Podcast S1 E5: Rastas as Musical Maroons

Welcome to the Jahmi Roc’s Jottings, your seriously silly space to hear deep insights on music, especially reggae and samba reggae. It is my intention to share meaningful musicological arguments and observations, to inspire and, frankly, pass my doctoral exams. Welcome all! I’m your host, Jahmi Roc aka Racquel Bernard. Let’s start jamming!

Welcome to the season 1 finale of Jahmi Roc’s Jottings. Thank you to all my listeners. You’ve stayed with me this far and now exams are around the corner. So it’s time for me to lean into the written muscles of formatting and citations to prepare for the big push.

Today we will be focusing on framing Rastas as musical maroons through Margareth Menezes’s song “Rasta Man”. You’ll also hear me gesturing toward the research that comes after I hopefully pass my exam. Now to review from our last episode. Maroons are once enslaved Africans who resisted and founded free communities in the Americas, especially the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean for our purposes. Maroonage is then the noun for these acts of resistance. Urban maroonage and erotic maroonage as recounted by Raquel Rivera and Lisa Tomlinson are attempts to contemporize this concept and use it as a metaphor for African-descended acts of resistance in neoliberal and neocolonial contexts.

Let me stop for a moment and define neoliberal because I will be honest, I had heard this term a lot for several years, but I am just now more deeply grasping it. To define it I’ll turn to the first scholar on our roster: Miguel De la Torre who edited the volume The Hope of Liberation in World Religions. De la Torre’s research interests are social ethics, theology of liberation, Latinx religiosity, and Santería. In the introduction of the volume he explains

“Neoliberalism is a relatively new economic term, coined in the late 1990s to describe the social and moral implications of global market imperialism (capitalism) and its free-trade policies revived (hence “neo”) since the collapse of the Eastern bloc” (De La Torre 279).

De la Torre does an impressive analogy of how this economic term expands out into unfair treatments of people made poor by its organizational structure. The way he explains this in terms of faith suits my organization of Gender and Spirituality in Post Colonial Liberation Musics. As you listen to De la Torre’s analogy I want you to consider that Reggae Rastas liberate by singing of their faith and their faith is based on a commitment to those who are suffering. De la Torre explains:

“Neoliberalism is a "spirit" which encompasses both an emerging culture and a corresponding morality that justify the economic arrangements brought about by neoliberalism, an economic arrangement that more often than not dehumanizes those made poor by neoliberalism. When the world's disenfranchised are commodified, cultural consequences follow, specifically the disintegration of communal and familial life. As the world's poor compete with each other in the race to the bottom of global compensation, traditional institutions that foster faith also suffer, not due to lack of interest, but lack of time, as more waking hours are expended in the pursuit of the basic necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter)” (3).

This is the nature of the postcolonial world where time is made scarce. I argue that Rastas as maroons reframe senses of time through their daily activities and style of movement. What academics call coloniality is what Rastafari call Babylon. In an attempt to combine the two I offer the term “Babyloniality”. Babyloniality, for me, refers to the structure of serving money regardless of the effects of economic dehumanization. De la Torre contextualizes the work of colonial powers to frame the “white man’s burden” as “bring[ing] civilization and Christianity to the world’s heathens and savages (understood as nonwhites)” (3) He continues “Today, rather than bringing the natives civilization, we bring them democratization, the new buzzword” (3). He frames this as the gospel of neoliberalism. Musical maroons of this period chant down the neoliberal Babylon.

De la Torre will be joined on this episode’s scholar roster by, Rosemary Redford Ruether, Hope Munro, and Licia Fiol-Matta. Taking them together I will explore how women’s voices shape how we understand Rastas as musical maroons in my wider field. Liberation musics like reggae and samba reggae have distinct rhythms and dances associated with them.

