Embodied minstrelsy,racialization and redemption in reggae

Musical villains

The figure of the minstrel and the use of the phrases ‘blackface’ or ‘blackface minstrel’ has become a shorthand way of framing and disparaging White musicians and consumers who adopt music styles and practices defined as Black in ways that are considered appropriative, inauthentic, exploitative, fetishistic or indeed, racist. Honey G – an X Factor 2016 contestant – was described as the latest White incarnation of ‘blackface minstrelsy’ (Okolosie, 2016) for her ‘inauthentic’ hip hop covers. Honey G’s performative style was viewed as an unacceptable parody of Black culture and indicated a disregard for Black British people. Is there any other way of framing her, or is White performance of hip hop covers only visible through this default lens? This use of ‘blackface minstrelsy’ reflects one of the dominant meanings conveyed within academic studies of 19th-century minstrelsy, which was considered to be an elaborate technique used to disguise cultural borrowing and the resulting cultural transformation of White America in the process. Minstrelsy was a process through which African American culture and experience was characterized by White entertainers in a ‘carefully regulated and socially approved context’, thereby avoiding perceptions of their own cultural ‘degradation’ in the process (Szwed, 2005: 85) but ‘at a considerable expense to African Americans’ (Tuhkanen, 2001: 16). Thus, the crude manner in which Black experience and culture and, in particular, Black bodies, were publicly degraded within 19th-century minstrelsy in the American entertainment sphere frames contemporary social relations of music production.

However, this framing overlooks other possible dimensions of minstrelsy such as meaning reversals, hybridity, ambivalence and political resistance inextricably linked to a wider ethnic constituency of performers and audiences including African Americans. Indeed, such an acknowledgement demonstrates how it offered space for critical dialogue and as Taylor and Austen (2012) argue, ‘despite the appearance of black minstrelsy as a servile tradition, there were elements of liberation in it from its very beginning, and these were instrumental to its popularity’ (p. 27; original emphasis). African American minstrel performance used the same racist stereotypes ‘to distance themselves’ from racist images and as such, ‘… they were performing these roles, not embracing them as representative behaviour’ (Sotiropoulos, 2006: 9, original emphasis). The reproduction and critique of racist stereotypes and middle-class morals suggest that within the context of 19th-century American music culture, ‘in blackface minstrelsy’s audiences there were in fact contradictory racial impulses at work, impulses based in the everyday lives and racial negotiations of the minstrel show’s working class partisans’ (Lott, 2013: 4).

Writing about 19th-century minstrelsy in Britain, Pickering (2008) suggests that although ideologically infused with problematic racist and imperial dimensions, it also constituted a type of cultural resistance to counter Victorian values and morals, ‘[t]he blackface mask was an acceptable prism through which Englishness could become un-English, and so allow laughter and tears to flow without moral inhibition’ (p. 105). Minstrelsy therefore enabled a ‘crossover between polite society and proletarian disorder and between cultural refinement and racial transgression’ (Pickering, 2008: 215). In light of both historically contextualized perspectives, far from being a one-dimensional cultural figure expressing hegemonic cultural values and racist ideology, minstrelsy was used to undermine classed and racialized forms of power. Thus, although the idea that minstrelsy is a form of racist parody remains potent within contemporary cultural imaginaries, other interpretations emphasize its ‘hybrid, creolized nature’ and raise questions about ‘the status of nineteenth-century blackface performance as an unequivocally racist, anti-black practice, both in intentions and effects’ (Tuhkanen, 2001: 16).

