i have seen this very one sizzla in action a couple of times and popular opinion around here suggests elements of hatred beyond the homophobia (endemic beyond this guy)- he alledgedly likes making anti-white noises when he visits which only few of the attendants are able to understand or fully participate in. you see around here, bourgois white rastafarians display very limited appreciation of content- the language barrier between english as a foreign language and dancehall styled jamaican is fairly tough- whilst association is cheap (outfit, hairdo).

information is a very real problem throughout the range of post-modern identity narratives up for "choice" post-advent of mtv youth culture (calling it "youth movement" would be cynical). there certainly is an anti-something feel about it, but no-one's really all that sure about anything. you can say this about the late punk scene around but white bourgeois rastafarians in this instance means fairly well educated (banking method unfortunately) group of people collectively and half-heartedly, yet loudly agreeing about nothing in particular at all. the re-introduced christian pattern is very amusing (post-protestants bubbling on about "jah")

i spent the last weekend at such an event and i can tell you i wasn't all that impressed. to a people with a feel for the comedy of this smelly ironic thing it does offer an exceptionally liberal space due to the numbers game and demographics (hence repeat attendance even!), but personal achievement really does boil down to playing around with the scheme whilst there is some sort of background noise with a number of signifiers to it which you can, if you can, then read over into a narrative, belong it, belong to it, ride it, whatever you want to call it (consumption pattern?).

to contrast above with "that other thing", the bit behind the "da roots" on t-shirts at your shopping mall, real world for some, i'd refer to it as a form of post-colonial resolve- comparable to the mexican nationalist movement in anthropological terms. a proper and very legimitate totality, collective spiritual resolve in freirean terms. and also a highly specific movement- universal applicability i'd deny to it. black supremacy is the right hand end of this movement- an unhappy side-effect of any nationalist move to counter oppression, usually not even notable. sometimes it does come out. and then its pain-time for the palestinians.

lyndon kwesi johnson (am able to like this one- enjoy his pol stance in interview) re: rastafari:

Rasta has influenced Jamaican culture in a very big way. Not only in terms of the music but in terms of spirituality that it lent to reggae. Also in terms of the language, the Rastafari that has become a part of everyday Jamaican parlance, spoken by non-Rastafarians. My very first group was, in fact, called Rasta Love, which was a group of rasta drummers. We used to accompany my poetry with bass drum, funde drum and repeater drum. In all of my albums, there's also some repeater playing percussion in the background. Rasta is important for me on that level- as a cultural force that broadened our consciousness and opened our consciousness to our African hertitage and our African ancestry.

IN AMERICA, AFRO-CENTRIC TEACHING HAS BECOME POPULAR RECENTLY. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS MOVEMENT?

Frankly, I don't know what Afro-centric means.

BLACK CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT THAT CIVILIZATION BEGAN IN AFRICA.

So, once you learn that, so what? That's my attitude. Once you know that black people were a part of ancient cilivization in Africa and that African civilization has contributed a lot to world, what next? That's my position. Where do we go from there?"

and in western european pop culture, "african heritage", can be acquired fairly cheaply whilst we're certainly lacking the ancestry around here. the bit where it gets really funny is when sizzla comes on stage here, makes his "introductiory remarks", and you get thousands of dressed up whiteys greeting him with delight. whatever he's saying, it doesn't even matter

bigging up, don thereof - what a title

"Certainly the single event in this century which resonated with the multiple cultural, political, and religious dimensions of Ethiopianism was the coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen, the then Prince Regent of Ethiopia. In November of 1930, the biblical enthronement of Ras Tafari as His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, became an internationally publicized event which was unique in the African world. The news of a black regent claiming descent through the biblical lineage of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, stirred the imaginations of an entire generation of African Americans and refocused attention upon ancient Ethiopia. The second Italian invasion of Ethiopia in October of 1935 produced an enormous wave of pro-Ethiopianist sentiments [...] In Harlem, thousands of African Americans marched and signed petitions asking the U.S. government to allow them to fight on behalf of the Ethiopian cause. In Trinidad, this crisis in the black world coincided with the emergence of calypso and a fledgling Caribbean music industry. Calypsos which described the crisis from a black perspective were carried by West Indian seamen from port to port throughout the black world. Music--always an integral part of African and African American culture--served to crystallize shared sentiments of racial pride in support of the Ethiopian cause."