“Rasta Man” is a tune that I have grown to love over the years. Its instrumentation is a Brazilian hail to the organization of reggae tunes. The engagement of the organ, the percussive style of the keyboard, the walking groove of the bass guitar, the sway of the horn section as well as the signature guitar upward strumming alert the listeners that they are now entering reggae sound. Menezes with her background singers sing:

Jah Jah Jah

Lala lala lala la la

Jah Jah Jah

Lala lala lala la la

Notice they hail Jah from the very top. Because the figurative “Rasta Man” cannot be understood without Jah. Menezes sings in a skillful delivery the following words

Eu vou contar a historia de um Rasta Man

Que viajou o mundo inteiro de metrô

Na sua vitrola só rolava reggae clássico

Gregory Isaacs, Bob Marley só sucesso

As suas tranças passeavam na cintura

Na sua cabeça uma touca tricolor

Jogava bola lá na rua onde morava

Fim de semana batucava seu tambor

This means:

I will tell the story of a Rasta Man

Who traveled the whole world by subway

Only classic reggae played on his record player

Gregory Isaacs, Bob Marley only success

His locs hung around his waist

On his head a tricolor cap

He played ball on the street where he lived

On the weekend he beat his drum

Menezes lays out the activities of the Rasta man. Name dropping two reggae superstars Gregory Isaacs and Bob Marley.

Then the chorus goes

Reggae

Esse cara dança Reggae

Reggae

Meio maluco mas um homem bom

Rasta Man

Essa cara dança Reggae

Rasta Man

Meio maluco mas um homem bom

Which means:

Reggae

This guy dances Reggae

Reggae

A little crazy but a good man

Rasta Man

This guy dances Reggae

Rasta Man

A little crazy but a good man

“Rasta Man” by Margareth Menezes does a beautiful job of sonically expressing the way Rastafri are understood from a non-Jamaican perspective. I want to hone in on the explanation that this Rasta Man was a little crazy but a good man. This “craziness” I attribute to the insistence that reality should not be how it is. It’s a craziness that is prophetic, a goodness that believes that humanity should be held to a higher standard than what De la Torre calls “a race to the bottom”.

The migration of Rasta culture from Jamaica to Brazil that is referenced in this story calls my attention to the ways that migration in neoliberal contexts plays out. Just like the maroons who kept their African orixas, Rastafari keep Jah. Spirituality is resistance. To put faith in a source higher than the human postcolonial powers. As we discussed before, power is always everywhere, there is no outside to power and spirituality is a way to harness one’s individual power by connecting to a higher source.

In Rosemary Redford Ruether’s chapter on Catholicism in De La Torre’s edited volume we gain a deeper sense of what the postcolonial context looks like in Brazil. She explains

“Beginning in 1964 with the Brazilian coup, a new kind of military regime emerged in Latin America. This “national security state” might be described as a kind of colonial fascism dependent on foreign aid from neocolonial centers of power which acts as a conduit for economic exploitation on behalf of the interests of these outside powers.” (16)

Rastafari like Peter Tosh stood against global fascism. Fascism’s dictionary definitions are, first, a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition, secondly, it means a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. Tosh had songs that sang against apartheid and nuclear war for instance. In a previous episode you heard me recount the lyrics of Bob Marley’s “War”. Rastafari take global news very seriously and they put it in their reggae music. Now to be sure, you do not have to be a Rasta to make reggae music but you cannot make authentic reggae music without respecting the values of Rastafari. Even if you don’t believe in the divinity of Emperor Haile Selassie, I think you should respect the space of a reggae gathering by responding to the artist’s hail of JAH, with an enthusiastic RASTAFARI.

Menezes sang “Meio maluco mas um homem bom”. Rastafari are musical maroons who shake up the ideologies that oppressive societies create. In my field, I am interested in the ways women of color, especially black women engage in their own shaking up of oppressive ideologies. Imagine that Acotirene and Nanny, women maroon community leaders of what is now present-day Northeast Brazil and northeast Jamaica, are succeeded by female urban maroons who do their best to resist neoliberal constraints. This brings us beyond reggae and samba reggae.

At this time we turn to Hope Munro who wrote What She Go Do: Women in Afro-Trinidadian Music, published in 2016. Munro’s fields are Ethnomusicology, Music History, World Music, and Caribbean Studies.

Munro’s work answers gender questions around calypso and soca music.