Dominant narratives of popular music’s development in the 20th century characterize high-profile artists based on a narrow version of minstrelsy’s racialized relations and in a way that suggests an ahistorical sense of popular music’s tangled history. For example, Mick Jagger is described by Szwed (2005) as performing in a minstrel tradition ‘without blackface’ and thereby representing ‘the almost full absorption of Black tradition into white culture’ (p. 85). Such characterizations of popular music through Jagger (and others such as Elvis Presley) however, imply that, as Hagstrom Miller (2010) suggests, ‘an identifiable and distinct black tradition existed prior to White appropriation through an emergent minstrelsy’ (p. 10). Such readings overlook how music experience and opportunities were always racially entangled through commercial and non-commercial music worlds. Furthermore, Hagstrom Miller (2010) argues that Jagger ‘illustrates the extent to which imitating black performance remained a constituent component of white identity’ and thus that the reason he ‘appeared transgressive’ is because ‘he represents the survival of the performative authenticity’ emergent through minstrelsy (p. 11). In this sense, modern styles of performative minstrelsy practice are achieved without black face paint. For this reason, the phrase ‘embodied minstrelsy’ is used in this article as a way to distinguish traditional ‘blackface minstrelsy’ (i.e. with black face paint) from modern performative minstrel practice (i.e. without black face paint), where other forms of racialized embodiment such as language, accent and voice are emphasized instead of skin-colour as the major cultural signifiers of Blackness. Thus, ‘embodied minstrelsy’ is a more accurate descriptive label.

Most characterizations of the high-profile examples introduced above tend not to examine forms of imbricating social practice and values that artists may display beyond their performance or output. Furthermore, moral and political judgements of an artist’s authenticity generally tend to be made without knowledge of all of the contextual production details, including the complicated historical detail about the song or genre being performed (Frith, 2004). Focusing on a ‘low-profile’ White DJ embedded within a local African Caribbean community, whose musical and social worlds were brought together through reggae, demonstrates how racial embodiment of performative authenticity – by adopting Jamaican patois – demonstrates the racist and antiracist potential of everyday cultural practices as well as the uncritical acceptance of racially discrete musical categories (see also Nayak, 2003).

Musical heroes

Another dominant, yet competing, repertoire of authenticity that tends to be more prevalent in academic and industry discourse is achieved through a heroic version. For musicians that do not possess the social characteristics believed to be associated with authentic renditions of a music genre, particularly those associated with Black people, other means of negotiating alterity and producing authenticity are established by using their cultural capital as a form of political and/or personal redemption. Rather than framing their musical practice as problematic and/or inauthentic, for White artists, this vision of authenticity is construed as a form of ‘identity transcendence’ and thus they are viewed as heroic individuals for having escaped the ‘shackles of racial conformity’ (Hamilton, 2016: 15). This ‘heroic’ view of authenticity is used to frame high-profile rock artists such as Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger/The Rolling Stones where their Whiteness is believed to have underpinned perceptions of their heroism for creatively extending themselves beyond their racialized subjectivity to embrace a form of cosmopolitan openness through music. It was also visible within the folk revival in the middle of the 20th century led by White artists such as Pete Seeger. Hamilton suggests that in this folk revival a ‘vision of authenticity’ was being claimed which was not rooted in the ‘dust-bowl homestead’ or ‘sharecroppers’ shack’ once associated with a previous form of folk music authenticity, but instead within self-making and rebirth. Many of those turning to folk music at this point were university educated and did not have a poor, rural Southern upbringing. Thus, as Hamilton (2016) suggests, ‘[i]n Seeger’s telling, self-invention (or self-reinvention) could become its own authenticity, illustrating one’s commitment to an identity that one has chosen, rather than what one has simply been born into’ (p. 63).

There can be an ethical dimension to this self-invention also. For example, within the folk revival referred to above, part of the self-making and rebirth was to rescue ‘real black music’ that they thought was ‘always believed to be vanished or vanishing and thus in need of preservation’ (Hamilton 2016: 69). Similar visions of authenticity are realized in world music where music understood to represent the ‘real’ South Africa or Brazil is perceived to be under threat and is thus often the music championed by the industry and preferred by consumers within Western markets (Haynes, 2013). However, not all musicians are allowed to pursue such personal or political pathways to transcend established racial and musical boundaries, as some are subject to differing judgements depending on their ethnoracial background.

