Contents - Beth Lesser

Stone Love & the Noise
Act
By the new millennium, Dancehall had achieved a level of acceptance in
Jamaican society never before imagined. Admiral Bailey starred in television
commercials for banks. Western Union continued to run its ads featuring
Wayne Marshall despite his arrest in charges of procession of Marijuana.* Kiprich
was making commercials for Mother’s Chicken. Singer I-Octane is Digicel’s
‘brand ambassador’. The Jamaican government finally established “a new
sub-committee on music, somehow only recently realizing that the country’s
music is among its most successful exports.”**
Burro Banton, reflecting on the upwardly mobile course of dancehall, told
Gaia Branca in an interview in 2006, “When I started it was 1974, only the
people from the ghetto loved reggae. It was in quarters like Trench Town that
everything started. When you started to play, people from the upper classes
called the police to make you stop, they didn’t want that type of music to
spread. But that was impossible, the kids started to love reggae and the music
invaded Up Town.” ***
Throughout the ‘80s, dancehall kept its flight path still a little below the
radar. The upper classes still listened to ‘funky’ and soul in parties while the
sound systems held their corners in the many ghetto neighborhoods of Kingston.
But that was about to change completely, in large part, due to the emergence
of a sound system that brought the two worlds together.
“Everything changed when Stone Love came along,” Sugar Minott lamented
in the late ‘80s, as he watched the new sound system on the block
came in and rewrite all the rules. But Stone Love wasn’t really new. It was just
new to downtowners who still thought of it as something alien – an uptown,
‘party’ set.
Stone Love started out as a disco set, playing mainly soul and very little
hard-core rub-a-dub. They did mix in a bit of reggae, just to keep the uptowners
on their toes, but the set was clearly aiming for a well heeled crowd. Which
was all well and good as long as Stone Love stayed in its own territory. But
* The Jamaican Gleaner Friday, September 15, 2000
** Resistance and Complicity: Dancehall, Rap and the Market. Ed. note: The text says that the article
is from the Glendora Review, African Quarterly on the Arts, vol. three nos. three & four, 2004, but I am
unable to confirm the source.
*** www.rototomsunsplash.com
344 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall