ABSTRACT
Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks represent the two major directions of contemporary Jamaican popular music: reggae and dancehall.1 Both performers have achieved international superstar status as exponents of Jamaican music and articulators of the cultural values embedded in the music. Conventional wisdom in Jamaica, manifested in the popular press and on numerous talk show programmes, valorizes Bob Marley’s politicized reggae lyrics as the peak of ‘culture’. Shabba Ranks’s dancehall links are stigmatized as base, misogynist ‘slackness’, a Jamaicanism for the English licentiousness’.2 Beyond fundamentalist Jamaica, the culture/slackness binarism does have some currency, though the oppositional ideology is not often as simplistically stated as in the following case.
