Can't Stop Won't Stop Read Online Free PDF

fires. Smoke from dozens of portable roast-peanut and jerk-chicken carts hazes the half moon rising.
    The rest of the countryside follows. Uniformed schoolchildren swingingtheir book bags, young denim-skirted mothers with toddlers on arm, the barmaids and working boys stride off their shift and into the dance. The elder locksmen and the gray-haired grannys sway to the music. In the front of an earbleed-inducing bassbin tower, a turbaned Boboshanti gives an inscrutable grin, his fingers touching finger-to-finger, thumb-to-thumb in the sign of the Trinity.
    Through modern Jamaican history, much more than musical vibes could be at stake in settings like these. In the dance, political fortunes might rise or fall, society made or undone. If political parties controlled jobs and turf, wealth and despair, they rarely exerted much control here. This was the people’s space, an autonomous zone presided over by music men and women, a shelter of collective memory.
    Tonight, while the band sets up onstage for a star-studded bill of twenty-first-century dancehall stars, the sound-system operators, housed in a series of special tents that enclose the circle of speakers, drink up and play music. Candle Sound System, the local “foundation sound,” is spinning the classics. An old Bob Marley song, “Chances Are,” inspires a resounding wheel-up and cries of “Big tune!” It is a thirty-year-old ballad, not danceable, but something more—a sweet echo of the post-independence years, before Marley was an international star, when his was a voice of a young nation bursting with hope and pride. Everyone, no matter their age, seems to know all the words. They sing, “Though my days are filled with sorrow, I see it—a bright tomorrow.”
    From his turntables, Candle’s selector shifts time forward, cueing a Dennis Brown bassline. Another roar of recognition goes up, and a blast of approving airhorns. This time, hundreds of lighters raise, flickering lights over a black sea. As Brown sings the opening lines—”Do you know what it takes to have a revolution?”—the country youths release their aerosol cans into the butane. At the start of a new century, they recreate an elemental, biblical sight. Against the purple sunset, bolts of flames shoot up, tongues of fire licking up the night sky like history and prophecy.
    The blues had Mississippi, jazz had New Orleans. Hip-hop has Jamaica. Pioneer DJ Kool Herc spent his earliest childhood years in the same Second Street yard that had produced Bob Marley. “Them said nothing good ever come outta Trenchtown,” Herc says. “Well, hip-hop came out of Trenchtown!”
    Reggae, it has often been said, is rap music’s elder kin. Yet the story runs much deeper than just music. During the 1970s, Marley and the roots generation—the first to come of age after the island nation received independence from Great Britain in 1962—reacted to Jamaica’s national crisis, global restructuring and imperialist posturing, and intensified street violence. Seeing politics exhausted, they channeled their energies into culture, and let it flow around the world. They pulled global popular culture into the Third World. Their story is the prelude to the hip-hop generation, felt as a portentous shudder from the dub side. “Some are leaves, some are branches,” Bob Marley had sung. “I and I a di roots.”
So Long Rastafari Call You
    When the 1970s opened in Jamaica, national pride was surging.
    A song contest had played a major role. In 1966, Edward Seaga, a ranking conservative in the leading Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), who had been one of the first music executives to record indigenous music, instituted the annual Jamaica Festival Song Competition. The contest supported the young island industry and fostered national identity by introducing and making stars of
patwa
-singing, ghetto-identifying artists like Toots and the