Title: Culture @ the Cutting Edge: Tracking Caribbean Popular Music
Author:Curwen Best
Reviewer: Tanya Batson-Savage
Publisher: UWI Press
CURWEN BEST'S Culture @ the Cutting Edge: Tracking Caribbean Popular Music is a fitting example of what can happen when cultural criticism and analysis wheel and come again.
The book is an interesting addition to the academic cultural criticism landscape highlighting the expanse of virgin territory left to be conquered in the field of cultural studies.
This is created in both the areas which Best is successful at analysing as well as the silences which his text generates.
Cultural studies is currently busily chipping down the road, and those engaged in the field are salivating at the barely covered possibilities that are revealed before them. Music is one of the areas that have been most actively engaged, but even so the area can be attacked on several fronts, some of which are just becoming visible to scholastic eyes.
The region's music has been tackled on the front of its lyrics, its development and even the spaces with which it engages with the public and they with it. Culture @ the Cutting Edge attempts to engage Caribbean popular culture, or rather Caribbean music through the music, the technology used to create the music and the media via which it is diseminated.
MUCH NEEDED READING
The introductory chapter 'Reading Culture as Multi-tracked' lays out this terrain on which Best engages in this much needed reading. He explores music videos, the value of the Internet, the role of technology in the music's development, and the music itself.
However, it quickly becomes evident that though the text is perfectly valid as representative of the Anglophone Caribbean music, it leans more heavily toward the Eastern Caribbean and Best is more conversant with calypso than he is with dancehall. As such, though he provides a multi-tracked reading, some tracks are fore-grounded and others are muted.
Yet with chapters such as 'Towards a Caribbean Gospel Aesthetic' Culture @ the Cutting Edge is an invaluable addition to cultural scholarship. The chapter is particularly important because gospel is a largely ignored area which has been sidelined by its sexier, lace-wearing, rump shaking, or gun-toting compatriots calypso and dancehall.
RIGOROUS ANALYSIS
The chapter contains rigorous analysis with important information about how gospel in the Caribbean developed and its movement toward greater inclusion of indigenous rhythms while being engaged with Caribbean issues, not just an unracialised God.
Indeed, simply placing gospel music in a book analysing Caribbean gospel music is a little groundshaking, if not necessarily groundbreaking. As the essay also indicates there is much room for cultural critics to take up the greater analysis of gospel whether through space, performance, or song text.
The book's final chapter 'The "Big Technology" Question' also makes for exciting reading, at least once you make it past the listing of all the various pieces of equipment that can only arouse the interest of musical technocrats. Yet by using technology to interrogate ideology, Best raises some exciting questions. As he notes, "Technology does not come to the region innocently. It has always come with an attendant bias and ideology in its very functionalities."
LACKS VISUAL MARKERS
The chapter 'Music Video to Web Streaming: Cultural Ventriloquism @ the Leading Edge' also promised to be exciting, but failed to live up to its full potential, especially in regards to providing analysis of Caribbean videos. Best's analysis is unfortunately hampered by his media of engagement as he needed far more visual markers which the text lacks. Additionally, in his reading, Best fails to differentiate between videos which merely focus on writhing female bodies and those which foreground dancing and he furthermore ignores the other elements which play into the creation of a video, which results in a very limited reading.
The most disturbing element of this chapter, however, was his constant reference to post-dancehall. His use of this, very disturbing term begs the question, who gets to label? Best seems to use his undefined post-dancehall and dancehall interchangeably. The postdancehall label is needed because the music is refused the right to jump across borders and retain its identity.
PROBLEMATIC ARGUMENTS
Indeed, Best continuously runs into problematic arguments when he confronts dancehall, as in his look at AIDS discourse in Caribbean music. In this segment, Best explores not merely muted tracks, but tracks which clearly do not exist. In his attempt to explore the links between lyrical homophobia and AIDS he explores homophobic lyrics and then presumes a link between that and the AIDS discourse. In so doing, he ignores the numerous lyrics that have linked AIDS with heterosexual activity (or rather loose women) since the late 1980s, as in Admiral Bailey's hyperbolic treatise to the Punanny.
Yet even so, even in the spaces that beg further interrogation, Culture @ the Cutting Edge provides the start to some very interesting conversations about Caribbean culture.
