JAMAICAN CULTURE- CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT- By Richard Hugh Blackford

I came across a response from a Facebook user's response to a thread of mine in which he lambasted Jamaica's music culture, particularly Dancehall as "dead". According to the poster, "Jamaica has lost its culture nor its identity world wide, especially in music. So if we can go back to the drawing board there that's will be good. Love him or hate him Vybz Kartel destroyed our musical culture, almost every artist after him is worst.

Jamaican music was love, inspirational, weed not drugs now its gun, drugs (molly) calling women names, no imaginational sex, brute force. In the dancehall man naw get woman no more, man and man inna a line a dance, females over the next side a dance with each other. Lazy youths wanna pose with man and leave the woman by themselves."

JAMAICAN CULTURE DIDN’T DISAPPEAR- IT MIGRATED, MUTATED, AND MULTIPLIED

I thought the observation was important enough to start a new discussion on this particular topic. I must say for openers, I can actually understand his views and his pain. However, Jamaica has neither lost its culture nor its identity. The claim that “Jamaica has lost its culture and identity worldwide, especially in music” sounds persuasive only if culture is frozen in time. Jamaican culture has never worked that way.

From Mento to Ska, Rocksteady to Reggae, Roots to Dancehall, Slackness to Consciousness, Sound-system to streaming; Jamaican music has always evolved through tension, controversy, and generational discomfort. Every era declared the next one “the end of culture.” None of them were right. What we are witnessing now is not loss, but dispersion.

Dancehall no longer lives only in Kingston dance spaces. It lives in Tokyo clubs, Lagos studios, Bogotá playlists, London carnivals, Brooklyn block parties, and streaming algorithms. That is not cultural death; that is cultural export at scale.

MORAL NOSTALGIA IS NOT CULTURAL ANALYSIS

What the poster like so many other critics did was to posit "Moral Nostalgia," and present this as a Cultural Analysis. It was a collapsing of several frustrations into one argument:

Nostalgia for a time when music centered love and upliftment

Discomfort with sexual and gender expression in contemporary dance spaces

Anger at commercialization

Resentment toward younger men and shifting social dynamics

Those arguments were actual social anxieties, not proof of cultural collapse. The idea that Jamaican music was once only “love, inspiration, and weed” is historically inaccurate. Jamaican music has always carried violence, sexuality, class struggle, bravado, protest, excess, and spirituality, often at the same time. What has changed is who gets to be visible, who controls the space, and who decides what is respectable.

DANCEHALL’S GLOBAL ECONOMIC FOOTPRINT IS UNDENIABLE

Dancehall today exerts influence far beyond what Jamaican policymakers seem willing (or able) to quantify. Fore openers, Reggaeton, which is now a multi-billion-dollar global industry, is structurally built on Dancehall rhythms, cadences, and sound-system logic.

In Japan, their Dancehall ecosystem; events, fashion, production, tourism: operates at a scale Jamaica itself has failed to monetize. Yet they pirated this from Jamaica.

Even contemporary Afrobeats borrows heavily from Dancehall phrasing, basslines, call-and-response patterns, and performance culture. This is not accidental. It is the result of Jamaican music being too powerful to stay local.

ON VYBZ KARTEL

Love him or hate him, Kartel did not “destroy” Jamaican music. He re-energized dancehall at a moment when it risked creative stagnation. His post-incarceration impact is measurable:

Performance fees for dancehall artistes have surged, International demand has intensified

Dancehall has re-entered global conversation as a current force, not a nostalgia act.

Kartel didn’t invent slackness, violence, or controversy. He refined narrative dominance, linguistic agility, and cultural immediacy; traits dancehall has always rewarded.

Blaming one artist for structural shifts in society is easier than confronting the reality that culture evolves faster than comfort.

THE REAL FAILURE IS NOT DANCEHALL. IT IS POLICY

Jamaican cultural policy has never seriously treated music as an export industry,

a labor ecosystem, a soft-power asset, or as a long-term economic engine.

Instead, policymakers oscillate between moral panic and benign neglect; celebrating culture symbolically while refusing to invest structurally. The fact is that Dancehall’s global success has happened in spite of the Jamaican state, not because of it.

SYMBOLS VS SYSTEMS

Yes, Bob Marley and Usain Bolt are towering cultural symbols. But symbols alone do not sustain culture. What sustains culture is:

infrastructure

intellectual property protection

artist development pipelines

export facilitation

cultural education without moral censorship

And on that front, Jamaica has consistently under-performed.

CHANGE IS THE ONLY JAMAICAN CONSTANT

The final truth is simple and uncomfortable. The Jamaica the Facebook commentator misses still exists; but it is not at the center anymore. It lives alongside new forms, new energies, new audiences, and new contradictions.

Culture didn’t die, it outgrew the gatekeepers. And until Jamaica’s policymakers learn to understand, measure, and invest in that reality, rather than arguing about respectability; Dancehall will continue to make the world rich while Jamaica debates whether it is still “culture.”