Black and other minority ethnic artists that have free-ranging music taste are typically considered to have betrayed their racial or ethnic group and often attract criticism. African American artists that crossed over from rhythm and blues to popular music were viewed as having ‘sold out’ or diluted their ‘real’ sound and others such as Jimi Hendrix were subjected to contradictory claims about his Black authenticity or hybrid musical aesthetic (Waksman, 1999). According to Hamilton (2016), ‘[i]n these formulations, cosmopolitan versatility among African American artists was not heard as identity transcendence but rather as racial betrayal, in accusations that were too frequently lobbed by white critics’ (p. 15). This asymmetrical racialized logic resurfaces in more recent ‘post-genre’ debates regarding the extent to which artists possess the same level of racial flexibility when it comes to genre experimentation or, in fact when they suggest they have gone beyond genre altogether (James, 2017). Despite Bruno Mars’ desire to make and perform pop music that was not thought of simply as reflecting his racial/ethnic group, according to James (2017), the music industry instead understood that ‘an artist who appeared to be Hispanic’ was a ‘performer of Latin music’. (p. 28). Thus, in order to avoid any ‘identity-based genre stereotypes’ and ‘being pigeon-holed as a performer of Latin music’, Bruno Mars removed his Hispanic surname (James, 2017: 28). It is apparent therefore that, on the one hand, visions of authenticity that reinforce the alignment of music genres and ethnoracial identities continue to constitute the social and commercial relations of music production, but not all artists and social identities are caught up in these relations equally. In light of this asymmetrical framing and mobilization of discourses of authenticity as heroic and flexible, the next section will examine how DJ Derek was produced through the differing strands of authenticity.

Redemption through self-invention as a reggae DJ ⁶

Derek’s knowledge of reggae was often referred to in published accounts of his life and career alongside acknowledgement of his vast collection of recordings (see, for example, BBC 2, 1994; BBC 2006; Coleman, 1994; Dudson, 2012; Emmanuel, 2016; Lynskey, 2016; Williamson, 2016). Together, his knowledge and recordings created opportunity for work as a DJ in the 1970s. His first gig was at a local Jamaican pub called The Star and Garter, which had been taken over by a friend of Derek’s called Hector who, ‘[k]nowing that Derek had a great love for the music and a record collection to back it up… asked him to come down and play some of his records in exchange for a little beer money’ (Dudson, 2012). The accumulation of (Caribbean) subcultural capital through musical knowledge, record collecting and the records themselves positioned Derek as a ‘reggae connoisseur’ – where both collecting and the collections themselves are ‘both public displays of power/knowledge and private refuges from the … social world’ (Straw 1997: 4) – and references to this capital were used to legitimate him as a reggae DJ within a music field that is suffuse with ideas of race and, in particular, the sounds and history of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993). Derek was also positioned as a local entrepreneur and became an independent supplier of music to the local Caribbean community which he sought from music stores in London, ‘Having had access to the main reggae warehouse in London, he had always been first to get hold of the latest imports from Jamaica. As a result he knew what was hot and made sure he got a copy or version that no one else had then’ (Boat Mag, Dudson, 2012).

Becoming a ‘reggae connoisseur’ was also framed as a journey of self-invention and discovery. Authenticity is therefore produced through a narrative of redemption within published accounts of his life and is typically structured around a series of transitional moments when his earlier career in accountancy and marriages dissolved prompting a relocation to St Pauls, an area of Bristol with the largest concentration of African Caribbean people and noted for its levels of deprivation at that time. There are many references to how Derek embedded himself within the Caribbean community where he found his spiritual home among a generation of likeminded people, including how,

‘He lost his home, his job, everything’, says Larkin, ‘and the black community got him back on his feet. He was totally adopted by them’. ‘I think he sometimes felt the odd one out’, says Shirley. ‘And then he found all this love and affection from the black community. Maybe he felt that was more like a family for him’. (Lynskey, 2016).

