



1 / 7 Chevron Chevron From “Serious Things A Go Happen: Three Decades of Jamaican Dancehall Signs,” by Maxine Walters. Published by Hat and Beard Press.

Since the late nineteen-seventies, the streets of Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, have been decorated with ad-hoc placards promising quick, transformative thrills. The signs—hand-painted on discarded slabs of splintering plywood, or on whatever else was freely available—direct passersby toward outdoor lots or indoor nightclubs, and list dancehall performers (Stone Love, Grenade, Beenie Man, City Beat, Super Force) and entry fees (usually between one and ten American dollars). Lettering is done in a vivid red, gold, green, or blue paint on matte black backgrounds, and is sometimes accompanied by a custom illustration, like a young lady, a heart, or a car. The signs promise blessings or guidance or free Jell-O shots. “Bikini Car Wash All Day.” “A Yah Suh Haffi Nice Fish Fry.” “Vibes.”

A new book called “Serious Things A Go Happen: Three Decades of Jamaican Dancehall Signs,” which was published by Hat and Beard Press, gathers more than a hundred dancehall signs, all plucked by the collector Maxine Walters, a Jamaican film director and producer who has admitted to climbing “light posts, walls, bridges, down hillsides—I would go anywhere to reach and capture a sign that attracted my attention.” In the book’s introduction, the Jamaican novelist Marlon James writes, “If hip-hop’s visual language is graffiti, then dancehall’s visual language is the sign, the event poster—the notice that big t’ings a gwaan down di street.”

What might a person expect to find, were she to heed a sign’s beckoning? Dancehall, the musical genre, is different from a dance hall, the venue, though one was born in the other, and in the woozy untangling of any vernacular or folk tradition—especially in a country with a history as rich and multitudinous as Jamaica’s—even distinctions as material as these can begin to feel trivial. Musically, dancehall is a splinter faction of reggae, itself an amalgamation of ska, rocksteady, and mento (a playful acoustic folk music that’s often and easily conflated with calypso), along with jazz and rhythm and blues from America, especially New Orleans. It is created by sound systems, or groups of d.j.s and m.c.s with their own proprietary combinations of gear (generators, turntables, massive speakers). The foundational element is the riddim, an instrumental beat or backing track that an m.c. performs over.

Following the election of Prime Minister Edward Seaga, in 1980, Jamaica shifted from a socialist government to a more conservative regime, and early dancehall pioneers, sensing a cultural conversion, disregarded reggae’s themes of resistance in favor of more ribald notions. All the best dancehall songs are deeply lustful, and the genre routinely inspires the creation of new dance moves with evocative names: Wine and Dip, Tek Weh Yuhself, Whine Up, Boosie Bounce, Drive By, Shovel It, To Di World, Nuh Behavior, Skip to My Lou, Gully Creepa, Bad Man Forward Bad Man Pull Up, Pon Di River, Willie Bounce, Screetchie, and Daggering, to name but a handful. The combinations suggest, in literal ways, the various pleasures of the flesh; Daggering, in which rough sex is pantomimed, has been widely banned in Jamaica. Critics have identified misogyny, violence, and homophobia as hugely problematic elements of both the music and the culture, and dancehall is occasionally referred to, derisively and dismissively, as “boom-boom music.”

Periodically, dancehall threads its way into global pop music. Last year, its influence was especially palpable in the singles “Work,” by the Barbadian singer Rihanna, and “Sorry,” by the Canadian pop star Justin Bieber; both releases made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The rapper Drake, also from Canada, borrows from it frequently enough to inspire articles with titles like “Is Drake’s Dancehall Obsession Homage or Exploitation?”

In his book “Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica,” Norman C. Stolzoff called the genre “a multidimensional force, at once symbolic and material, that permeates and structures everyday life in Jamaica.” Flipping through “Serious Things A Go Happen,” there is a feeling of being made privy to an alternative but essential history of Jamaican street culture. Some of Walters’s acquisitions—she has now gathered more than four thousand signs—have been shown at galleries in New York and Hartford, Connecticut; in St. Mary, Jamaica; and at the Havana Biennial, in Cuba. It would be impossible for any book or exhibit to capture the true, humid spirit of dancehall events, but the signs, at least, convey some sense of their urgency and wildness.

Last year, powerHouse published “No Sleep: NYC Nightlife Fliers, 1988-1999,” a collection of downtown party posters yanked off staple-pocked utility poles and collated into a similar style of art book. Though both “No Sleep” and “Serious Things A Go Happen” were published by independent, visionary presses, institutional affirmations of folk or street art can still feel fundamentally incongruous. (This is also true of compilations of historical music.) The process of ratification is funny: the objective beauty in a benign or omnipresent object is recognized, and then the source material is curated and recontexualized. When it works best, the object is not just confusedly divorced from its intended utility but celebrated or enhanced in a way that allows it to become a storytelling tool—to help cohere a narrative.

Regardless, this can feel like a strange and high-minded tumble—a regular, everyday doodad denatured, turned into an objet d’art—and the process calls to mind the strange and high-minded tradition of Dada, an avant-garde movement that reconfigured art-making as lawless, petulant. Beginning in 1914, the French artist Marcel Duchamp used mechanically reproduced commercial objects for his so-called readymades, an instantly provocative series of found sculptures. In 1917, Duchamp laid a coatrack on the floor and titled it “Trap”; at its first showing, it went unnoticed as an art work. In a piece from 1964, titled “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” he hung a fifty-two-inch snow shovel from the ceiling of his studio_. _“An ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” is how he explained it.

There is an element of Dada to “Serious Things A Go Happen”—these signs, lifted from the intersections where they were erected, take on new and more ambiguous meanings. Likewise, it is nearly impossible to identify or credit individual sign artists, just as it is very hard to discern who designed the snow shovel Duchamp carted home from the hardware store and reimagined as high art.

A limited edition of the book includes “a six color screenprinted reproduction dancehall sign on quarter inch plywood, along with a two inch nail for hanging.” The nail feels essential, somehow, to protecting the entire spirit of the thing—a built-in corrective for anyone looking to get too fussy about it. It also reëmphasizes a noteworthy parallel between the signs themselves and the outlaw ideology of the music. (“A session wasn’t a place for decent people,” James suggests in his introduction.) This is also true of Walters’s retrieval of the pieces, itself a kind of bandit scramble. Nothing about either process feels prim. Unapologetic impropriety was a central tenet of Dada; it feels present here, too.

I’ll admit it’s now tempting to eulogize these signs—which are beautiful—as one more casualty of digitization, another shift away from tactile pleasures. Of course, it’s old-fashioned to think this way. (In my more captious moments—during which I believe that the Internet is obliterating the only small but meaningful indulgences left available to us—I force myself to watch a particular “60 Minutes” segment, in which Andy Rooney shuffles around a supermarket produce section, muttering about the sorry state of fruit.) Perhaps several decades from now some enterprising archivist will curate a collection of Facebook invites—“I’m Interested: Birthday Rituals in the New Millennium”—that might prove just as evocative.

In the meantime, it’s important to remember that these sorts of ephemeral histories can be easily lost. The pleasure these signs promise—and what is an advertisement if not a suggestion of self-betterment? Why does anyone go to a party or a concert if not to maybe be changed completely?—is both undeniable and spiritually edifying. “All art attempts to cope with the environment by making sense of it and layering what the eye sees with what the brain interprets—exactly the case with the signs on display here,” the late Jamaican writer Tony Winkler writes in his afterword. “Look at them with both eye and brain. What you discover will surprise you.”