And heartfelt words of celebration, memorialisation and love from his daughter Natara and nephew Mark.
Asher Senator who also spoke has recently published brilliant account of his life working with Smiley Culture, capturing the feeling, sounds and voice of sound system cultures, and the realities of life in the 1970s and 80s.
For the last 15 years I’ve been working on the history of the 1980s. Smiley Culture’s words became absolutely central to making sense of a contradictory, changing decade that still speaks to the present. This led to two different chapters, one of which focussed on his important work with the Commonwealth Institute and one of which used his work and words to explore ‘hybridity’ and resilience in the face of hostile race relations policies. In the face of growth of the far right, ever tightening immigration control, moral panics around black youth, disproportionate levels of unemployment, and experiences of racist policing in the 1980SSmiley Culture taught me, and us all some important lessons, lessons that I think still need now
He has taught us:
- The Power of laughing at power.
- The Power of using your voice within and across different communities and being heard within and across those communities.
- The Power of working together to build something bigger than the sum of its parts, whether that thing you are building is a Sound System, musical collaborations, education projects or new types of broadcasting, and making a big impact with little budget or mainstream support structures.
- The Power of words, and language to connect people, recognise similarities and differences between us, and their power to dismantle problems and build new solutions,
- The power of education that provides our young people with the real skills that they need to nurture their own creativity and negotiate the world around them
Taking inspiration from these lessons helped me to explore the relationship between race and class in eighties Britain. In the process he helped me to think about what it means to speak for yourself, for your community and intra community and how popular culture can help us work intersectionally, across class, race, locally rooted in the city space, Popular Culture is a way of bridging and dividing simultaneously. Smiley culture exemplifies the ways in which popular culture might help to perforate the relationship between race and class and speak of location.
My response to Smiley Culture’s work was informed by Les Back’s work on hybridity. Back argues that black music can be situated within racist cultures that bear a complex hybrid history and recognises that ‘One of the limits of much sociological writing on music is that it often pays little attention to the content and sound of black music. Rather what are privileged are its social effects to the degree that little attention is paid to why particular genres are so compelling’. He particularly helps us to think about what it means when black music is embraced by white audiences and broadcasters
Who Was Smiley Culture?
Smiley Culture was born David Emannuel. He was Britain’s first mainstream success as an MC. Part of the Saxon Studio International sound system who had been going since the mid-1970s. Early reviews of his music described him as ‘a whimsical London “chatter”. His own home-grown version of a West Indian talk-over style was less hard or aggressively rhythmic than most rap. Described as ‘mimicked accents… with a genial lecture added in.
Cockney Translation was the Smiley Culture’s first hit single. It was a classic ‘break through’ single. ( Although the idea of a ‘break through’ is of course problematic and assumes that firstly cultures exist in two separate spheres and secondly breaking through into one type of audience holds more cultural value than another). Like all of Smiley Culture’s work it was continuous verse with no repeated verses. The song translates cockney into Jamaican Patois and vice versa its wordplay was picked up by sociologists, linguists and educationalists. As a performer, Smiley Culture also translated style, as well as vocabulary. He merged West Indian forms with London-based as East End music-hall. Looking back on the song, Smiley Culture recognised that as a black man talking cockney he was integrating cultures – identifying them as separate in order to perforate the divisions between them.(Denselow, Robin. ‘Smiley Chats His Way to the Top’. The Guardian, 25/1/1985.)
Culture’s ability to perform both simultaneously demonstrates a shared sense of class community, both the patois and the cockney are in fact in Smiley’s voice. He was hybrid London, carrying its pasts into its presents.
Police Officer
Cockney Translation topped the reggae charts. It was originally on the independent Fashion Label, -, was handed on to Polydor. Polydor turned down his follow up single, Police officer so it was released solely on Fashion but successfully entered the mainstream charts leading to a performance on Top of the Pops. Police Officer, hit the mainstream charts. By the time of the first mainstream press coverage of the release it had sold more than 160,000 copies. [3] Smiley Culture appeared on Top of the Pops and the song reached number 12 and was in the charts for 13 weeks from November 1984.
