dancehall artists agree to reduce homophobic content

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DannyL

Wild Horses
(hey John! Joined at last)

What I personally found really loathsome about this piece was this paragraph:

Nowadays when I go to put on a CD, it's old tune," he says, and stop laughing at the back. "Alton Ellis, the Meditations, the Heptones... From that I start to teach myself some of the history of this music. I like dancehall, but de foundation and conscious tune really what me love." Now we just have to work out whether he's kidding.
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Now is he just mocking patois - which is bad enough - or is he sneering at the fact that Collie Budz likes some "old" Jamaican music., which is obviously rubbish? I'd love to see Exile on Mainstreet get a hard ride like that in The Guardian. Someone shoot him.
 
STN

STN

sou'wester
DannyL said:
I'd love to see Exile on Mainstreet get a hard ride like that in The Guardian. QUOTE]

Such a thing is entirely possible, but it would be written in the most pseudo-daring iconoclastic way, in which the cheeky scamp of an author would assume everyone loved the album except clever old him.
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john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
DannyL said:
(hey John! Joined at last)


Now is he just mocking patois - which is bad enough - or is he sneering at the fact that Collie Budz likes some "old" Jamaican music., which is obviously rubbish? I'd love to see Exile on Mainstreet get a hard ride like that in The Guardian. Someone shoot him.
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Welcome aboard the rantin' wagon! ;)
 
mos dan

mos dan

fact music
UFO over easy said:
Dan, are you in a position to give Paul Lester a smack for that article? He quite clearly deserves it.
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never met him, probably never will.

anyway, i don't know why everyone's so upset about the Collie Budz piece: this guy clearly knows what he's talking about. He is, after all, the author of such seminal literary broadsides as

Oasis: The Illustrated Story

and

The Verve: The Illustrated Story

see Paul, you're not the only one who can be a condescending prick.
 
STN

STN

sou'wester
It really bugs me that more people don't remember that incident in the 90s where The Gallaghers were talking the radio about a childhood spent breaking into cars and suchlike and their mum rang up the radio station and said 'they were lovely boys, they did no such thing!'. Now that's inauthenticity!
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
STN said:
It really bugs me that more people don't remember that incident in the 90s where The Gallaghers were talking the radio about a childhood spent breaking into cars and suchlike and their mum rang up the radio station and said 'they were lovely boys, they did no such thing!'. Now that's inauthenticity!
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Ahaha. :) I hope she was telling the truth, rather than just trying to save family reputation.
 
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DRMHCP

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Ahaha. :) I hope she was telling the truth, rather than just trying to save family reputation.
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Think she was as i remember how when they first came out they were mouthing off about very misdemenours which the police investigated (to piss them off i think) and eventually issued a statement that basically said that theyd admitted theyd made it all up; which tallied with what the old bill thought anyway. Noel's pre-fame girlfriend said the same thing too saying he hardly ever left his bedroom yet alone ever got into any trouble...

...typical pathetic ficititious rebel past so universal among modern rock musicians...come to think of it I'd go as far as to say Shaun Ryder is just about the only one I can think of who really was the real deal
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
...typical pathetic ficititious rebel past so universal among modern rock musicians...
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True, but I dare say if my every utterance was recorded and pored over like NG's I could be equally embarrassed.

It's pretty common for 20-something blokes to make out they were more of a rascal than they were. We all wanted to be the Artful Dodger when it comes down to it.
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
Doesn't a lot of the homophobia in dancehall come from deeply held biblical beliefs?
How can these views suddenly just be withdrawn?
 
J

Jezmi

Olli Oliver Steichelsmein
Don't believe the hype, this "act" is just for politics. Sizzla performed "Nah apologize" last Thursday, which is probably the most unambiguous anti-gay song he has.
Beenie man signed a similar letter not too long ago.....
 
