The fallacy of affirmative Reggae Grammy action

So, let me attempt to understand the reasoning of those who are complaining about SOJA winning the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album, just because it is a group of White people. They believe that SOJA should not have won because Black people from Jamaica – Etana, Sean Paul, Spice and Jesse Royal – were also nominated and one of them deserved to win simply because they are Black and from Jamaica. Or, in other words, SOJA should not have won simply because they are White and not from Jamaica.

So, they want an automatic Jamaican awardee, regardless of the field in any particular year. They want a quota system, the equivalent of affirmative action which guarantees inclusion to redress entrenched imbalances, because the Reggae Grammy belongs to Jamaica by right, because the RIAA which runs it does not stand for Recording Industry Association of America, but Righting Imbalances Against Africans and Associates. Heck, they want more than a quota, they want a monopoly – something like the Jamaica Public Service Company Company (JPSCo) – and we know how that has turned out. By their logic, Sean Paul should be happy he did not win this time around, because as a Jamaican ‘brown man’, he would have been next in the colour cussing line.

Hell, while you all are at it, why not demand that Joe Bogdanovich not run Reggae Sumfest, which he has been doing a superb job of. He is White, isn’t he? How dare he pump his cash, connections and business savvy into Black people’s festival and make it bigger and more successful than it has ever been, with an all-Jamaican popular music format? Give it to the Black Jamaicans! A fi wi time now! As a mater of fact, don’t have any White fans at Sumfest this year. Yeah! Some a dem a spy, a look pon wha Shenseea a do fi go copy it! You know, lick it over like a riddim. Ol jancro dem!

I have really tried to clamber down to the levels of reasoning behind a belief that the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album belongs to a Jamaican by right, but it is a hard ask in uncharted depts. On the bright side, I do believe that the claims of unfairness are from the relative few, amplified by an Internet connection and a smartphone. However, there are still persistent underlying issues which point to much of how as a collective we are doing our utmost to kill quality and then blaming those who are picking its still twitching carcass as culture vultures. They are not. They are carting off the good bits before we Jamaicans, as a collective, allow it all to rot. Many of those with their knickers in a bunch over SOJA’s win will have already moved on to Champs or whatever makes their drama glands produce fluid and their typing fingers twitch. It is up to those who have a sustained commitment to Jamaica’s popular music to give it serious thought, even as those who look for an emotional button to push and lean on it find somewhere else to kotch.

In that vein, we should recognize this complaint as the same type (on a lesser scale) as when a Marley wins the Reggae Grammy. We should also recognize that someone not having heard of SOJA is not a poor reflection on the band but, in an age where access to content is a tap on a screen away, an indictment on the ignorant. Coupled with that is the false sense of self-importance created by an entertainment media which is often pliable and payable (and not by the official employer, but through payola). Think about it – how much analysis of music content do we have in our media. Where are the reviews?

And where is our own awards show, where we identify what we believe is our best and present it to the world? That takes actual work, but we do not have to start huge. A panel to review the five Grammy nominees each year and select the best, based in the given criteria, would do in the first instance. That would be a little bit of vulture behaviour on our part, scavenging off the RIAA’s process, but we would have an input and could expand from there. There is nothing wrong with building on someone else’s foundation, as long as you give them credit. It worked beautifully for SOJA, didn’t it? Go back and listen to their acceptance speech.

I remember Tanya Stephens refusing to perform on a women’s only show, because it would be like begging for pity because they all have vaginas. The complaints about SOJA’s win are the flipside of the same attitude that Stephens is rejecting. It is begging, disguised as self-righteous indignation. And, it is non-productive. We want White people to buy the music, attend the concerts, shower Jamaica with adulation, then automatically give us the Grammy that they created and sustained.

A final question. How many of the persons who are complaining about SOJA’s win have bought the album which they would have preferred to take the 2022 Reggae Grammy? Not just listened on YouTube, but actually paid their money. Hmm. Talk about culture vultures!

Mel Cooke covered Jamaican entertainment as a print journalist for almost two decades, overlapping with his MPhil research on dancehall and experiential marketing with the Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI, Mona, where he is now working on a PhD while lecturing in the Bachelor of Arts, Communication Arts and Technology (BACAT) programme at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech, Ja.).