Derek also identifies similar aspects of his life when explaining how music became a way of dealing with the loss of both parents and his marriage break-ups. Hence, refusing to relocate to Birmingham at the behest of the local Cadburys ⁷ chocolate factory where he worked as an accountant, Derek states that, ‘… by that time I was essentially a single man, I’d lost both my parents, marriages had crashed, so I handed in my notice and I didn’t know what I was going to do’ (Ujima Radio, 2013).

However, explanations for his redemption through self-invention as reggae DJ extends beyond the music. Derek described how ‘the music made [him] feel at home’ among the Caribbean community with whom he shared, ‘a mutual love of music and cricket’ (UJima Radio, 2013) and elsewhere he suggested that, ‘… I loved the music and then I fell in love with the people’ (Grand Finale, 2008). Derek’s reinvention as reggae DJ is also believed therefore to be inextricably linked to his localized experiences and community embeddedness in St Pauls illustrating how reinvention can be its own authenticity. Furthermore, Derek reflected on his musical mission by asking, ‘why aren’t people, my people, hearing this wonderful music that this race of people are making?’ (Grand Finale, 2008), suggesting there was a self-styled ethical dimension to champion reggae music from a particular era, which is reminiscent of the folksingers’ musical ethics discussed above. Versions of this narrative of a personal and localized authenticity are reproduced across many sources reflecting on Derek’s life in music.

DJ Derek: ‘the blackest white man in Bristol’

Another more significant dimension in representations of DJ Derek that tended to immediately follow references to his love of reggae are descriptions of him as a White Englishman, closely followed by a reference to his performative style which incorporated Jamaican patois. Derek was described as, ‘the most unlikely of Patois speaking reggae DJs’ (Emmanuel, 2016) and more recently described by Daddy G (from the band Massive Attack ⁸ ) and cited in the section heading above as, ‘probably the blackest white man that people knew in Bristol’ (cited in Lynskey, 2016). Indeed, most of the published accounts focus on lauding Derek for a series of apparent musical and racial transgressions achieved through his biography, style, musical knowledge and vernacular mode of speech. For these reasons, Derek was often referred to as, ‘… a cult hero in the world of Jamaican Reggae!’ ⁹ and there were other accounts of his legendary status demonstrated by the recognition and praise he had received from high-profile reggae artists such as Toots and the Maytals. Thus, a heroic version of authenticity is discursively produced through what is perceived as a ‘racial flexibility’ implied by repeated references to and juxtaposition of reggae and Whiteness. This heroic authenticity also manifested through accounts of his cosmopolitanizing music mission where he was also described as ‘an ambassador for cultural exchange’ (Daddy G cited in Lynskey, 2016) and that he had transformed ‘what it means to be British’ (Don Letts cited in Lynskey, 2016). ¹⁰

But how should we interpret Derek’s adoption of Jamaican patois? Lott (2013) argues that in contemporary cultural contexts, ‘[e]very time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return’ (p. 5). It is likely that some of Derek’s immediate public viewed his use of Jamaican patois as problematic cultural appropriation and indeed, perhaps as racist stereotyping and caricature. However, there is no evidence of this view produced in any published account. Instead, rather than being criticized as ‘blackface’s unconscious return’, prominent musicians and DJs describe Derek’s embodiment of Jamaican patois as endearing:

I found the contrast of this bespectacled old Englishman in his cardigans and fancy waistcoats throwing down some serious Jamaican slanguage quite endearing, …. I don’t know anyone who had a problem with it. (Don Letts, cited in Lynskey, 2016)

Explanations for his vocal style appear in numerous accounts, including Derek’s, although the rationale has two different emphases: one where for pragmatic business reasons he needed to better understand patois and the other was to convince people of his authenticity:

I met a Jamaican guy from Birmingham who was into promoting and sound clashes. I was expected to do the financial side of things having been an accountant…. it’s a natural instinct I think anybody who’s sitting with a load of people and they can’t understand fully what’s being said, especially when it involves money, you think I could be being stitched up here. (Grand Finale, 2008)

when I started to play in a nightclub it became a problem because you get coaches of people from Birmingham and London ‘Why have you got a white DJ?’ on the assumption that no white man could know anything about black music. (Grand Finale, 2008)

