'Branding' Jamaica

Bob Marley, left, and Freddie McGregor

Elena Oumano, Contributor

WHEN applied to Jamaica, "branding" - that marketing buzzword - becomes an especially thorny issue. "We are cantankerous, contradictory, and exciting," Jamaican cultural icon Rex Nettleford observed fondly, at a recent National Dance Theatre Company performance.

Yet even that pithy description barely hints at the slippery complexity and mighty charisma of Planet Jamaica. The tiny island nation's hold on the worldwide imagination is wildly out of proportion to its diminutive size and population. So what is Jamaica for those living outside its borders?

Is Jamaica the cultural hothouse that's produced such visionaries as Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley and the most compelling musical sounds this side of jazz and the blues?

Or is it the breeding grounds for the toughest kingpins in the international drug trade and a music industry that's substituted its mission to rock racism into oblivion with an obsession with other people's private bedroom habits?

Of course, the international media happily participates in post-colonial assumptions of superiority, especially in its sensationalist, negative takes on so-called developing nations like Jamaica. This is why Jamaicans must move beyond their own national mirror-images of the Coloniser's conquering vision and assume full control over their "branding" - their image in the global mind - in order to reap the profits from the products of their considerable talents.

International Reggae Day, produced by Andrea Davis' Jamaica Arts Holding, presented the best blue print yet for branding and marketing Jamaica's cultural riches. Wednesday night featured performances from upcoming artists and producer/singer Freddie McGregor and celebrated the release of 3 new CDs which span original roots in King Baucho's Kumina chants, classic reggae in DIA's debut, and competitive hard rock with Gibby's sophomore set.

Thursday's workshops on the latest communications software pointed the way for Jamaicans to market their cultural wealth to anyone located anywhere. The Univeristy of West Indies, Mona, and Jamaica Arts Holding have also created in www.reggaelovers.com, a learning and general information web site for buyers and sellers of all things Jamaican.

Musicologist Roger Steffens' Friday night presentation from his exhaustive Marley/reggae archives attested to the persisting fascination of the world and its eagerness for more information, music, food and drink, crafts, fashion, art, dance, literature and everything else Jamaican.

Sunday's closing concert and fashion show featured Jamaican food and crafts and performances by such striking young talents as Zinc Fence, Dingo, Abijah, VC and 8 year-old Javaughn Genius, alongside evergreens like Toots, the Mighty Diamonds, Kulcha Knox, Ghost, and Tony Rebel.

The lessons of International Reggae Day seem even more essential against the background of recent violence in West Kingston, (where the Trench Town Community Development Association valiantly continues to rehabilitate the area with such works as the restored Culture Yard on lower First Street), as well as the continuing pettiness and ignorance evidenced in "chi chi man" accusations that have found their way from the music fraternity into the national political debate.

Of course, these contradictory impulses are not exclusive to Jamaica, and my own country's politicians and policies are a continual source of embarrassment. As an American music journalist/book author based in NYC, I am drawn like filings to a magnet to those nations with a deeper cultural well.

And as an unabashed lover of Jamaica who works to share my appreciation with those not yet convinced, more than once I've had to enlighten otherwise sophisticated magazine editors to the fact that Jamaica has more to offer than ganja and homophobia.

The dream that the universal language of music - reggae in particular - would unite the world may be floundering, but at least we can understand each other better. Jamaica's greatest hope for economic and social stability is tied to its branding, that is, to the world's greater understanding of this nation's true identity.

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