Haiti

I had planned to reactivate this blog shortly with a series of further posts about the latest stack of Voodoo-related vinyl that I brought back from the US last month. Obviously under the circumstances, that's not going to happen for some time.

I don't know how to begin writing about the devastation in Haiti. When I close my eyes I see the images of unimaginable death and destruction from the past week projected like a horrific accusatory slide show. I've been reading various accounts of battered and traumatised survivors congregating in what is left of the streets of Port-au-Prince to sing and pray through the night to God and the Lwa. Maintaining their faith in the face of an apocalyptic event.

Language is insufficient. Blog writing is inappropriate. Chatty mouth doesn't get people out from under buildings.

Aside from donating, praying and setting lights, I thought I could at least collate some relevant URLs and offer a perspective on some of the stone cold evil commentary that I've seen in the media recently.

First and foremost, here is a list of information and resources for helping Haiti, collated by a friend of mine. Doctors without borders seems to get a lot of praise for their work. Partners in health gets a recommendation from Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, who has written a great article in today's Guardian (which unfortunately contains some truly callous and despicable sub-human entries in the comments field). And Waxidermy (home of "weird records that suck") are running a series of charity auctions of rare and collectable vinyl with all proceeds going to Haiti.

Also in the Guardian today is the collected twitter entries covering the earthquake and its immediate aftermath from Richard Morse, hotelier in Port-au-Prince and musician in the band RAM. Hearteningly, the 5:45 entry on Tuesday tells us that Morse's mother – the singer and folklorist Emerantes de Pradines Morse – has survived the disaster. I have previously blogged about her 1953 record Voodoo, recorded under her maiden name Emy de Pradines.

Throughout the week, the Wild Hunt blog has contributed some excellent commentary and collation of the various eye-bleed diatribes about Haitian Vodou that have been doing the rounds in the media. And there has been a bit of discussion of similar issues over on Liminal Nation and Enfolding, Phil Hine's new blog.

It's all just the same old predictable shit really. New Orleans was on the receiving end of similar victim blaming in the aftermath of Katrina. There always seems to be someone out there whose first impulse to images of catastrophic loss of human life is to warp it into something that bolsters their own paranoid political, religious or occult narrative.

Former presidential candidate and apparent worshipper of the Gnostic demiurge, Pat Robertson, got the ball rolling early on this week by informing his audience:

“Something happened in Haiti a long time ago that people may not want to talk about… They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."

There's not too much to say about this that hasn't already been said elsewhere, but it's surprising how little attention the "You know, Napolean III, or whatever" line has received. The Haitian Revolution took place between 1791 and 1803, and Napolean III was made President of France in 1848. Yet somehow Mr Robertson can still gaze emphatically into the camera and assert that he is telling us a "true story". What the fuck, Pat? What the fuck?

This bollocks about a pact with the devil has its roots in the Haitian folk tale of Bois Caiman, that tells of a Vodou ceremony that took place at that location on the eve of the Haitian revolution, led by a Houngan called Dutty Boukman and attended by Voudoissants from all over Haiti. According to the tale, a pig was sacrificed to the Lwa Erzulie Dantor, and a vow was made to overthrow the French slavers and free the people from their subjugation. It is a popular folk tale of Haitian independence.

What I find interesting is the way even those involved in debunking Robertson's bile, often still seem to portray this event as a Faustian pact of sorts. A contract entered into with shadowy powers where a pig is sacrificed in order to ensure a certain outcome. However, a basic grasp of Vodou will tell you that the Lwa are fundamentally understood as ancestral spirits. Erzulie Dantor herself is a fierce protective mother goddess often envisioned as a single mother who will do anything to look after her children when they are in danger. The ceremony at Bois Caiman is therefore best understood as an appeal to the ancestral powers for protection, ahead of the Haitians entering a conflict where they were vastly outgunned.

