front of an ear-bleeding bassbin tower, his fingers extended finger-to-thumb in greeting.

Our host Ruddy explains the significance of the gathering. Malcolm was one of only two from the north to have made it to the National Team. His death by car crash earlier in the week left the North Coast reeling. "They call us 'country,' " he says. "But these are the people that do not make it to Sumfest. This is down-home people."

As the Venom Band sets up onstage, readying for a star-studded bill that will feature Elephant Man, Baby Cham, Ghost, Ninjaman, Tanto Metro and Devonte, and Beenie Man, among many others, Candle Sound System, the local "foundation sound," plays classics. Bob Marley's "Chances Are" inspires a resounding wheel-up and cries of "Big tune!" When Dennis Brown's "Revolution" is cued, the crowd goes wild and hundreds of lighters raise. As Brown sings the opening line – "Do you know what it takes to have a revolution?" – the country youths shoot aerosol spray into the butane, and suddenly dozens of flames lick up the cool night sky.

Context is everything. Of all so-called world musics, reggae seems to have been the most thoroughly remade in the first world's image – in forms ranging from rancid to sublime – so that here in the middle of it the real thing almost feels unrecognizable. To these foreign eyes and ears, for whom live reggae has often meant fields of swaying, madras-jacketed blond dreadlocks or stuffy urban clubs of buppies hoping a Winston or Patra can give them their groove back, 10,000 Jamaicans – of all generations, hues, and classes – singing along to the Crown Prince is impossibly dreamlike.

Dependency and the Shaggy effect

Back in the USA, it's taken an urban crossover effort from Shaggy to put Jamaican music back on the first world map. (And although Hotshot has sold four million copies, he still hasn't appeared in any of the major urban music magazines.) After five years away, A&R execs are once again quietly prowling the streets of Kingston in search of the next Jamaican superstar.

Dancehall producer Jeremy Harding is ambivalent about this development. "That coattail effect? Musically, I don't think so. The road that Shaggy takes bypassed all of the local support from Jamaica."

"Most of these [Jamaican DJs] are not willing to travel that road," he says. "They need to know that when they go down the street, they're hearing their music played by the likkle store-man. They want to be on the boom-boom riddim because what they want is this hard-core, street respect."

Harding's breakout "Playground" riddim became a spearhead for the current wave of first-world interest when Beenie Man voiced "Who Am I" over it. The single sold more than 300,000 copies and prompted Virgin to sign Beenie in 1998. A Kingston native, Harding got his bachelor's degree from Montreal's McGill University. While his colleagues were apprenticing in Jamaica's studio system, Harding was holding down club nights and a college radio gig at CKUT-FM, spinning hip-hop, R&B, and reggae. He sampled the Roots to build one of his first riddims. Harding, in short, is well positioned to talk about dancehall's ability to take it to the first-world bridge.

"The problem is when there's nobody [like Shaggy] out there, then the whole international industry thing shuts down," he adds. "When Shabba and Cobra dem were out there, it was vibrant! Everybody was getting on – Spragga Benz, Beres Hammond, Tony Rebel. It was crazy! Sign, sign, sign – dancehall's the hottest thing. And it run its course."

The problem might be familiar to a globalization activist. It's an economic one, a problem of a dependent export economy prone to volatile boom-and-bust cycles. "Everything [in Jamaica] was tourism and exports," Harding says. "And all that changed when reggae music became our biggest export."

And it is a cheap export. A 45 rpm single is made and sold for about U.S. .83¢. (About .17¢ goes back to the producer and the artist.) But Jamaican music has historically been notorious for piracy and bootlegging, awash in complaints of theft and unpaid royalties. Record companies, especially foreign ones, have found themselves legally vulnerable. If they paid a producer for an artist's tracks, the artist might never receive a penny. If they paid an artist for the tracks, they might not be guaranteed that the artist owned the song rights.

During the mid '90s, Harding says, after the wave of signings peaked, "The government was like, 'OK, let's push reggae. What do we have to do to push reggae on an international scale?' "

So in 1993, in an effort to rationalize the music industry and ready it for the global economy, Jamaica passed its first copyright law. The first effect, as if to verify the unevenness of music-industry practices, was a flood of lawsuits. Most notably, Studio One producer Coxsone Dodd sued former Island Records mogul Chris Blackwell for the royalties to "One Love," a hit for Bob Marley and the theme song of the Jamaica Tourist Board. In turn, many artists sued Dodd for what some called 30 years of unpaid royalties. One love, indeed.

Now, Harding says, a few Jamaican labels have set up proper artist-royalty structures. Foreign companies from England and America have benefited from clearer artist-contract and song-licensing standards. And, most important, power has shifted away from the producers to the artists.

"It was just a whole maturing of the industry," he says. "You moved from this era where the producer was the big man, and the artist was a struggling person, and they kept this kind of control on them. Then the whole thing shifts, and the artists start to ask questions. You go and you get international exposure, and you meet people, and you get a lawyer, and the lawyers start getting involved, and then people start to clean up their act."

"There's a lot of reggae music being incorporated into other kinds of music; you see them stealing ideas from Jamaicans," he adds. "They're using that dancehall beat. Rappers are using Jamaican slang. If they can understand that, then maybe our music can be appreciated by Americans as well. What happens is that when you leave here and you try to go into that market, you got to be organized."

A new world dancehall

Globalization has created its own cultural convergences. Timbaland's beats clearly grow out of some Halfway Tree. Missy Elliot's "Get Your Freak On" sounds as if it's fresh out the box from some Kingston pressing plant. Harding listens as closely to Rockwilder as he does to Richard "Shams" Browne.

In the global market, Harding says, he has to learn how to compete with all of them: "Who's gonna care about dancehall reggae music when 10 riddims come out and 10 riddims sound the same? Dancehall is the same boom-boom-dun-boom-boom. People getting turned off by it."

"Worse now, you have this whole thing with [BET and MTV now on] cable with all the R&B and hip-hop music. A lot of kids are just like, 'Yo, this is what we listen to now. We didn't have a choice before, but now we have a choice. I can listen to DMX, I can listen to Jay-Z, I can listen to Cash Money, I can listen to Ludacris. All this hip-hop is different-sounding, new and fresh.' "

In some respects, hip-hop's cultural hegemony has to be a bittersweet pill, even to aficionados like Harding. It could be argued that hip-hop's flirtation with dancehall has never gone much deeper than that of post-punk's a decade earlier; in retrospect, the fact that American producers layered an old-school break under a Rayvon or a Beenie tune wasn't really much of a favor. Jamaican music offers its first world patrons –Wu-Tang and Wyclef, Artful Dodger and Shyne – bonus street cred, but it's fair to ask if that's been a one-way street.

Still, down yard, they aren't wasting much time worrying about it. Like Dave Kelly in his work on Baby Cham's Wow: The Story, Harding is actively extending dancehall's palette, trying to meet hip-hop on island terms. One of Harding's first offerings was the Lightning riddim, a dazzling string arrangement compiled on Greensleeves Rhythm Album #7. "To me now, as a producer, you're thinking, 'All right, if they're listening to this, and their whole brains are geared to that, clearly I have to start being creative,' " he says.

Ambitiously, he plans for five more riddims this year, and he has high hopes: "If I have it within me to do that, and you get two, three, four producers who think like that, then you raise the bar for the whole industry. This is how you're gonna get the ears of the international market."

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