Small Axe: Lovers Rock (McQueen, 2020)
Lovers Rock is a 2020 film directed by Steve McQueen, an Afro-Caribbean Briton, who co-wrote it with Courttia Newland. The second installment in a 5-part thematically connected anthology of films known collectively as Small Axe depicts the lives, struggles, and joys of the Anglo-Caribbean diaspora that migrated to Britain in the post-World War II period.
The anthology explores the lives of children of the Windrush Generation through the setting of the 1960s—80s, the forms of code-switching and code-meshing characters perform, the fact that some characters were born in Britain and some in the Caribbean, and the fact that some still trace their origins to parishes and towns in specific Caribbean islands.
The Caribbean diaspora transformed all aspects of British society. First, it provided labor desperately needed in many industries, especially transportation, construction, and health. Second, it introduced Caribbean musical forms, rhythms, and cultural events, such as Carnival, revolutionizing British society.
However, trade unions excluded Afro-Caribbeans, pubs, and nightclubs refused to serve them, and housing was in short supply. Afro-Caribbean British children were often wrongly placed in special needs schools, as was Steve McQueen himself. They were often victims of attacks by organized groups of nativist vigilantes.
The anthology title, Small Axe, comes from the Jamaican saying that the tall tree must be wary of the small axe—that seemingly small actors and agents can overcome seemingly overwhelming opposition.
The film title, Lovers Rock, is taken from a 1970s genre of music popular in the Anglo-Caribbean and in areas of Britain, the USA, and Canada with significant Caribbean diasporic representation. The genre grounds itself in reggae baseline rhythms and incorporates the vocal stylizations of Philadelphia and Chicago soul. In Britain, and especially London, lovers rock was overtly apolitical in content, unlike reggae, focusing instead on love, romance, and the woman’s perspective. Women and female groups dominated the scene.
Lovers rock, however, is one of many forms of music represented in the film, including reggae, dub, soul, disco, and reggae covers of soul classics. Clearly, while Lovers Rock as a genre is foregrounded, signaling the importance of women and women’s concerns, it is in dialogue with various genres–and thus, by extension, several challenges and issues–from which it cannot be readily isolated.
Presentation
Political Factors Involved in the Evolution of 1960-70s Jamaican Music
By the 1970s, the economy, still dependent on the former colonial arrangements, sputtered. Banana farming needed price support and protection. The bauxite and tourist industries—the businesses that extracted more than they put in—were growing but had little effect on an island where more than one in three was unemployed. Here was where the optimism of official nationalism broke down. (23)
.Political corruption and confrontation between two main parties: the Conservative Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) and the democratic socialist People’s National Party (PNP).
.U.S. intervention in Jamaica and economic retreat.
.Violence against the supporters of the opposition; The intermingling of state violence and gang violence.
Diaspora
.In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave people from colonies the right to live and work in Britain. The government needed workers to help fill post-war labor shortages and rebuild the economy. Caribbean countries were also struggling economically, and job vacancies in the UK offered an opportunity. Many of those who came became manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses in the newly-established NHS.
.The 1971 Immigration Act gave Commonwealth citizens living in the UK indefinite leave to remain – the permanent right to live and work in the UK.
This included the Windrush generation and people from other former British colonies in South Asia and Africa.
Racist alarm at the increase in the Black British population led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act that restricted the entry of immigrants from current and former British colonies. By 1972, only those with work permits, or parents or grandparents born in Britain, could enter the country, and this effectively ended most Caribbean immigration.
Here’s a diasporic take on the “British” experience:
Cultural-Spiritual Factors
.Rastafarianism (Afro-centric religion and culture; people’s nationalism: a return to the ideals of independence; emancipation)
Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anti-colonialism, and Black nationalism, and it gave the cause of “Black supremacy” spiritual, political, and social dimensions. The religion found a fast following in the impoverished western Kingston ghettos, especially in the yard called Back-O-Wall, where Rastas constructed a camp of wood and tin. Through the mid-1960s, amidst frequent and constant run-ins with the colonial authorities, their influence over the tenement yards grew. (Chang 23-4)
.Rebel music: rocksteady, reggae, sound systems and dub
“Noise came up from the streets to fill the space—yard-centric toasts, sufferer moans, analog echoes—the sounds of people’s histories, dub histories, versions not represented in the official version. As musical competition was overshadowed by violent political competition, dub became the sound of a rapidly fragmenting nation—troubling, strange, tragic, wise slow-motion portraits of social collapse.” (Chang 30)
The soundtrack as an example of your upcoming assignment:
The film moves through a specific sequence of songs reflective of lovers rock as a genre and of those genres that influenced it and that it also incorporated.