Pedagogies of the Vulgar: Lessons in Caribbean Music

Abstract

Through theorists like M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Carolyn Cooper, and Michelle Wright, this project reconsiders the “vulgarity” attributed to Caribbean musical genres, like dancehall, dembow, and reguetón, as a pedagogical practice: an embodied, sensorial way of knowing that challenges colonial and racialized modes of aesthetics, morality, and order. Through an examination of Vybz Kartel’s “Fever,” Tokischa’s “Sistema de Patio,” and Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón,” I examine how sound, image, and movement converge to create what Alexander calls “pedagogies,” which simultaneously disturb and instruct. These pedagogies of the vulgar illuminate the ongoing impact of colonialism and plantation slavery in the Caribbean, particularly the gendered extraction of labor and capital that continues to shape daily life. In this context, vulgarity is not simply performed but inverted, prompting us to ask what is truly vulgar: Caribbean music and dance, or the systemic violence of Western modernity? These pedagogies foreground the paradoxical beauty of violence and survival, revealing how Caribbean peoples reconfigure “vulgarity” to craft pleasure and freedom amidst constraint. Embracing Michelle Wright’s concept of “epiphenomenal time,” this study invites readers to watch, listen, and feel, reminding us that the pedagogy of the vulgar must be embodied to be understood.

1. Introduction

In the last several decades, urban Caribbean music genres, such as Jamaican dancehall, Dominican dembow, and Puerto Rican reguetón, have become global phenomena. Yet, they too have been met with critiques of vulgarity, aimed at their oftentimes sexually explicit or violent content as well as dance styles. As Carolyn Cooper reminds us, however, the “vulgar” is not an inherent quality but a signal of the “high/low-euro/afrocentric divide” that marks anything outside of the category of Man,1 notably Blackness, as being immoral or sub-human (Cooper, 1995). In the context of these genres, then, their classification as vulgar reflects the modern onto-epistemological processes that debase their African origins. However, we might also consider their consistent use of qualities deemed vulgar as intentional, for, as Cooper explains, the disturbance of vulgar music “can be recognized as a profoundly malicious cry to upset the social order” (Cooper, 1995). As such, this project examines the role of vulgarity within urban Caribbean music genres, using the music videos for Vybz Kartel’s “Fever,” Tokischa’s “Sistema de Patio,” and Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón” as case studies. Paying attention to their aural, lyrical, and visual qualities, I argue that vulgarity functions as a pedagogical practice, one that speaks to M. Jacqui Alexander’s multilayered definition of “pedagogies” as disturbing yet informative (Alexander et al., 2005). In this way, the pedagogy of vulgarity simultaneously reveals how the present-past of colonialism circumscribes daily life for Caribbean peoples and the ways they enact pleasure in order to make living possible.

I must confess that the writing of this project has not been easy—not for a lack of interest or enjoyment, but because of the difficulty of translating opaque, poetic practices2 into the textual. When Édouard Glissant speaks of popular Caribbean musical styles as the “necessary creations of places where entire communities are struggling… in the face of a major, unrelenting threat,” it comes as no surprise that he names those places as slums and ghettos (Glissant & Dash, 1989). It is in the ghetto where “the present-past of involuntary servitude unfolds,” and unless we surrender to the overwhelm of our senses that the ghetto requires, we miss the beautiful tragedies that lie beneath the surface, the “black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom” (Hartman, 2019). The pedagogy of the vulgar that I put forth is a fully sensorial experience. It exceeds the boundaries of transparency, linearity, and time. Indeed, it is a pedagogy that relies on what Michelle Wright deems “epiphenomenal time,” ephemeral moments of infinite possibility that collapse the past, present, and future into a “now” that can only be understood through sensorial perception (Wright, 2015). Epiphenomenal time launches us into the site of our creation, and yet, just as quickly, pulls us out.

This helps to explain my experience. Each time I watch the videos at hand, thousands of lessons, observations, and connections come to the fore, just to become virtually unintelligible once I hit pause and attempt to speak what I know I feel, or perhaps, what I feel I know. What to do, then?3 How do I capture every detail, lesson, and feeling onto the written? The answer is simple: I cannot, I should not. Instead, I allow the pedagogy of the vulgar to speak for itself, to remain as opaque as it possibly can. Thus, I resist a linear prescription of the vulgar’s pedagogy, instead honing in on particular scenes where both the present-past and pleasure simultaneously take center stage, and parse through what they might show. I invite the reader to join in on this experience by clicking the link embedded in each section’s subheading,4 to watch and listen, and perhaps even dance, for otherwise, the pedagogy of the vulgar cannot be made legible.

2. Vybz Kartel—“Fever”

“Fever” is arguably one of Kartel’s most popular songs.5 Lyrically, “Fever” describes Kartel’s obsession with a woman: the feverish effect her wining and lovemaking have on him (VybzKartelRadio, 2016). Visually, “Fever” pans through changing scenes of Jamaican women dancing, whether individually, in couples, or in groups, interspersed with overhead drone shots of Kartel’s home city of Portmore, Jamaica. I focus, however, on the scene found at two minutes and twenty-six seconds. Wearing a jockey cap and holding a jockey whip, the male protagonist stops thrusting into the female protagonist bent over in front of him, hopping onto her back and riding her as though simulating a horse race (VybzKartelRadio, 2016). Cooper reminds us of the prominence and “slackness” of horse-racing imagery within dancehall. The jockey stands in for both the “verbal skill of sports commentators” executed by DJs, as well as the technical mastery of their sexual prowess (Cooper, 1995). Audibly, Kartel playfully leans into this dual imagery, simulating the jockey commentary through his fast-paced delivery of “mi wah pussy/come ah yaad/fi di/best fuck” in Jamaican gypsy: “Milipee walapaa pulupoosilipee/Colopum ala my yalapaad/Fi li di li/Belepes fulupuk/Fi li di li/Belepes fulupuk.”

