Nassau's Gone Funky

Sounding Some Themes in Bahamian Music

Just last week, a few Ca rib be an nationals joked that The Bahamas is the 51st state of the United States of America. As you can imagine, I was not amused and jumped to the defensive in true Bahamian fashion. Although I would never admit it to my regional brethren, I must reluctantly confess that there was a bit of truth to their satirical claims. For someone who loves The Bahamas and our culture (or what remains of it) like myself, there is nothing that hurts more than the truth. —ANDREW EDWARDS, NASSAU GUARDIAN WEEKENDER, MAY 19, 2006

It's rake-n-scrape. It's rhyming, the way we Bahamians do it. It's rushing, both in the streets, and around our churches. It's the double-rack, the heel-and-toe, the anthem, the story-song that we use to keep one another entertained. It's that real Bahamian guitar riff , it's the way the stomach jumps when a real bass rhythm is played. It's the rescuing of trash, the conversion of ordinary, undervalued objects like cardboard and paper into works of art. It's the way we laugh when the cowbells start, the way we dance when we hear the beat. What "the world" wants is stuff that's raw, that isn't over-processed. What "the world" wants is something that makes "the world" remember its own humanity. And what "the world" wants we have.... We must listen to our music, not just to the people who are popular now, but to our fathers and grandfathers and their fathers, to draw upon all the richness that is ours. And then we must take what we learn from both, and create—and package to sell—our own. —NICOLETTE BETHEL, BAHAMIAN DIRECTOR OF CULTURE, IN THE NASSAU GUARDIAN, MAY 20, 2004

From the Arawaks right down to the Bahamians of the present, Bahamian culture and literature [have] been produced under a situation of de pen den cy, in the sense that the needs and hopes of the Bahamian people to chart and direct our own economic and political destinies, to create societies which responded to our way of being and developed according to our own ideas ... have constantly been sidetracked by the imposition on Bahamians of the ideas, plans, and needs of forces that have come from outside the area. —ANTHONY DAHL, LITERATURE OF THE BAHAMAS, 1724–1992, 2

The epigraphs opening this chapter combine to paint a picture of several pressures facing the Bahamas—pressures that continue to shape dilemmas and challenges for which solutions have not been readily forthcoming. The first of these epigraphs succinctly illustrates the interposition of the Bahamas between the United States and the rest of the Ca rib be an, a space in-between that serves to highlight and intensify questions of cultural identity, raising the specter of the nation—and of nationalism in particular—in the process. Nicolette Bethel, a former director of culture for the Bahamas, transposes these questions of cultural identity neatly onto the "national" product that the Bahamas presents and sells to the world. According to Bethel, however, that export product stands in need of a bit of an overhaul, one that can be realized by understanding that the power of cultural identity and cultural production rests in the past to be recovered for use in the present. The comments of Anthony Dahl, for their part, suggest that the nation's colonial and postcolonial histories have powerfully affected and continue to affect the conditions of possibility for pursuing the project that Nicolette Bethel proposes.

Throughout this book, I suggest that Bahamian musical life has been deeply influenced and shaped by three separate but deeply interrelated themes embedded in these epigraphs: the physical interposition of the Bahamas between the United States and the rest of the Ca rib be an, tourism, and the nation's colonial and postcolonial histories. These geographic, economic, and political influences, moreover, are unthinkable without considering the ways that travel is implicated in each of them—that is, the centrifugal and centripetal routes that are taken through them. For travel operates at several registers in the Bahamian context, including human itineraries, musical migrations and media flows, and journeys related to time and nostalgia.

The physical travels I explore in the chapters that follow include the journeys of Bahamians within and outside the nation; the influx of Ca rib be an migrants from places such as Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica; and the itineraries of tourists who flock to places like Paradise Island and Freeport, enjoying (or consuming) the sun, sea, and sand of the Ca rib be an (Sheller 2003). The musical migrations and media flows I trace here, moreover, highlight the internal center-periphery migrations attendant to Bahamian music (Nassau/Freeport–Family Islands) while also illustrating the long-standing and intimate relationships instantiated between Bahamian musics and the musics of the islands' Ca rib be an neighbors (Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti in particular). In addition, Florida-based radio stations, and more recently cable television, have instantiated other networks of musical and cultural relationships—other journeys that continue to powerfully affect musical production and reception in the Bahamas.

Leading up to and in the wake of independence in 1973, Bahamians increasingly found themselves considering what it sounds, looks, and feels like to be Bahamian, resulting in a concerted attempt by those concerned with cultural politics to explore the riches of the Bahamian past for answers to these questions. The narratives that emerge from these constructions of Bahamianness, from the process of what Svetlana Boym (2002) has called "prospective nostalgia," have resulted in a dynamic by virtue of which the "Real Bahamas" is (re)located in the past to be recovered in the present.? These journeys of memory, time, and nostalgia, then, constitute the third register of travel with which I think about Bahamian musics throughout the book.

These registers of travel, furthermore, are all complicated exponentially by the geopolitical structure of the Bahamas itself, not least because the geography of the archipelago marks the center-periphery relationships always attendant to the nation-state in the starkest of terms. Citizens who live on New Providence or Grand Bahama are located in the center. Those who do not are separated from the center not only in terms of the diminished resources and infrastructure available to them but also by virtue of...