Kunta Kinte Dub (1976) — ‘when the music hits you feel no pain’
‘Without music, life would be a mistake’ — Nietzsche (1889)
Fifty minutes into Steve McQueen’s (2020) Lovers Rock is one of the most enjoyable scenes of TV or film I’ve ever experienced. It’s 10 minutes of young Afro-Caribbean men going absolutely buck wild to The Revolutionaries’ legendary 1976 Kunta Kinte at a house party in London. Lovers Rock is the second of an anthology of films (Small Axe) to depict different aspects of the Afro-Caribbean immigrant experience in the 70s and 80s in London. The film follows the events of a house party over the course of one London evening, with the epic dance scene taking place towards the end of the night, when the booze and ganja has really kicked in.
Ostracised by the mainstream nightclubs, house parties were common among black and brown immigrant communities across the 70s and 80s. The men in the dance have been shown in the film to not all see eye to eye by this juncture, but the riddim takes over and provides a moment of shared revelry and Dionysian frenzy.
Common in Caribbean sound system culture, the riddim is rewound three times. When the beat drops on the second play, a couple of the revellers seem completely possessed. Watching with a huge smile on my face, I screamed ‘YES, that’s how I feel when the beat drops!’ I asked my partner to rewatch the scene with me, asking her to guess who I identified with the most. She guessed correctly; it was my man below:
Similar to how our 3-year-old toddler shakes his head and limbs uncontrollably when flooded with joy and excitement, I too still get that feeling when a desirable beat kicks in. While the amygdala tends to ‘shut down’ the fear response during orgasm, during these peak experiences of sonic joy, not only is there no fear — ‘when the music hits you feel no pain’ as per Marley — but there’s a feeling of such dissolution of self and a pervasive joy that is impossible to articulate in words.
Using Nietzschean terminology (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872), it’s as though the veil of the lyrical, safe, harmonious, ordered and individual Apollonian gives way to reveal the primordial, intense, awe inspiring, and unifying force of the Dionysian. The reveller cannot reside in the Dionysian state — therein lies madness. However, through musical intoxication, there is a glimpse of the primordial that the Apollonian can only temporarily veil, but never fully conceal.
Attempting to survive in a racist, cold (physically, emotionally and psychologically) and foreign climate, in the dance the participants ‘feel no pain’, and instead experience unbridled joy and affirmation. As the DJ screams: ‘I feel me so!’, ‘let out the lion!’, and ‘power!’ Building on themes from the BFI listed Babylon (1980), which pre-empted events in Brixton and across in the nation in 1981 (powerfully articulated in The Shoulders We Stand On [2023] — shout out to my sister, Preeti Dhillon), Lovers Rock is McQueen at both his visceral and tender best.
I’m writing this in early 2025, when Arsenal’s 18 year old Afro-Caribbean star in the making, Myles Lewis-Skelly, is being portrayed with racist tones in the mainstream media. Films such as Babylon and the Small Axe anthology, documentaries like Channel 4’s Defiance (2024) as well as texts such as The Shoulders We Stand On are essential viewing and reading for those who want to better understand the struggle that black and brown people have gone through, and continue to experience, to survive in Inglan. These texts also highlight the quotidian and institutional bullshit, along with the occasional sensorial release, that we oscillate between in attempting to survive.
Sustenance
As I ranted about a few years ago, my body is not at home living in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Neither is my spirit. But there’s no ancestral home to return to; there’s no completion to be had. Instead, what I’m/we’re left with — and it’s by no means nothing — are moments of Dionysian rupture, affirmation and intoxication. Much like the problems of how carnival exists to temporarily upturn order in order to maintain the status quo (see my piece on Marcuse, Hip Hop and Revolution), such rapturous moments of rupture can be seen as self-indulgent, and as failing to engaging in the ‘struggle’. But bass filled sustenance is needed in order to continue with more substantive endeavours; in my case, working in the academy. There is, in cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s (Critical Models, 2005, p. 274) terms, a necessary ‘bourgeois coldness’ needed without which one can simply not survive in an unjust society. But the cold needs to be set ablaze every now and then.
So, nuff respect to the countless forebearers and contemporaries for bringing the fire and sustenance from within Babylon (Akala, Asian Dub Foundation, Bob Vylan, Fun-da-mental and Kano all immediately come to mind if I was forced to give a top five at this exact moment of writing!).
A special thanks also to Paul Standish, whose recent PESGB seminar ‘What’s in a TV series’ prompted me to revisit McQueen’s anthology.