It wasn't a compassionless contract or business deal with an infernal power, it was calling on the extended spiritual family for support in a time of crisis. The sacrificed pig wasn't payment for services rendered, it was dinner. Erzulie Dantor regularly receives a pig as part of her service, which is then cooked and shared by the community of celebrants. This is not a one-off thing that happened once in the 18th century, it is a regular aspect of Vodou practice which takes place in a context where participants rear and slaughter their own livestock. They would ultimately be killing the pig (or chicken or goat, etc) in order to eat anyway. The dedication of the animal to the Divine beforehand is a way of making the act sacred and having respect for the life that is to be taken so that the community can eat. Interpreting such an offering in terms of a lurid Satanic sacrifice like something from the Hammer House of Horror is akin to portraying the sanctification of Halal meat in a similar light.

Nothing is taking place in Robertson's comments other than the racist portrayal of African ancestor-based traditional religions as a source of evil. The only real difference between the ceremony at Bois Caiman, and a Christian soldier attending church and praying before going off to war, is that the latter employs the services of an abattoir and only has to worry about buttering the bread and preparing the ham sandwiches for the buffet after the service.

It's also worth pointing out that the Bois Caiman story is a folk tale, and as per folk tales, it may not have literally happened. It is perhaps best thought of as analogous to our traditions about Robin Hood.

Later on, cheeky cheery R*sh L*mbaugh waded into the debate, telling us that the disaster was "made to order" for President Obama, as it would allow him to "burnish his credibility … with both light-skinned and black-skinned" African Americans.

I don't even know what that means. "Both light-skinned and black-skinned"?!? Who says things like that? I know I shouldn't be surprised by these nutjobs, but, just, fucking hell...

Keith Olbermann brings the fight to them here:

One unpleasant pattern that I've observed this week is how a right wing talking head will say something disgusting that uses the deaths of thousands as political ammunition. Then someone more liberally-minded will pipe up and rightly call them on it, and the right wing response will be to accuse their liberal interlocutor of using the deaths of thousands as political ammunition themselves because they are stepping up and challenging these inflammatory statements. I fear it is a conspiracy to take all voices of opposition off the board due to self-inflicted desk-related head injuries.

According to wikipedia, the planet sees an average of 18 earthquakes per year on the Richter scale of 7.0-7.9. This appears to support the notion that it's the nation's poverty, vulnerability and lack of infrastructure that has made the impact of this earthquake so catastrophic. Similarly, the hurricanes that devastated parts of Haiti a few years back caused such levels of destruction specifically because of the widescale deforestation that has vastly reduced the once heavily forested landscape that previously provided a natural protection against storm damage. Comparatively, it was the destruction of the once plentiful wetlands around New Orleans, directly caused by excess drilling for oil, that left the city so vulnerable to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, a recent US court ruling found that poor maintenance of a navigation channel by the Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for ruptures in the levee that caused much of the worst flooding in the city. The barriers should have been able to stand a hurricane of that force, but money that should have gone towards maintenance was allegedly skimmed off due to the endemic corruption of local politics.

None of these facts really point towards a supernatural cause belying the natural disasters that Haiti and New Orleans have endured. I'm a strong believer that "The Devil" only really exists as a personification of the horrors that human beings perpetrate upon one another and upon the planet. Such as slavery, for instance. Or being so abjectly terrified of a free black territory that has violently thrown off the yoke of slave owners, that you conspire to undermine its economy and stability in such a way that the repercussions are still being felt centuries later.

My grasp of Haitian history is fairly superficial, but I understand that the emergent nation was forced to pay 150 million francs of war reparations to France in the early 1800s, an amount that would translate into tens of billions today. The west believed that Haiti needed to be taught a lesson, lest other slave colonies might follow it's example and rise up in bloody revolution. It seems unrealistic to my mind that powerful western nations would *not* use everything at their disposal to punish a country that attempted to exist so far outside of their global hegemony in this way; and that seems to be largely what happened. It took the country over 150 years to pay these reparations, severely depleting its natural resources to do so. Haiti was forced into this arrangement – essentially remunerating slave owners for the loss of revenue incurred by their freedom – in order to finally be recognised as a valid entity. For the preceding 60 years before the reparations were agreed to, not a single nation on the planet had recognised Haiti's independence following its revolution. I'd hazard that a line can perhaps be drawn between these concerted efforts at undermining Haiti throughout it's early history, and its current position as the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. It's not fucking rocket science is it. I've seen many commentators describe Haiti as a "failed state" this week, but did it really have much of a chance to be anything else, given how it came into being and the forces ranged against it?