There are many similar references to the instrumental role played by his Jamaican friends who taught him patois, ‘Derek was taken down to a Barber Shop … and told to keep his eyes open, ears open and mouth shut until he was ready to say something’ (Boat Mag, Dudson, 2012). These accounts do more than explain the cultivation of a Jamaican accent and patois, it shows awareness of being subject to critical scrutiny and sanction by an African Caribbean audience and local community. A similar observation was made by Les Back (1996) in research in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in London, which demonstrated how White appropriation of Black cultural symbols were routinely monitored and contested by Black residents as part of the everyday negotiation of race and racism (p. 132). David Rodigan, ¹¹ another prominent White reggae DJ, recognizes the risk of being perceived as parodying Rasta/reggae music culture in his performance when he states that, ‘I don’t wear the clothing of the Rastaman. I understand the culture totally… But I talk the way I talk, and I dress the way I dress. I’m a diehard reggae fan, and that’s it’ (cited in Burrell, 2003). Thus, although Derek and Rodigan opted for different performative styles, these accounts demonstrate the intrinsic role that awareness of racialized perceptions of embodied differences – both theirs and the audience – plays in negotiating being a White reggae DJ within what is perceived as a predominantly Black cultural space.

Alcoff argues perceptions of racial difference can be understood as a ‘constitutive element’ in ‘fundamental everyday embodied experience and social interactions’ and thus as a form of ‘racial common sense that pervades people’s understanding of the social world, in recognition that racial identity is lived in the body at particular cultural moments (Alcoff 1999: 17; 19). These ideas can be drawn on to frame Derek’s racialized positioning and his interactions with the African Caribbean community and audience members. Derek conveys awareness of the potential limitation that perceptions of his embodied Whiteness have as a reggae DJ evidenced above and, in response, in order to sustain his musical and local identity, he embodied a Jamaican accent and incorporated Rastafarian vernacular. Thus, Derek changed his speech/bodily habits depending on the type of circumstance, including those produced through perceived challenges from racialized others when performing to mostly Black audiences, but also in Black majority social spaces. However, in several accounts like the one below he describes himself as ‘black’:

I was a white DJ but albeit I hardly ever saw a white face in the venues I was playing so I wasn’t conscious as a white man about this influence affecting what I was doing as a white man because although I’m white to all intents and purposes I was black…. I knew that a lot of black DJs weren’t happy in the early days with going out and playing in the white places but I was so lucky I was able to merge between the two worlds … I mean I never felt out of place even though I was conscious that I was making some people uncomfortable when I first started to mingle in St Pauls, among the black community… I think generally in the end my body language meant they didn’t think I was a plain clothes or someone trying to muscle in on territory or any of this. I just became part of that scene. (Grand Finale, 2008)

Comparing his DJing and musical opportunities to Black DJs, Derek alludes to their less positive experiences in White majority spaces; however, attempts to authenticate and explain difference invokes a racial flexibility, producing a vision of authenticity that portrays his embodied transgressions of perceptions of racial difference as convincing and eventually, non-threatening as ‘to all intents and purposes [he] was black’. Should this claim be understood as reflecting the broader context of what Brubaker (2016) describes as the ‘increasing complexity and fluidity of the landscape of identities’ or is such a claim ‘unnatural, opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent’ (p. 415)?

