This account, which came out on September 25 and was written by Kimberly A. C. Wilson, had Pioneer Square's business folk saying the strangest things, like "There's something about the music that seems to bring out the stupidity of the people who hang around outside these clubs" (tavern owner Tina Bueche). This is tantamount to saying, "Something in hiphop makes niggers go crazy!" After suggesting that hiphop casts black magical spells on black folks, the same tavern owner made this revealing statement: "Reggae is 'black' music, and there hasn't been this kind of problem at the Bohemian after reggae shows in the past." Apart from her shameless use of reggae to prove that her criticism of hiphop was not motivated by race, Bueche failed to clarify exactly what kind of reggae she had in mind.
This omission is significant because reggae, like hiphop, has many subsections, with each subsection representing different social and economic realties. The type of reggae the Bohemian and most clubs in Pioneer Square play is called "roots reggae." This form of reggae is performed by older bands like the Israel Vibrations and Burning Spear, and, in America, has a predominantly white, middle-class following. In the case of Seattle, roots reggae, which is not to be confused with dance-hall reggae (its electronic offshoot, popularized by the likes of Shabba Ranks and Shelly Thunder and favored by black Americans), has a large white and small East African following. So when business owners in Pioneer Square say "reggae," what they really mean is roots reggae, which is a code for white, middle-class patronage; and when they say hiphop (which attracts black Americans), they mean black, underclass patronage. As Wordsayer from Source of Labor put it, "Hiphop is a code word for blacks, the current code word. My mother told me it used to be R&B, rock and roll, jazz. Now it's hiphop."
Because hiphop is a code for black people, in Seattle the hiphop scene has been harassed--dogged into a state of total instability, appearing in the galaxy of our city's nightlife as brief flashes and flickers. Hiphop has no center in Seattle. It has never cohered, or, as in other cities, been normalized. This is why, for example, bouncers can't regulate or make sense of the flows that come in and out of hiphop clubs--the scene never lasts long enough for them to recognize good and bad patrons. A more anchored hiphop scene would certainly ease much of the tension caused by unremitting police repression and racism.
At this point, I must stress that I'm not talking about the independent hiphop scene (that is another matter altogether), but clubs that play the type of hiphop distributed by big American, European, and Japanese corporations, which last week (September 21 to 28) made up 25 percent of the top 40 CDs sold in America. Indeed, all you have to do is play Top 40 music and you basically have a hiphop club.
Ultimately, though, the problem is not just hiphop. The main issue is whether the city will ever have the guts to let go of certain spaces, so that those spaces may explode into a perpetual carnival. A carnival not ordered or regulated by corporate interests (Bumbershoot), but run (or run amok) by street musicians, informal businesses, drunkards, whores, sleepwalkers. In a word, a carnival where the city is turned upside down socially, racially, and sexually. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic, once argued that the carnival of the Middle Ages was the sort of space where kings were turned into beggars, beggars into kings--all the codes of the regular world were inverted and perverted.
Pioneer Square can become such a space. True, it will be a dangerous space. Bullets and punches may fly. But it is necessary for a city to surrender a part of itself to the laws (or lawlessness) of the carnival if it wants to maintain sound mental health. If we don't let go of Pioneer Square or some other section of town that's dying to erupt, then Seattle will continue to get crazier.
