We had a recent public conversation: Message in the Music, which for me was like torture. When there are, as Bob Marley said, …‘so much things to say’… a little sounding off here and there on this and that can be so much more agitating than the relative bliss of perfect silence. Music, (and too the dramatic arts) as powerful tools in the arsenal of items affecting cultural formation, begs to be properly understood by angry placard-bearing protestors demanding that society change, yet clueless how to effect just that.
In my contribution to the discussion, I paid scant allusion to powerful experiences we had in the 1990’s experimenting with innovative uses of music in a school setting when we started to practice the total immersion of the entire school day in a perpetual stream of music. The choice of music was part and parcel of the innovation. Roughly coinciding with two major, perhaps related, musicological paradigmatic shifts in the Jamaican public space, we chose to almost exclusively use Jamaican ‘pop’ music (reggae) for content.
The first was the emergence of the ironically Chinese-Jamaican owned (a tangential fact) Irie FM, the reggae radio station protesting against the other ‘uptown’-influenced, colonially- minded stations, then begrudgingly playing however little locally produced music possible, having accepted the ‘civilising’ mission to ‘tame’ the Jamaican soul with more ‘sophisticated’ sounds from ‘foreign’. Irie’s swift and sweeping popularity proved the economic soundness of its ‘yard-first-and-only’ philosophy.
The second was the rise of the ‘Christian Souljahs (soldiers)’, branding for a school of reggae artistes led by the poet and cultural militant Yasus Afari and including artistes like Tony Rebel, Mutabaruka and others). They declared they were marching into the dancehall for war against the misguided practitioners who had hijacked the direction and influence of the music having caved into nihilism as a result of the neglect and sting of being ostraciced or demonized by an elitist society. A new and ignoble face of the music had taken to registering its protest against the social values at the source of its pain by an all-out lyrical rebellion against decency and celebration of the shocking and vulgar in a seeming endless competition for the most explicit usage of Jamaican ‘bad words’, the most crass and lurid descriptions of human sexuality, a torrent of odes to the Almighty Gun and the most cold-blooded expressions of Jamaican ‘badniss’ and ‘rudeboyism’ possible in its lyricism.
These ‘Christian’ soldiers (nothing to do with the church, but affirming the Christ of scripture through the lens of Rastafari) were militantly warring not by condemning their fellow singers, songwriters and musicians who had lost their way, but by producing a deluge of hit records demonstrating the commercial value of positive musical vibrations still, notwithstanding the massive popularity of Downtown’s main answer to Uptown hypocrisy, which had thrown out both baby and bathwater.
We chose to soak ourselves at school in the music of the ‘generals’ of the army: Tony Rebel, Garnet Silk, Luciano, Everton Blender, Buju Banton, etc. We celebrated our best selves from morning till evening in the creative sounds of Jamaica, plus some echoes of African culture, both ancient and modern (Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria’s own massively famous ‘Bob Marley’ was a hit with us).
Academic achievement soared as school became a constant ‘party’. There are so many fond memories:
- The morning Devotion where the kids would quite literally (as once actually happened) dance a hole into the floor (all the jumping and prancing broke the wooden floor). We did not use ‘religious’ music for ‘religious’ devotion, choosing instead to celebrate our ethical themes with appropriate lyrics from the pop genre.
- Boys would dance up such a sweat during devotions they would have to put their drenched shirts to dry and spend the early part of the morning shirtless.
- Children waiting in line for books to be marked and staff sliding from class to class dancing to Quincy Jones’ super funky version of Handel’s Messiah (the closest we came to featuring ‘classical’ music)
Not to worry. All this may sound like pandemonium but it was very, very orderly. The entire school could be brought (this in fact was daily routine) from the heights of adrenaline-rushing bacchanal to sustained meditative silence within 5 seconds at just a hand signal, without a single verbal command, and certainly without barking out any reprimands. No wonder some from the community took to calling the school a ‘cult’; and I suppose they were right in a way, but what they were witnessing was highly programmed behaviour … one could call it hypnosis, but with all participants as equal partners in suggesting a commonly desired reality… self group hypnosis perhaps.
We certainly created an atmosphere …. for living not just learning. Without equivocation, school was the favourite place to be for all students and staff. We were addicted to each other. Extended holidays were massively protested. Our high standards of both academic over achievement [where else will you find once remedial students in Language and Math after a year or two not only able to sit, pass and access scholarships in external exams but do fun stuff like work out algebraic problems from the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and tackle unsupported and with confidence the longest words in the English dictionary?] and self and social discipline attracted the mayor, the press, university scholars – experts in all kinds of fields : Curriculum Development, Transcendental Meditation, Neuro-Linguistic Programming etc. who all came to commend, study and/or strengthen our achievements.
How could a school achieve this measure of success with such strange policies as:
- Results guaranteed or your money back for all school fees’. (Never happened – the need never arose)
- Weekly tests which if you fail three times consecutively, your teacher gets fired (Never happened – I had the best staff in all Portland)
- School as a ‘restaurant of knowledge’ philosophy. Teachers serve. Students order. (Actually happened – when the kids spontaneously decided one Monday morning, after achieving spectacular results on their most recent end of week test, to unilaterally declare a holiday, storm the canteen, relieve the chef of his daily duties and head for the river where they spent the day ‘running a boat’ with ‘looted’ food supplies, in the presence of their teachers who were ‘taken hostage’ for their adult supervision. I knew then the students had gotten the message. They were in charge… and that would only change if they couldn’t handle the responsibilty….as I pondered in amusement when I as Director arrived late to find the school entirely deserted with no clue of what had transpired.)
Music was at the heart of it all.
YeKengalé 