Certainly these factors seem a more convincing reason for why this earthquake has had such a dreadful impact, than the fuck-witted explanation of a Voodoo curse that irrational minds seem to leap towards. If you make an effort to understand Haitian Vodou, as opposed to uncritically soaking up its hollywood caricature, it becomes clear that it is community building and empowering for its participants. It was, after all, the religion that brought together enslaved peoples from all regions of Africa and galvanised them into a force capable of accomplishing the only successful slave revolution in modern history. It's difficult to think of another world religion that has been demonised to the extent of the African traditional religions, and there is a convincing argument that the sheer terror which the success of the Haitian revolution evoked in slave-holding nations is one of the key drivers of that othering process.

Here is a link to an article I wrote a couple of years ago called 'Live and Let Die – fears and misconceptions about Vodou'. It's a response that I drafted the last time I had to deal with a pair of eedjits harbouring stupid racists ideas about African traditions, previously published on the now inactive Key 64 (thanks to Nick Pell for digging out the lost text for me), and now very kindly hosted at short notice by Phil Hine over on his website.

Even (comparatively) respectable news coverage of the disaster in Haiti can't seem to help dropping in a bit of lurid Voodoo-bashing to spice up its copy. For instance, the Evening Standard (London's evening paper) ran a box-out last week on the corruption and unstable infrastructure of Haiti that will exacerbate the current situation, and couldn't help but make the observation that "Voodoo, involving black magic and animal sacrifice, is recognised as an official religion in Haiti". What bearing on the issue does that have exactly? Why would you mention this unless you were attempting to make some spurious connection between the religious lives of Haitians and the disaster? If there was an earthquake in Japan, it would be unlikely that a newspaper would make any reference to the equally animist Shinto traditions of that island. When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004, I don't recall seeing much coverage of the broadly comparable animist traditions of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Fuckers can't resist an opportunity to leer at African spirituality and depict it as ignorant savagery, without actually bothering to try and understand it before splurging out inane copy.

Lastly, here's an interesting perspective on the earthquake from a Haitian Vodou practitioner who perceives the disaster as nature rebalancing itself after decades of deforestation and environmental destruction, "like a horse throwing a rough rider".

However you may frame the event, the important things right now are donating money to the aid organisations that are doing good work on the ground, and expressing unequivocal support and solidarity for those that have been affected and their family members. Slapping down pernicious hatemongers wherever they rear their heads is a secondary pursuit, but that's good too.

Here's Richard Morse's group RAM doing their track "Fey", meaning "faith":

And Arcade Fire's track Haiti with lovely footage shot on location:

Yemaya

Number 3 in my occasional series of posts about "Radiant Ladies of Voodoo and the music they love". Having just returned from Cornwall and some inevitable Seaside Voodoo, today's post is about Yemaya, the Queen of the Sea and the Mother of Fishes.

Her name is a contraction of the Yoruba words: "Yeye emo eja" which means "Mother whose children are like fish". All life emerged from the sea, and Yemaya is seen as the divine source of all. Her colour is blue, her number is seven, and she likes offerings of champagne, watermelon, pound cake and molasses. She is syncretised with a Black Madonna known as Our Lady of Regla, and is called on for matters relating to pregnancy, fertility, wealth, abundance, cleansing, nourishing and the home. Her presence is like the fresh sea air and her service imparts a sense of well being, comfort and renewal.

One of her most important festivals throughout the year takes place on New Years Eve, where her devotees as widespread as Cuba, Brazil, Florida and Tynemouth will go down to the beach with offerings, set off fireworks, pour champagne into the sea and cast small wooden boats filled with offerings onto the waves to be received by the Goddess.

As per her sister/daughter, Oshun, there is a wealth of latin music dedicated to Yemaya. Perhaps some of the most popular and best known recordings of devotional music for Yemaya are by the Cuban "Queen of Salsa", Celia Cruz. Although publically a Roman Catholic, Cruz was an archetypal child of Yemaya who recorded numerous songs for the Orisha and drew much inspiration from the music of Santeria. Even Cruz's catchphrase "¡Azúcar!" (meaning "sugar"), a reference to the sweetness of Cuban coffee, recalls the traditional offering of mollasses that is received by Yemaya.

