Contents - Beth Lesser

gestive lyrics were nothing new in Jamaica, or in the folk music of most countries.
Calypso, Mento and other earlier forms of West Indian music contained
steady diet of innuendo. So did Ska and Rock Steady - songs like Jackie Opal’s
‘Push Wood’, The Starlight’s ‘Soldering’, Lord Creator’s ‘Big Bamboo’, Phyllis
Dillon’s ‘Don’t Touch Me Tomato’, Prince Buster’s ‘Wreck a Pum Pum’ (and
the answer, The Soul Sister’s ‘Wreck a Buddy’), or Dawn Love’s ‘Watering’.
By the 1980s, Mento and its cousin calypso were seen as innocuous and
archaic folk musics, something harmless to play for tourists. But in 1956 there
was a Parliamentary inquiry looking into banning ‘calypsos’ with offensive
lyrics, songs like ‘Rough Rider’, ‘Big Boy And Teacher’, ‘Red Tomato’, and
the infamous ‘Night Food’ * .
The term ‘sexually explicit’, of course, is relative. “[Slackness] was always
around but people used to use it like more poetic, more suggestive,” Observes
deejay Lord Sassafrass. “Like [calypsonian] Sparrow for instance. He would
be singing about ‘Salt fish, nothing no nice like salt fish’. So, more or less,
everybody presume what he is talking about. So, it was always around, but it
was never so explicit. Now, it became explicit. People actually saying out the
words. Instead of making suggestions about the thing, they actually call the
name.”
With more churches per capita than any other country in the world, Jamaica
remained a very conservative, Christian society. It didn’t take much to get a
song banned for lewdness. Deejay Dennis Alcapone comments, “I remember
one of the songs banned on the radio station was a Heptones song called ‘Fattie
Fattie’. All they was singing was, ‘I need a fat girl tonight,’ and that was
taboo, that was outlawed. Compared to what these [modern] guys was doing!”
Critics in the ‘80s failed to recognize that slackness actually represented a
return to a more politically and socially conservative set of values. Slackness
was not about changing government structures or advancing human rights.
Slackness, as enunciated in the dancehalls, adhered to a very traditional interpretation
of sexuality. Sex was something that happened between men and
women in very standardized ways. The purpose, and outcome, of sex was still
seen as procreation, and the lyrics reflected that.
Put it n dry, the gal start cry
Take it out wet the gal start fret
Next thing she know, a pickney she a get
-Ringo
Rice and peas and Ackee
Papa Echo skin him cockie
* From One of Mento’s Great Voices Silenced, by Daniel Neely, Sunday, March 18, 2007, Chin’s
Calypso Sextet, Alerth Bedasse, Everard Williams and Ivan Chin’s label, http://www.mentomusic.
com/chins.htm
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