Mento Music

My dissertation: Mento, Jamaica’s Original Music: Development, Tourism and the Nationalist Frame.  New York University, 2008, 413 pages; AAT 3310562  Copies of my dissertation can be ordered through ProQuest’s Dissertation Express service.

I began my doctoral research into mento, a genre of Jamaican social dance music, in 1997.  Since 2000, I have visited Jamaica several times, including one funded by the Fulbright program for the 2002-2003 year.  On these research trips, I spent my time documenting mento as it is currently played as well as its history and development.

My dissertation explored how different ideas about Jamaican national identity have complicated mento’s performance and history, and have yielded competing notions about what it is and how it should sound.  I examined mento’s history and development, with a particular focus on the relationship of three themes: folkness, social development and tourism.  I believe that these themes are linked by cultural nationalism, an idea that has motivated and influenced mento’s performance in complex and sometimes contradictory ways since the nineteenth century.  Often referred to as “Jamaica’s original music,” I argued that mento’s symbolic value in popular culture has become fragmented and its ideological and musical meanings increasingly open to re-articulation.

To show how these ideas developed and affect mento today, I began with an investigation of archival sources, paying special attention to the ways culture-based institutions – including the Welfare & Development Ministry, the Festival Office, the Jamaica Tourist Board and the local recording industry – mobilized and presented mento music opportunistically for the purposes of nation building.  I tempered this archival work with careful ethnographic research among contemporary musicians to show how historical representations differed from the lived experience of those who make the music.  I came to conclusion that claims about mento’s historical authenticity and “originality” are often products of modern nation building programs, and are mired in an antiquated ideological and musicological approach that fails to account for how the music and its practitioners have adapted and changed over time.

A work of historical ethnomusicology, my dissertation is quite unlike most writing about Jamaican music history.  It offers a critical reassessment of the narratives commonly found in traditional and popular music studies in the Caribbean and suggests a new perspective on the study of Jamaica’s musical heritage.

I also offer a one-hour Powerpoint presentation based on this research. Comprised of rare historical recordings and images, it covers all of mento’s historical periods and features a comprehensive examination of the state of the music today. Institutions with a focus on Caribbean music or anthropology will find this presentation provocative and fascinating. Email for more information.