Here is a recording of Celia Cruz performing a track entitled "Yemaya" and accompanied by images of the Orisha.

Tubby Hayes' Voodoo Session

I got my copy of Tubby Haye's Voodoo Session in the post this week, the latest release from Trunk Records and limited to 666 numbered copies. Trunk is an independent label specialising in film scores, library music, sexploitation and kitsch releases, such as the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, UFO, Deep Throat, Ivor the Engine and The Clangers. (There's something a bit perturbing about mentioning  Deep Throat and Ivor the Engine in the same sentence).

The Voodoo Session record is from the soundtrack to Dr Terror's House of Horrors, a 1965 British horror film from Amicus Productions starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, among others. It was the first in a series of portmanteau films from the studio, which later included From Beyond the Grave, which has always been a particular favourite of mine.

The plot of the film involves five men on a train carriage having their tarot cards read by Peter Cushing, who reveals the horrible destiny of each of them. One of the stories that is revealed through the cards features Roy Castle (of later Record Breakers fame) in his first starring role as jazz musician Biff Bailey, who encounters a Voodoo ceremony whilst touring the West Indies. 

Loving the Voodoo sounds, he makes the mistake of copying down the music of the Voodoo Lwa Dambala and doing his own Brit jazz arrangement of the spirit rhythms at a club in London. Occult peril quickly ensues as a result of having stolen the music of Dambala. He could have at least offered a white egg on top of a mound of flour and asked nicely. It's not fucking difficult.

Castle was drafted in at the last minute to replace Acker Bilk who had recently suffered a heart attack, and his band in the film consists of a historic 1960s Brit jazz line-up including Tubby Hayes and Shake Keane. According to the Trunk website, the Voodoo Brit Jazz number from the soundtrack has been much in demand among record collectors for years, with one copy of what was assumed to be the single selling for £800 before it was discovered that it wasn't the lost recording from the film, but something else entirely with Roy Castle singing on it. 

Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records says: 

"Fast forward to mid 2009, and out of nowhere I get an email from a good jazz man known as Simon Spillett. He is overseeing the recently unearthed Tubby Hayes archive. This is a set of reels and records taken care of first by Tubby's mother, and then later passed on to Tubby's last girlfriend. In amongst these reels is the original session for this super Voodoo scene.

Simon emailed me the tracks, and I got extremely excited - it was the killer tune, the missing music that music people have been waiting for. A few weeks later the tracks were remastered, and a very limited 7" ep was designed, the idea being to make sure we can make enough money so Tubby's girlfriend can afford to fly abroad and see her family."

The main sequence where Roy Castle goes to the Voodoo ceremony and hears Dambala's drum rhythms, and the later sequence where he plays his jazz arrangement with the Tubby Hayes quintet, is embedded below. It's worth a look, if only for the surreal scene of Roy Castle being admonished for stealing the music of the great god Dambala. 

The 7" release itself is awesome, has a great cover and liner notes, and is an interesting pop culture Voodoo curiosity. Since one of the main subjects of this blog is the hidden influence of African Diaspora magico-religious traditions on popular music and culture, I took the recent unearthing and release of this record as a good nod. The liner notes manage to namecheck my mate Danny's pivotal UK jazz saxophonist uncle, Joe Harriott, but neglect to mention anything about Dambala, which feels like a bit of an omission. I'm not sure how auspicious it is to reissue the stolen music of Dambala and not give him his due. Did Jonny Trunk not see what happened to Roy Castle in the film...

New Orleans, Storyville and Billie Holiday

New Orleans is a 1947 film starring Arturo de Cordova and Dorothy Patrick in the leading roles, but much more interestingly has a supporting cast that includes Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, starring in her first and last film role.

 

The plot gives a fictionalised account of the birth of jazz, focusing on the destruction of the historic Storyville district of New Orleans and the "jazz diaspora" that took place afterwards leading to the proliferation of jazz throughout the country.

Storyville was the prostitution district of the city from 1897 to 1917, and was set up to limit and restrict prostitution to one area where it could be monitored and regulated. It was based on the Dutch model of legalised red light districts that operated at various ports. Brothels in the district ranged from cheap 50 cent dives or "cribs" as they were termed, to magnificently opulent mansions servicing wealthy clients.  

