Greetings Superstars!
I remember the first time I saw a woman do the Butterfly. We were cooling off in the water at Rainbow Beach on St. Croix while our friend, TJ, competed in a chili cook-off. As part of the festivities, a small dance floor had been set up on the beach for a dance contest. When it began, a very drunk lady in a string bikini got up on that dance floor and wound her knees together and then all the way open, over and over, mimicking a butterfly’s wings flapping. Sadly, this was directly in our line of sight and there just wasn’t enough fabric involved. I’m still traumatized.
Because I’ll admit it: I’m just a little too old to feel comfortable with people doing sex-simulation dances like twerking. I’m not so prudish with lyrics, but would generally prefer everyone’s bottom cheeks covered. That’s why slackness in Dancehall isn’t my favorite aspect.
SLACKNESS: Explicit, sexually charged Dancehall lyrics and dance moves.
But I found this thesis paper that a young person called Racquel Fagon wrote back in 2009, which puts a whole new spin on slackness. Consider the timeline in Jamaica:
1500s - 1800s: African people are kidnapped and brought to the island against their will by colonizers to be slave labor. Colonist ideals are forced onto this population, especially Christianity.
1800s - 1900s: British rule continues to inform Jamaicans in terms of puritanism.
1910s - 1920s: Marcus Garvey organizes Jamaicans into labor unions and rallies people from a morally superior point of view.
1930s - 1970s: Rastafarianism promotes dignity and communion with the natural world and is popularized by Bob Marley’s music.
Up until this point, cultural values that were norms in Jamaica revolved around piety and self-control. But the generations that had been shaped under this colonial ideal—even in Rastafari—were growing old. In redefining themselves as independent of those ideals, were young Jamaicans embracing slackness in the dancehalls?
Then, in the 1980s, Yellowman said, “I never know why they call it slackness. I talk about sex, but it's just what happens behind closed doors. What I talk is reality.”
And now we’ve said it. Who gets to decide what is morally good and bad if no one is getting hurt? And the woman in the string bikini doing the Butterfly up on Rainbow Beach that day? Who’s to say that she shouldn’t be waving her bits around in the sunshine? Do I want to see it? No—but I also don’t have to look.
I’m becoming convinced that slackness in Dancehall music is truly a celebration of freedom and self-expression. Slackness is a reminder that we have the right to manage our voices and our bodies just as we want to. I think that’s beautiful.
Raunchy, but beautiful.
May your week be filled with some naughty moves to make you feel alive!
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