So­ca mu­sic has cre­at­ed re­in­force­ment of some neg­a­tive be­hav­iours in our so­ci­ety.

This was an ar­gu­ment put for­ward by Dr. Sueann Bar­ratt dur­ing the pan­el “Where we go­ing with So­ca? Eval­u­at­ing An Art Form Through Machel Mon­tano’s mu­sic” at a Car­ifes­ta sym­po­sium.

Dr Bar­ratt has a PHD in In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary Gen­der Stud­ies (IGDS).

The pan­el was part of Car­ifes­ta’s Jour­ney Round My­self Sym­po­sium held at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ De­part­ment of Cre­ative Fes­ti­val Arts Main Hall on Mon­day.

Bar­ratt, re­fer­ring to the crit­i­cism lob­bied against Farmer Nap­py’s ‘Hook­ing Meh’ in Bar­ba­dos ear­li­er this year, said many times songs we en­joyed of­ten pro­vid­ed an un­der­tone which sup­ports abu­sive be­hav­iour in re­la­tion­ships.

Crit­ics had claimed that the song and its video pro­mot­ed tox­ic mas­cu­line be­hav­iour in re­la­tion­ships and en­cour­aged do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.

“With­in that song we have that ten­sion, that in­her­ent con­tra­dic­tion be­tween a so­cial re­la­tion be­tween gen­ders that are ide­alised, ro­man­ti­cised and even ex­oti­cised. The erot­ic is made palat­able,” said Bar­ratt, “But at the same time, we have a root mes­sage about vi­o­lence in that I am en­ti­tled to you and where that en­ti­tle­ment is not met, you are at fault and thus cre­ate a prob­lem. Now a lot of peo­ple miss that.”

Bar­rat said she was tak­en aback when some of her stu­dents stat­ed that some peo­ple want to be “a tro­phy” as Nap­py had sung in the song, as she could not over­look the re­stric­tive mes­sage of the song.

“Some peo­ple def­i­nite­ly recog­nise you want to be ap­pre­ci­at­ed you want to be val­ued and in­tel­li­gi­ble but you do not want to be an ob­ject that is con­tained and con­trolled. You do not want to be placed on a shelf with­out free­dom,” said Dr. Bar­ratt.

She said, how­ev­er, ‘Hook­ing Meh’ was not the on­ly song guilty of hav­ing sub­tle mes­sages which em­pow­ered tox­ic at­ti­tudes.

“There are ob­vi­ous he­do­nis­tic mes­sages, ‘gyal bend over let me jam yuh’ we know why that is over, let me slam you up. That’s ob­vi­ous, we know what that is about and I could do a gen­der analy­sis of that,” she said, “But then you have those that rest at that mo­ment of ten­sion, we have to con­tem­plate. The ob­vi­ous we can eas­i­ly re­sist or com­ply with but those that are sub­tle and make the in­vis­i­ble more in­vis­i­ble cre­ates norms around trou­bling things like vi­o­lence and con­trol be they in re­la­tion­ships or not.”

She said with this sub­lim­i­nal­ly fed to us through our mu­sic we can­not be sur­prised when it trans­lates in­to mu­sic.

“As we lis­ten to our cul­ture, we of­ten have moral pan­ic at the end of the fes­ti­val. Oh my God why do these things hap­pen all?” she said, “What trou­bles me most­ly as I look at the lyrics of mu­sic is that in that mes­sage we re­in­force the very things that we find prob­lem­at­ic. It’s ok to act up­on some­body else’s body with­out con­sent, re­mem­ber the whole stress when you say you can’t ‘whine’? We’ve been ne­go­ti­at­ing it for years and we’ve been ne­go­ti­at­ing it with­out trou­ble. So I think I would love if we could re­flect up­on that.”