The photographer E.J.Bellocq is famous for having taken a series of haunting images of Storyville prostitutes, the negatives of which were discovered hidden in a sofa and first published in 1971. In many of Bellocq's images the prostitutes wear masks or have had their faces scratched out on the negatives to conceal their identity. Some of the photographs are posed as if the subjects are acting out some strange and mysterious narrative, and more than a few of these scenes are suggestive of Erzulie Freda Dahomey and her mysteries. A few of the women are posed next to collections of objects that almost look like altars, as if the prostitutes were devotees of Our Lady.

 

The district was famous for its "blue books", that were guides to the brothels available in the area including prices and services on offer. The Storyville blue-books were inscribed with the motto: "Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.)"

There are some nice reproductions of pages from the blue books in the journalist Herbert Asbury's, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld,  currently in print under the title The Gangs of New Orleans, to cash in on the Martin Scorcese adaptation of Asbury's other book about NY gang culture. Tangentially, Asbury's French Quarter book also has a pretty good section on New Orleans Voodoo Queen's and Root Doctors, that discusses various Voodoo personages beyond the more well known operators such as Marie Laveau/s and Doctor John/s.

 

The New Orleans film portrays the popular, although incorrect, idea that jazz originated in Storyville. In reality, the emergent style of music was played all over the city, but as Storyville was often a social destination for many visitors to the city, that was where jazz was often first encountered. It was common for the higher end brothels to employ a piano player or small band, and this is where many jazz musicians in the city got their start, including Louis Armstrong.

Storyville was shut down by the Federal Government in 1917, and then later demolished completely in the 1930s. Some of the finest and most historically important buildings in the city were destroyed by a city government that wanted to eradicate all memory of the district's reputation from existence. 

Whilst the New Orleans film takes some staggering liberties with history (such as suggesting that one sympathetic white man was the driving force behind the success and popularity of jazz...), it does depict the exodus of jazz (or ragtime as it was then known) musicians from Storyville to Chicago in one of its most poignant scenes. Louis Armstrong, in his 40s in the film, did make the journey from New Orleans to Chicago as a young man, following the closure of Storyville, and initially found his success in the windy city rather than the crescent city. 

For much of his career, Armstrong was unable to play at venues in his hometown New Orleans as he often had a mixed race band, and in the south during that time, bands comprised of integrated white and black musicians were unwelcome. A venue would accept an all black lineup or an all white lineup, but bands that crossed the colour line on stage were a no go. A fact that Armstrong always said broke his heart, and gave him checkered feelings towards the city of his birth. The band that Armstrong plays with in the film is a who's who of early New Orleans jazz greats, including trombonist Kid Ory, drummer Zutty Singleton, clarinetist Barney Bigard, guitar player Bud Scott, bassist George "Red" Callender, pianist Charlie Beal, and pianist Meade "Lux" Lewis.

The most interesting scenes in the film, however, are the ones that involve Billie Holiday. Much of the surviving film footage of Holiday performing is from her later period during the 1950s, where her voice is  still awesome but you can almost see the demonic ravages of her drug use crawling under her skin. The nightclub scenes in New Orleans give us a glimpse of her closer to the prime of her career, three white gardenias in her hair and inhabiting the Lady Day persona. 

 

Holiday was not happy with the film, understandably, as it was kept from her that she was expected to play a maid until she had agreed to the part. In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, she says:

 "I thought I was going to play myself in it. I thought I was going to be Billie Holiday doing a couple of songs in a nightclub setting and that would be that. I should have known better. When I saw the script, I did. You just tell one Negro girl who's made movies who didn't play a maid or a whore. I don't know any. I found out I was going to do a little singing, but I was still playing the part of a maid."

You can pretty much see the resentment on her during the scenes where they have her dressed as a maid. She has the last laugh though, as New Orleans isn't actually a very good film, and the only reason to watch it is for the scenes where she sings. 

You can see her squirming with resentment in a maid's outfit here:

And then killing it in the Storyville exodus and nightclub scenes here:

Oshun Tropicalia

Today's blog post is the second in my occasional series of features on "Radiant Ladies of Voodoo and the music they love", and it celebrates my Lady Oshun, Queen of the Rivers, and ruler of love, intimacy, luxury, beauty, joy and all of the things in life that make it not just bearable but truly worth living.

