I will be writing a column on Length & Time in music, in each presenting an album and its strategies that pertain to addressing Length & Time.
The quotidian elegance of Jamaica’s women flows forth from the culture of the Akan groups of present day Ghana, along with that of other immigrants who’ve populated the Caribbean island. The archaeology of Akan culture has presented findings that are much more elegant than the creations of the Yoruba, the people from Dahomey, and the Kongo who populated the remainder of the Caribbean. Akan art is clean and their Kente clothing patterned. Their language, Ashanti, Asante, or Twi, is one of power and beauty, of brilliant tonality, of pride in selfhood, being that Ashanti (the most dominant of the Akan) itself translates to ‘descending from war.’
In a polity that descendants of these Akan now live, Jamaica, this femininity exists side by side with the need to thrive in Jamaican capitalist society, a ‘plantocracy’ is what President Michael Manley called it, and the urbanite conviction that the society that they desire will come from political action. Protesters are produced alongside a middle class that seeks to live in a capitalist society that is somewhere between wanting to an industrial society because of cheap labor and a post-industrial society because such a society is so good to Americans and those who live in Europe. These descendants of the Akan have been a revolting people and the Jamaican maroons are now well known. A Jamaican Boukman (man with a book) even participated prominently in the Haitian revolution.
Sevana Siren is a singer of artful reggae pop songs as if a Jamaican version of Brazil’s MPB genre. They are songs full of synth wherein we hear acoustic guitars and acoustic drums: meld-ings. They feel traditional because of their instrumentation, as if artful pop steeped in Jamaican tradition (though limited to the traditions that begin during Jamaica’s 20th century.)
Her songs are well written and well constructed, positive in the land of both reggae and dancehall. Her first album Sevana is titled to express self-hood. It is a reggae album. The cover is elegant pop, as elegant as her songs, pointing us in the direction of the identity that is at the foundation of this music: vibrant femininity.
Their texts are sentimental balladry: that of a woman with modernist and postmodernist sentiments. Case in point is her song “Bit Too Shy” where she is honest about how shy a boy is and the initiative that a girl must take to woo him. Its video features her in minimal, elegant, style, singing along to maximal melody: an enthralling figuration of reggae.
To her times, she sings self-hood artfully, not in its anthropological sense, but in the same sense that an artful European or American singer expresses self-hood today. This self-hood is elegant (her songs are from beginning to end,) as elegant as many Jamaican women are on a minute to minute basis. This self-hood is loud and proud. It is full of parables “no, you can’t be dirty” that tale us that Sevana‘s art is a crystallization of what is beautiful, melodic, about Jamaica’s everyday.
Author: Adolf Alzuphar