Discussing the author Jack Kerouac, Alcoff (1999) suggests that his desire to get beyond perceptions of his own racialized limitations – socially produced within a historical racialized schema – is evidenced in the way he describes his encounters with African American people and thus his recognition of disequilibrium – an ‘incoherence between his felt-body image… and the body image now induced by the alienation he felt’ (p. 20). The disequilibrium experienced signals some potential for transformation of perceptions of embodied racialized experience. However, rather than reorienting or eliminating the positionality of his race-consciousness and disrupting racialization processes, Derek’s embodiment of Caribbean capital and subsequent claims about being black – both his and others’ – suggests instead that, as a musical figure, Derek is produced through competing discourses that reinstate prevailing categorical frameworks of race while also undermining the notion that normative racialized identities are meant to provide a fixed set of musical tastes and affinities. The emphasis on racial flexibility and heroism in accounts of Derek’s musical identity is historically and discursively tied to dominant racialized repertoires of White authenticity within popular music. In answer to the question posed above, therefore, the self/other perceptions of Derek, particularly those emerging from the local Bristol context where he lived and worked, attest to the complexity and fluidity of identity claims, but also suggest an opportunistic moment rather than an unnatural, exploitative or fraudulent one. Thus, the empirical reality of his musical activity and identity can be understood as an embodied manifestation of the routine negotiation of local expressions of social and cultural difference that incorporate racialized, racist and redemptive tensions. Although he was able to carve out a music career by adopting Jamaican patois, the emergent music culture of the subsequent generation was negotiating and representing ethnic and music differences in alternative ways. The next section examines the influence of age and thus Derek’s positioning with respect to younger and older generations of reggae fans and musicians.

‘Britain’s oldest DJ’

The final element repeatedly used to characterize Derek is his former career as an accountant, and thus that he appeared to be older than most other DJs, undermining popular perceptions of DJs by sticking to a wardrobe of cardigans or waistcoats and spectacles throughout his music career, which is captured in one of the earliest published descriptions of his style:

He wears a beige shirt with toning tie, a collared cardigan under a brown jacket, and a heavy pair of specs, which stick out like joists from under the eves of his greying thatch. (Coleman, 1994)

DJ Derek was also described as an accountant turned club disc jockey who delighted in the title of “Britain’s oldest DJ” (Williamson, 2016); as ‘a cardigan-wearing ex-accountant…’ (Lynskey, 2016) and ‘a 64-year-old former accountant from Bristol with a penchant for cardigans and long subsidised bus journeys’. ¹²

Derek’s age and sartorial choices cemented his reputation as a novelty within Bristol and the wider British music scene. Similar stylistic elements are emphasized within representations of David Rodigan described by journalist Ian Burrell (2003) as a legendary reggae DJ that, ‘wears a blazer and loafers’ and within the same article, Rodigan describes himself as, ‘follicularly challenged’ and that he resembles ‘an accountant or a dentist’ (see also Rodigan, 2017). The similar representations of style are noteworthy, but there are significant differences in how their music experiences were nurtured and in Derek’s case, it is contextually significant that he was embedded in the local Bristol community at a time when Bristol was developing a reputation for ethnically diverse, culturally syncretic and innovative music described as the Bristol Sound.

Emerging in the early 1990s, the Bristol Sound was and is portrayed as the organic product of a city at the cutting edge of musical and cultural creativity, comfortable with the ethnic diversity of its population. Academic narratives acknowledge the complex interaction between the symbolic and material facets that constitute the Bristol Sound including Caribbean migration, the interaction between different genres including reggae, punk, soul, jazz, funk and rhythm and blues, as well as individuals (musicians, producers, promoters and DJs) and the emergence of crucial social and music venues, pubs and clubs such as the Star and Garter and the Inkerman, which are described as having had ‘a great set of DJs who played roots, reggae and ska’ (Webb, 2005: 73; see also Hyder, 2014; Johnson, 1996). Such narratives focus on explaining the roots of a specific moment of music in the 1990s that in turn became critical to the evolution of the Bristol Sound as a national and global phenomenon. However, despite DJing at the same pubs referred to above and his growing reputation, there is no explicit reference to him as a key figure in either academic or music press accounts that defined the Bristol Sound in the 1990s. As an older, White, ex-accountant, waistcoat-wearing reggae DJ, what role or significance did DJ Derek have within the emerging identity of Bristol as an exemplar of creative ethnic hybridity?