She occupies a similar space in the pantheon of the predominantly Yoruban-influenced African Diaspora magico-religious traditions, such as Santeria and Candomble, as Erzulie Freda occupies in Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo, which are more influenced by the Dahomean traditions of Africa. Oshun shares many of the same mysteries with Erzulie Freda, and they could be considered cousins or sisters, but are not to be conflated. They are very different ladies, and you can learn more from observing how they differ than you can from noticing their points of similarity. I love and serve both of them in my House. 

Oshun's colour is yellow, her number is five, her day of the week is Thursday, and she is associated with rivers, mirrors, fans, jewelry, pumpkins, oranges, honey, and all sweet things. She is the quality of sweetness in your life, as well as your own sense of happiness and self-worth. Service to Oshun brings with it a feeling of refreshment, like cool water or sweet citrus, or a soft breeze on a hot summer day. She regularly receives offerings from her devotees at various places of power along the banks of the River Thames, a continuity of practice that recalls earlier riverside devotion to the old London Goddesses Isis and Tamesis. She is syncretised with Our Lady of Charity, the patron Saint of Cuba, and is much loved throughout the South Americas.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given her popularity in latin countries, Oshun is frequently the subject of a lot of Cuban and Brazilian music. A particular favourite of mine is Louvação a Oxum, by Maria Bethania, the sister of Brazilian tropicalia singer Caetano Veloso and contemporary of Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, et al. This is actually a late cut of hers, dating from as recently as 1992, clearly a devotional song for Oshun (or Oxum in the Brazilian spelling), and here accompanied by some lovely imagery of the Orisha and her priestesses. 

Erzulie Freda Dahomey

My Lady Erzulie Freda Dahomey is the Voodoo Goddess of love. Her day is Thursday. Her colours are pink and white. She loves flowers and jewelry, beautiful cakes and pastries, champagne and expensive perfume. She is syncretised with the Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows, because of the tears that she cries for the world. Her heart is pierced with a sword but it does not bleed. She feels everything. Her mysteries are a whirl of parties, and music, and dancing and romance – but the world in all its crassness and brutality always lets her down. Conditions down here on Earth never live up to the beautiful dream of Erzulie. Serving her mysteries is then a celebration of that beautiful, wonderful, unrealistic dream that Erzulie holds in her heart and which may blossom with the same radiance within our own hearts. She is the vivid beauty of nature, the fire of Netzach, the passion of the senses, the fresh early morning dew upon the petal of a rose. She has three husbands among the Lwa – Ogoun, Agwe and Dambala – whose three wedding rings she wears on her fingers, and an infinite number of lovers and admirers. And now she also has her own dubstep label. 

Paul.Meme is a DJ and co-editor of Woofah magazine, the essential British print fanzine covering dancehall, reggae, grime and dubstep. He records under the name Grievous Angel, and released the record Belief is the Enemy last year on the Electrik Dragon label to much critical acclaim. Paul's website is a regular source of awesome mixes ranging from 2step to bashment. His series of Dubstep Sufferah mixes and Grime in the Dancehall collaboration with Jon Eden (which appeared as part of the much missed Blogariddims series), are particular favourites of mine and have provided the soundtrack to Vodou services for certain Lwa on many occasions. 

Last summer he released a 12" track called Lady Dub (catalogue no: ERZULIE01), the first of his Devotional Dubz series of dubstep/dark garage refixes of r'n'b tunes, this one being a refix of D'Angelo's Lady. Paul told me that the track was conceived as a result of meditational music making one evening beneath a Full Moon, during which he experienced a powerful sense of spiritual connection with Erzulie Freda Dahomey. Thus inspired, he completed the track as a devotional piece for her over the course of that Moon cycle, with the track being finished when the Moon came full again. Lady Dub is essentially a distillation of that joyful contemplation on the beauty and sadness of human life. Paul wouldn't describe himself as a Voodoo practitioner, but he instinctively gets it, and you only have to listen to Lady Dub to hear the presence of Erzulie in its beats.  

