Dub-b-[ing] the Threshold All of the music genres mentioned so far have been part of an ongoing evolution, which have by and large taken place on the peripheries of specific cultures. They find themselves in the threshold contested by Bhabha and Hardt & Negri. In Kingston it was in the more marginalized areas where musicians expressed their frustration about their reality. This becomes evident in ska and early reggae, in Kingston. Lyrics often focused on the hard times of Jamaican reality, as ?Scratch? Perry and Bunne Lee lyrics demonstrate: Bunne Lee: The heat is on. In the Bronx, it was the African American and Latino working classes that also found expression in recycling recorded material. Rap lyrics became a legitimate form of expression laid on top of looped breaks, influenced by the practice of Jamaican talk-over, toasting and dub. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five echo Perry and Bunne Lee?s reflection above in the style of the Bronx: Broken glass everywhere And in Bristol, musicians were able to find an autonomous voice more or less following the models developed in Kingston and New York. Here is Tricky, when he was part of Massive Attack: It's a beautiful day, well it seems as such Who cared about Bristol as a cultural mecca prior to the development of down-tempo, and trip hop (and now grime and dubstep)? Mario Bl?nquez has reflected on this, arguing that the kind of creativity that took place in Bristol happened because the structure of the city allowed musicians to get lost in their bedrooms and studios and create their own compositions with some isolation from mainstream music culture.35 Bristol, Kingston, and New York are among many other cities that have helped shape music globally since the rise of dub. What this points to is that music is always in a constant state of change. It is never pure or impure. It just keeps evolving. Its power comes from constantly thriving on the threshold, from which, when it moves to the mainstream, it must find its way back away, again to produce the next progression in culture. If we reconsider the history of dub and the struggle of MC?s and rappers that has just been outlined above, we will note that progression in music culture has happened in part because of social struggles that preoccupy Bhabha and Hardt & Negri. Music was often the vehicle for the politics that shaped Jamaica since WWII. Reggae was about West Indians coming to terms with their roots in Africa and their hard life in Jamaica, which was mythologized in a more comfortable form for the mainstream once their music was introduced to the rest of the world via England with the recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers.36 In the Bronx, Afrikaa Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and their contemporaries developed their work in part influenced by the music of Jamaica. They also created work around a struggle, and the same happened in Bristol with the movement of trip hop, down tempo and Drum ?n? Bass. All these movements never developed in the center of culture, but the periphery. A periphery that must be noted has been always marked by colonialism. The individuals who contributed to these musical genres often had social limitations imposed on them, as Hardt & Negri would claim; and yes, many were interested in finding stability, rather than being in a constant state of flux. This search for stability, often due to lack of education and social awareness beyond trying to survive day to day, plus having problematic roles, has become fetishized through the glorification of commodities in bling bling culture. In rap songs from the mid/late eighties one can notice the desire for the stability that money is often equated with: Thinkin of a master plan What we find in these lyrics, which has been recycled in many ways by those who followed, is the possibility to break out of dire straits. In this way the constant push for indecidability that Hardt and Negri write against can be used by those who search for ways to break through their limitations: that which defines the individual?s instability becomes the very means to move on to a more appealing (albeit not necessarily critically productive) state of living. This is what Eric B. & Rakim rap about in ?Paid in Full? above; and once that rap is recorded to then become a commodity, the rappers may find themselves in a position of possible decision-making (depending on the deal they made with the record company). Here is the moment where social awareness can be important as Hardt and Negri write, ?Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is.?38 Rappers who have struggled monetarily in their upbringing often glorify their ability to make money with their compositions and rhymes, and find this form a way of taking control of their production, though not necessarily the reality in which they function. They often do this while not understanding the contradictory social structure that enabled them to get there based on particular stereotypes, that may bring some economic stability but at the price of becoming labeled in a way that is comfortable to mainstream culture. Due to this reality, Bling culture has no critical conscience. It is the fetishization of hip hop culture. The lack of critical awareness, then, is part of a vicious circle created by lack of education and positive role models. This vicious circle is hard to break out of because now it has become the means for corporate America to earn profits from hip hop as a major industry. Gangsta rap is the most obvious example of this development. With these contradictions on trying to take control of the tools of production, what one can find in Bhabha?s proposition of searching for agency within the threshold is that, even when one has been pushed to the margins, and is not there by choice, one can actually do something productive within this space. One can actually take control of the tools available if one figures out how to do that. The problem for those who find themselves in such situations is to realize that they do have a way to improve themselves and their communities. The problem is that realizing such complexities comes with education, and education is a commodity that the poorer classes, which are marginalized often cannot attain. With this limitation in mind what is of most urgency here, is not to privilege class over ethnicity and gender in the struggle for social change, but to see them as mutually intertwined, much how the concepts of version, instrumental and dub are in music culture. Bell Hooks is able to focus on issues of class, gender and ethnicity with great precision; her case is specific to African American culture: Racial solidarity, particularly the solidarity of whiteness, has historically always been used to obscure class, to make the white poor see their interests as one with the world of white privilege. Similarly, the black poor have always been told that class can never matter as much as race. Nowadays the black and white poor know better. They are not so easily duped by an appeal to unquestioned racial identification and solidarity, but they are still uncertain about what all the changes mean; they are uncertain about where they stand.39 Hooks shows how class is important and must be discussed, but that class difference will never be resolved unless we also take into account its intimate bond with gender and ethnic differences. The reflection on dub as discourse so far outlined has been written in a way that I hope will be compelling to those invested primarily in critical discourse as well as those who are participants in music culture. The outline of dub in juxtaposition with the critical discourses so far entertained shows that culture is always in a constant state of flux. It is ever-changing, on a feedback loop from the periphery to the center. The question becomes how to come to terms with this flux. While Bhabha and Hardt & Negri may disagree, their discourses need not be exclusive. The creative practice behind dub has played a marginal yet major role in all of the musical manifestations so far discussed. People often know about dub, but most may not consider themselves major fans. They often like music that is influenced by dub, and because of this they may buy an occasional dub album. Since dub has consistently stayed on the periphery of culture it is a rare element that shows that the liminal space promoted by Bhabha can be useful; and yes, once one becomes aware of it, a state of flux can be celebrated as the means to an identity that will need to keep being redefined. A question to consider then is, can epistemology be appropriated for post-colonial ends, and not dismissed as Bhabha argues due to its status as a meta-narrative, as a blanket term that allows Western hegemony to stay alive? And should one not question Hardt and Negri?s criticism of post-colonials for their generalized approach? Is not post-colonial discourse too diverse to be dismissed with the swift examination of only one example (Bhabha)? Like dub is to music, postmodern and postcolonial discourses are complementary to Critical Theory. The concept of dub then can be thought of in terms of dialectics, because the producer needs to become aware of how to work with what is already given. The new will come out of the material already in place?the material manifested already shows what it will be, but it will only be experienced and understood in the actual process of enunciation; whether in the studio as in the case of Tubby and other dub artists, or in media culture at large. |
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