Smiley Culture described Police Officer as a true story. According to the story, Smiley Culture was stopped by the police whilst driving his car in Victoria, London. There’s a key line in the song, “Police Officer no give me producer. ‘Producer’ refers to the police form HO/RT1 which required drivers to attend a police station with all of their license, insurance and tax documents. In the song, Smiley Culture is worried that a search of the car would uncover the stash of cannabis , ganja. He considers bribing the police. In the end the situation is resolved when the police officer recognises him and asks for his autograph instead. Again this is a voice character poem, this time with Culture playing himself and the voice of the London Met police.
There is much to be said about the politics of cannabis in the 1980s. The 1985 riots occurred after a change of policy from community policing to a crackdown, especially around the use of cannabis. This was compounded by the growth of Rastafarianism as a community and political expression. Numerous songs made the political significance of cannabis clear making public the coded language of drug cultures; for example, Steel Pulse’s 1978 album Handsworth Revolution’s Macka Splaff and The Selecter’s I Love My Collie
The song also raised thoughts on the limits of celebrity culture. Replacing a backhander with an autograph also suggests something about the relationship between cultural and economic capital. It also suggests something about the economics of racism. Young black men driving were stopped by the police because it was assumed they had stolen, rather than bought, nice cars. Here though, the exceptional nature of his success has bought him, literally a legitimate reason for driving the car.
With class read through race, Smiley culture suggests that despite the ideology of Thatcher’s Britain, you cannot simply work yourself out of race, place and class. Your hard earned nice car, just pinpoints you as a potential criminal. But more hypocritically still, the system that keeps you in your place will buy your records, sing along and ask you for an autograph for their mother. Following the song’s success Culture told interviewers that he’d “come across policemen who tell me that the whole station have bought it” (but is that black popular culture is meant to do? entertain the police?).
At the intersections between rap and performance poetry Smiley Culture’s locally rooted black british voice was a powerful weapon against state, or institutional racism. There are two ways I want to explore this politically – firstly speaking truth to power, and secondly giving voice to the complexity of black working class experience.
When Black voices in the 80s spoke truth to power, they were responding to police harassment and cover-ups with their own rhythms and words.
For example,
Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem 13 Dead criticised the police’s handling of a racist firebombing of a house in Brixton’s Railton Road. Another of Zepheniah’s poems asked Who killed Colin Roach? who had died of gunshot wounds in the foyer of Stoke Newington Police Station in January 1983.
Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem Dread Inna Inglan campaigned to free George Lyndo who had been framed for burglary by the police in Bradford. Sonny’s Lettah exposed the day to day harassment of black youth under the SUS laws. Sus, ‘for suspected person’ allowed stop and search on the street, It was seen as a racialized application of the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Like the use of Producers, SUS was experienced as day to day police harassment.
So on one hand we could see Smiley Culture’s music was similarly speaking truth as power in Police Officer. He uses the voice of the oppressor in a narrative form long established in Caribbean poetry and song and in ‘playing the dozens’ street culture. It is a move we can find elsewhere, for example, in the song Fare Dodger, which Papa Benjie performed as part yardy – part queen’s English to criticise exploitative bosses, high bus prices, and the politics of jumping the fare.
But there is something else going on here beyond speaking truth to power, the adoption of vernacular voice demonstrates the complexity of black working class resistance. As Lez Henry suggested in his work on black sound systems, black popular culture could simultaneously politically critique, and at the same time speak into being a new form of community. In cockney translation, for example, he isn’t mimicking a disparity of power he is embodying a duality of British working class experience. Smiley Culture’s voices reproduce the simultaneously similarity and difference of cultural appropriation. He is a cockney and he is Black British.
Based on this set reading
Gilroy, P. (2004) It’s a Family Affair. In: That’s the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader. New York/London, Routledge. pp. 87–94. http://sites.psu.edu/comm292/wp-content/uploads/sites/5180/2014/10/FormanNeal-Thats_the_Joint_The_Hip_Hop_Studies_Readerbook.pdf.
Henry, W. ‘Lez’ (2012) Reggae, Rasta and the Role of the Deejay in the Black British Experience. Contemporary British History. 26 (3), 355–373. doi:10.1080/13619462.2012.703024.
With thanks to lewispatrick.zenfolio.com for the great photos, and PA extraordinaire Charlotte Ruse for supporting me on the day so brilliantly.