It was well received, coming in at no.8 in Pitchfork's dubstep 2008 chart, getting single of the week at Boomkat, and plenty of airplay on Rinse FM and the pirates. One of the things Paul said he was trying to accomplish with the single was to offer "a different vision of dubstep, one that reaffirmed the form’s original tolerance for sweetness and vocals while offering the biggest booming 808 sine waves I could manage." 

I've been a bit at odds with the dubstep scene myself ever since I encountered difficulty getting into FWD cos I was wearing a pale grey suit with an early 60s cut, which was at odds with their unofficial dress code of scruffy bastard in a washed out grey hoodie. Fortunately, retro tailoring won out over shit Gap t-shirts and combats, as it always will, and they let me in anyway. I enjoyed the tunes, and the physically overpowering bass, but the thing that notably seemed to be missing was the influence of The Lady. There was no glamour, none of her mysteries, an 80% male crowd nodding their heads in unison, and a marked absence of where Erzulie Freda ought to be on a night out. I even got served a bottle of Corona that was missing its lime, which speaks volumes about an abandonment of basic decency. 

Perhaps as a symptom of the rough and uncertain times that have characterised the zeroes (I refuse to call them the noughties, they've been the fucking zeroes), both dubstep and grime have lacked that essential component that is the essence of Erzulie Freda. Dubstep is like a South East London night bus journey expressed as music, the florescent lit midnight screech of the 171 as it howls through Peckham's dreaming, the arduous brutalised voice of Croydon concrete speaking of the barrenness of its heart in the only language it knows. Grime is a stark contrast to that, a mad energy rising up out of East London towerblocks and proclaiming its turf over apocalyptic SciFi beats, an urban folk music infused with the collective experience of Bethnal pressure, daily struggle, postcode killings, police hassle, quick thrills, and the dull ache of a blighted landscape. Cut grime and it bleeds testosterone, the microphone passed from hand to hand, bad boy threats in the dancehall, even girl MCs spitting violence in the night. 

Where was Erzulie Freda in this? What happened to the sweet vocals and champagne, the dancing and allure, making an effort before you leave the house, creating a space where the brutality of city living is overcome for a few hours and replaced with fleeting and ephemeral worlds of delight and fascination. This is her mystery. She occupies the heart, and whatever the paucity of your circumstances or the grim surroundings you may inhabit, if you can locate Erzulie in your heart, she will transform that which you experience with a wave of her fan. You only have to meet her halfway.

When I put the needle down on the Lady Dub 12", it felt like listening to a spell that had been sent out to redress that balance and to bring Erzulie to where she was most needed. All soundsystem needs The Lady. She's the beating heart of any night out. Queen of the dancehall, captivating and enchanting, turning the night into something you'll remember for the rest of your life. Lady Dub was an invocation. A VIP invite to the Voodoo Love Goddess, seamed stockings and high heels, French perfume and eroticism. Our city groans beneath the weight of inequality and corruption, we've been robbed blind by bankers and politicians, disenfranchised and made to live in fear of one another, taught to be grateful for whatever meagre living we can scrape by. But Erzulie's dream is greater than all of this and will not be denied. In her world, every moment is like the first kiss of an ideal lover, and her presence reminds us of how beautiful nature is, how amazing and filled with possibility London can be, and how much magic there is to be found in a night out. 

Like all good witchcraft, the Lady Dub spell seemed to both echo and give solid form to certain yearnings that were already in motion in the culture. Strong magic simply irrigates and gives shape to unformed desire, and suggests an appealing direction in which existing energy and intention might be encouraged to flow. Since its release there has been a significant garage revival, and the unstoppable rise of UK funky, that brings back girly vocals, smart dress codes, and a female audience to a scene that has been dry of these mysteries for too long. Erzulie has re-entered the building, and wants you to buy her a bottle of champagne.

You can listen to Lady Dub at its dedicated myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/devotionaldubz

Or download the entire Devotional Dubz mix put together for FACT magazine.

Then buy one of the remaining 12"s and play it through a proper system like it deserves.

St John's Eve

The swamps are alive with spirits tonight, and so is the Borough of Lewisham. 

Spotify link:

Dr. John – Croker Courtbullion