SOUND SYSTEM: WHEN MUSIC GIVES PEOPLE A PLACE IN THE WORLD

Why Did Sound Systems Emerge in Kingston’s Ghettos?

Talk duration: 1 hour

Audience: Open to all

Format: Talk followed by an audience discussion

In the late 1940s, in a still-colonial Jamaica deeply marked by social and racial inequalities, a new cultural practice begins to develop in Kingston’s ghettos and poor neighbourhoods: the sound system.

Initially, the aim is not to create a new culture. Shopkeepers and entrepreneurs use recorded music and amplification to attract customers and organise dances. But within a few years, the phenomenon takes on an entirely different dimension.

Sound systems multiply. American records become coveted objects. Operators compete fiercely to attract audiences. Around the dances, new reputations, occupations, practices and opportunities for social recognition emerge. In Kingston’s streets, yards and dancehalls, a cultural world gradually takes shape, with its own participants, codes and hierarchies.

How does a population confined by colonial Jamaica’s racial and social inequalities to Kingston’s poorest and most dilapidated areas manage, with a handful of records and an amplification system, to create its own gathering places, businesses, occupations, stars, competitions and forms of prestige—and, before long, its own music?

This talk explores the social and cultural origins of the sound system to understand how a new way of playing music gradually enabled part of Jamaica’s population to reclaim urban space, build new forms of recognition and bring one of the twentieth century’s most influential musical cultures into being.

Three Themes

I — When the City Excludes, New Social Spaces Emerge
Segregation, rural migration and extreme poverty transform Kingston: faced with displacement and limited prospects, people develop new forms of social life in the ghettos, with the dancehall becoming one of their major expressions.

II — A Commercial Technology Becomes a Popular Culture
The coming together of dancehalls, downtown shopkeepers, technical innovations and a passion for American music enables the sound system to meet an enormous demand: access to music, opportunities to gather and the chance to celebrate on a previously impossible scale.

III — The Audience Turns Music into a Space for Recognition
By making sound systems compete, Kingston’s population asserts its choices and pushes operators, selectors, singers and technicians to distinguish themselves. Clashes, exclusive records, contests, reputations and innovations gradually give rise to a world with its own occupations, codes, stars and hierarchies.

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