First, because reggae has shifting forms of value and resonance between first and second generations of Caribbean migrants (Connell, 2012), Derek’s emergence as DJ overlapped different musical, political and cultural sensibilities. On the one hand, he was an important figure for an older generation of Caribbean migrants as they expressed their lived experiences through the converging musical traditions of Britain, the United States and the Caribbean. This is shown in the following comment from Daddy G, who had known Derek from when he was a child in the 1960s:

‘When my parents first came to England, there wasn’t any infrastructure for the West Indians to integrate with English people, so they used to hold parties themselves’, he says. ‘Derek was a real novelty to my parents because he was a white guy who had embraced their culture’. (cited in Lynskey, 2016)

This is the same generation that Gilroy (1993) alludes to as principally relying on their Caribbean musical heritage to not only express their cultural distinctiveness within Britain, an environment replete with ‘the endless pressures of economic exploitation, political racism, displacement, and exile’ but as fundamental ‘in facilitating the transition of diverse settlers to a distinct mode of lived blackness’ (p. 82). It is this generation that Derek professed to have a deep affiliation with because of their shared values and attitudes, ‘I love the black community, particularly the first generation of immigrants, people of my age, because I can identify with their manners and their upbringing’ (BBC 2, 1994). Moreover, the social ties to Jamaicans in the local area and the accumulated Caribbean capital discussed above enabled Derek to become a cultural and economic entity within the local context, known for the preservation and promotion of reggae from a particular era that happened to resonate more closely with this generation of British Caribbean people. Thus, Derek benefitted from and contributed to the circulation of reggae music, helping to facilitate a local music culture alongside a generation of Caribbean migrants which played an important role in the cultural and commercial potential of Bristol’s music future.

Second, although there is now greater academic recognition of how ‘the cultural significance of popular music is no longer tied exclusively to youth’ (Bennett 2013: 2), the extent to which older audience members or ageing music fans are recognized by youth as part of their immediate music scenes or cultures is less evident. However, the previous generation’s music tastes and influences, including a passion for reggae, is likely to have also shaped the subsequent generation’s preferences as part of their informal music education, which is also understood as a form of ‘generational trading of music tastes and influences’, where older listeners/audiences pass on their musical knowledge and taste to younger generations through family and friendship networks (Bennett, 2013: 124). While the emerging Bristol Sound was a product of an ethnically diverse youth culture, Derek indirectly participated in passing on musical knowledge to this younger generation through their family and friends alluded to above, and directly because of his increasing visibility at local pubs, clubs and music festivals.

Derek can therefore be framed as an intergenerational musical icon within the Bristol music scene, who ensured reggae’s hybrid and sonic incorporation into local interpretations of popular music in the late 1980s and early 1990s – that defined the Bristol Sound. However, he had already musically participated with an older generation of Caribbean migrants with whom he was culturally and socially embedded. Looking back on this moment, Derek is a visible figure standing between generations but not directly emergent from either. Derek’s reputation and presence may have formed the discursive and practical backdrop to the broader musical and creative context of Bristol (and Britain) for latter generations of young Black, White and Asian British musicians and audiences as an innovative, multi-ethnic confluence of sounds, culture and traditions, but he was not explicitly recognized as such within dominant academic framings of Bristol’s culturally syncretic music scene. Nor was he identified as a key cultural figure within formal media and industry representations of the Bristol Sound in the same way as other individuals and bands were in the 1990s. (Since his disappearance and subsequent death, however, this has changed.) The initial lack of visibility within the idea of the Bristol Sound simply affirms the dominant conceptualization of popular music as being intrinsically led and defined by youth, particularly as music tends to be marketed by the industry towards young people (Bennett, 2013; Frith, 1983). However, in spite of this, his age, ethnicity and style, which challenged mainstream conceptions of reggae and DJing more broadly, guaranteed his informal recognition and notoriety among musicians and audiences.