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gabriel

The Heatwave
gumdrops said:
i know a lot of people are tired of the slackness, homophobia, etc etc (prob the same way ppl are tired of the same old money, cash hoes angle in hip hop for example) but there is and must be more to dancehall than that.

http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2102953,00.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/06/dancehall_reggaes_chequebook_c.html
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weirdly i hadn't even read these two stories until just now, this thread really got completely derailed didn't it!

and yeah gumdrops you're completely right about there being more to dancehall than this story, there is so much more to dancehall than its homophobia and i find it miserable that it's so often viewed as this entirely negative, corrupting influence, often linked with sexuality. this view of black music seems to be an ongoing theme in white culture (jazz? reggae?), even though through the passage of time the white culture invariably ends up celebrating the older forms of black music as being some kind of bastion of musical and cultural purity, which makes it even weirder

it's depressing that this aspect of dancehall is all that is ever focused on by big media like the guardian/bbc. while jaimie hodgson's article above (the blog one) makes some good points about the deep-seatedness of homophobia in jamaican culture and about artists' motivations for renouncing it (though it is also important to note that some artists' motivations for going on about homosexuals in the first place - or indeed weed, guns, ghetto suffering, politics, sex or other staples of dancehall lyrics - are the same, ie it's about their careers as much or more than their personal beliefs), he/she doesn't really seem to have much of a handle on what dancehall music is like or about (e.g. references to deejay being the jamaican term for rapper or dancehall being the 'rap-driven scion of reggae' or the failure to acknowledge that many other non-gaybashing forms of lyrical expression exist within dancehall). sorry that's a bit of a long sentence!

i actually wrote to the guardian a few years ago complaining that the first time i ever saw sizzla featured in the paper was when they had a big photo of him alongside an article about homophobia and 'murder music' - here's one of the most incredibly gifted and prolific artists in any music genre of the last decade, and this is the only coverage he can get?

ho hum
 
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gabriel

The Heatwave
Jezmi said:
Don't believe the hype, this "act" is just for politics. Sizzla performed "Nah apologize" last Thursday, which is probably the most unambiguous anti-gay song he has.
Beenie man signed a similar letter not too long ago.....
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yeah, virgin records wrote a letter for him to sign, which he then apologised about in order to placate his homophobic fans. then his apology got out and he had to apologise to the non-homophobic fanbase/media/etc about having apologised for making the apology to homosexuals. if you see what i mean.

they're kind of fucked these artists - if they don't agree to what tatchell & co demand of them then it'll be very hard for them to perform and release music in europe and the US etc, but if they do then they get completely slated by their (considerable) homophobic fanbase around the world.

with regards these being deeply held biblical/religious beliefs - for some of the artists in question that may be true (e.g. i guess sizzla), but for many, anti-gay lyrics is simply one of the many topics you have to/are expected to cover as a dancehall artist, and many of them will do what it takes to keep their careers on track. sean paul's a good example of this - he did anti gay tunes in his early career when the audience 'demanded' it (obviously you can question the extent to which this demand exists etc) but then stopped doing them when his wider, anti-homophobic audience demanded it. i get the impression he doesn't really care either way about people being gay, and i think many other dancehall artists think the same.

i dunno, it's a very complicated issue i think - sorry for going on, bored at work :)
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
gabriel said:
with regards these being deeply held biblical/religious beliefs - for some of the artists in question that may be true (e.g. i guess sizzla), but for many, anti-gay lyrics is simply one of the many topics you have to/are expected to cover as a dancehall artist, and many of them will do what it takes to keep their careers on track.
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cf earlier comments regarding Noel Gallagher.
 
G

gumdrops

Well-known member
xpost
even the article by jamie hodgson though seemed to just be pandering to what guardian readers fucking LOVE to hear about dancehall though - the violence, the negativity, the homophobia, etc. for fucks sake, yeah its bad, but enough already. its lazy too, kind of an easy target at this stage too (not to excuse it though of course). its not like dancehall is at its most commercially succesful right now - why continue to put the nail in? its like all the hip hop is dead articles. yeah its not at its best as a genre (arguably) but enough now. at the risk of sounding paranoid, its like any opportunity to stick the boot into black/urban music genres is taken and relished. disco sucks = hip hop is dead and so on and so on. can we see more indie rock is shit/dead articles plz? ;)
 
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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
gumdrops said:
xpost
even the article by jamie hodgson though seemed to just be pandering to what guardian readers fucking LOVE to hear about dancehall though - the violence, the negativity, the homophobia, etc.
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FWIW, I read the Guardian and it's not what I love to hear about dancehall. Judging by the 'moral highground' thread other people here read it too, and I don't think that's what they love to hear either. Can we have a bit less with the generalizations, please?
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
hucks:

LCD soundsystem is just indie with (analogue synth) knobs on.

btw: I'm fucking annoyed that I missed Daft Punk playing in the north west! :mad:
 
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