“Soca music, a modern development on the musical ideas in calypso, was an accompaniment to the sense of fun and freedom that women experienced at these fetes, and appeared to be a way that they could cut loose regardless of what other obligations they might be facing in daily life…I had discovered that there was a strong feminist movement in Trinidad, making it possible for women to make enormous gains in equal access to education, employment, and equal pay during the second half of the twentieth century.”

There are some ways that education and employment are wedded to oppressive systems. Disenfranchisement of women is part of a legacy of sexist oppression. So for this project on Afro-Trinidadian music it's necessary for Munro to stake out the feminist history of Trinidad from where Calypso Rose and others sing.

“Women popular musicians participate in a vernacular feminist project that resists domination while at the same time inspiring audiences to question the relations that cause domination in their own lives” (p. 180).

I too am interested in vernacular feminist projects that resist domination in Jamaica and Brazil. On this season of “Jahmi Roc’s Jottings” my goal was to start defining the field Gender and Spirituality in Postcolonial Liberation Musics. My returning listeners will remember my call to lovers of reggae or samba reggae, promising to shed light on artists like Judy Mowatt, Gal Costa, Margaret Menezes, or Marcia Griffiths, really any pioneering woman of color. In episode 1, I emphasized Judy Mowatt who was a member of the I-Three, Bob Marley’s female backup singers group along with Rita Marley and Marcia Griffiths. “Black Woman” lays out sexist oppression. So I suggest that Mowatt is operating as a musical maroon chanting down racism and sexism in that tune.

What I am proposing with this field is difficult because the reggae industry is very masculine at first glance. Reggae scholarship is also full of attention to Bob Marley. I can admit my own desire to do research on Bob when I was a student at University of the West Indies and my teacher Dr. Waller pointed me towards Peter Tosh’s instead for my primary interest in music for social change.

I’m still interested in music for social change. The ways I think about social change are not just along class, race and sex lines. Those are the three factors I am limiting my own academic project to, but gender is also complicated by sexuality. Perhaps in a project about love I will venture more deeply into gender and sexuality dynamics that I limit in this phase of my research.

I now turn briefly to one vernacular feminist project that Licia Fiol-matta explores in her book The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music. Fiol-Matta’s fields and research keywords include Spanish and Portuguese, Feminism in the Americas, Hemispheric Latin American and Latinx literary and cultural studies, music, popular culture, feminist and queer studies, psychoanalysis, Latin American and Latinx literature, gender, sexualities, race, film, art, and popular culture.

She speaks of singer Lucecita Benítez who came of age in Operation Bootstrap Puerto Rico. Fiol Matta discusses Lucecita’s performance of “Genesis” in 1969 at Primer Festival de la Canción Latina saying

"In Lucecita’s case, no scripts were available to subordinate and tame her eruption. She was not feminine. She did not sing softly or croon about heterosexual love. She claimed the masculine prerogatives of expressing social and political ideas outside of marriage and motherhood, eschewing the roles that her managers sought to implant in her earliest persona. When it came to representing difference, decked in her stage costume that night in Mexico and armed with her mind-blowing delivery, she proved she had no intention of merely supplying a commercial hook to sell songs." (Location 201)

Performances can be liberating indeed. What Fiol-Matta brings up here is the resistance to making music simply to make money. I argue that musical maroon’s are not usually commercial successes although a musical maroon subsists from their musical labor. A celebrity’s refusal to be pigeonholed as “commercial” is another interesting point I may contend with in the future. Liberation musics can and do sell but more importantly they bring people together. I end here on my attempt to contextualize the term musical maroons for my future project.

For my listeners who are wondering, my exams will require me to write 30-36 pages about my field Gender and Spirituality in Postcolonial Liberation Musics that answer three questions my exam committee gives me. I’m asking for good thoughts and positive energy from my listeners as I embark on this journey. Thank you for giving me the extra push to study and explain as I moved through some of the pieces on my bibliography. Season 2 of JRJ will come in 2024 Jah willing.

Thank you for joining me for this season 1 finale of Jahmi Roc’s Jottings! I hope you enjoyed! Don’t forget to subscribe and hop on over to my artist page to hear some music that I hope changes the world for at least one soul!

You can find me on IG, FB, YT and TT @JahmiRoc

I look forward to sharing more musical moments with you next year. Take care and keep jamming!