As the female protagonist leans over with her face pointing downward, the image connotes “daggering,” a theatrical style of dancehall performance where the woman’s body acts as a prop, remaining motionless as the male partner thrusts into her at rapid speed (McCoy-Torres, 2017). As daggering assumes male-centeredness from a visual standpoint, it appears as a signal of the woman’s sexual objectification. Yet, this assumption would deny the complex subjectivity that lies underneath. McCoy-Torres notes that sexualized dance styles such as daggering “nevertheless require a woman’s consent and participation to properly complete” (McCoy-Torres, 2017). Throughout the video, women’s consent is made evident through their gaze. Before a partner attempts to dance behind her, she turns back to look, assess, and approve him before ultimately joining in (for the jockey scene, this occurs at two minutes and nine seconds). In this sense, the female participant is not a sexualized object, but an agentic, sexual being. Her pleasure is as important as that of her partner’s. Further, daggering requires physical strength on behalf of the female participant, for she must bear the man’s weight as he engages her body as a prop (McCoy-Torres, 2017). Despite being physically beneath him, he relies on her to participate in this kind of play. She can buck him off if she chooses, or buckle under the pressure, and yet she remains, standing firmly in her enjoyment. As such, sexualized dancing and jockey symbology invoke power, both social and psychological, autonomy, and self-pleasure on behalf of the participants.

The tension of gendered labor and pleasure in the foreground is juxtaposed by the physical space: the city of Portmore, in which the video takes place, and the mural of Jamaican National Heroes that stands in the background. While the jockey image speaks to dancehall, it also links to sugar and banana production. Presently, Portmore is home to the only horseracing track in Jamaica: Caymanas Park. Caymanas Park owes its name to the Caymanas Estates6, three sugar-producing estates that dominated St. Catherine Parish’s agricultural production from the eighteenth through the late-nineteenth century (Jemmot, n.d.). Contrasting most of Jamaica’s parishes, St. Catherine was one of two where enslaved women outnumbered enslaved men by almost twenty to one, making enslaved women’s bodies and labor vital for the enrichment of British planters and, thus, the legacy of the Caymanas Estates (Turner, 2017).

By the late nineteenth century, Caymanas Estates sold one of its properties, which would become present-day Portmore, to the banana giant, the United Fruit Company (Jemmot, n.d.). The UFCO’s entrance into the Jamaican economy caused major shifts in gendered labor relations. As lower-class Black Jamaican men found opportunities for work outside of Jamaica, lower-class Black Jamaican women, who had primarily worked in agriculture, were now pushed into domestic service as a result of the expanding middle class (Thomas, 2004). This change ultimately constrained Jamaican freedom, for, as Deborah Thomas writes, “this restructuring disadvantageously incorporated black lower-class women more squarely within the colonial color, class, gender, and culture nexus in terms that devalued their customary political, economic, and sociocultural practices” (Thomas, 2004).

Returning to “Fever,” the mural of the National Heroes stands behind the dancers, yet, Nanny of the Maroons is missing from the frame (VybzKartelRadio, 2016).7 Given the relationship between the National Heroes and Jamaican nation-building projects, perhaps Nanny’s absence speaks to how Jamaican national development post-independence has been built on the backs of Black women, given Nanny’s own association with the welfare of women and children in the national imaginary (National Heroes, n.d.). For example, the economic shift towards free-market capitalism under Edward Sega decimated lower- and working-class Jamaicans’ access to basic services and social welfare. This impacted Black women most, as “the rising cost of living impos[ed] disproportionate burden on those with primary responsibility for the well-being of households and the care and socialization of children… [yet] during the 1980s… women ultimately displaced the traditional male working class” (Thomas, 2004). As the primary caretakers and contributors to the island’s economic sector since enslavement, the “daggering” jockey position takes on layered meaning, pleasure, and violence.

3. Tokischa—Sistema de Patio

At one minute and four seconds, urban artist Treintisiete 3730, who raps the first half of “Sistema de Patio,” sits down onto his couch as the camera removes him from view (Tokischa, 2022). Looking from above, the camera centers the objects on the ground between his feet, quickly adjusting in focus as Treintisiete lights a blunt before him. In the first scene, a Nacho Dominicano 1 book lies at the center of the objects, framed by an empty baby bottle with another blunt on top of it, a handgun, and an empty beer bottle. Objects associated with violence, such as guns and bullets, are abundant throughout the video, emphasized further by Treintisiete’s opening lyric, “este e el sistema de patio/se vende droga/se mueren chivato.”8 Violence is the system; the way things go. Thomas reminds us, however, that the proliferation of violence is not an inherent, cultural quality, but “an effect of class formation, a process that is imminently racialized and gendered” (Thomas, 2011).

Surrounded by drugs, guns, and women in the earlier frames of the video, Treintisiete stands in as a tíguere, a hypermasculine performance of excess, whose violence is often at the expense of children, women, and anyone who dares cross him. This vulgar masculinity emerges from a long history of figures whose Blackness and class flexibility stood counter to the idealized, White masculinity of Dominican colonial and national order. These include the Creole, the formerly enslaved, the mulatto, and ultimately Rafael Trujillo (Ramírez, 2018). It was Trujillo’s omnipotent, hypermasculine legacy—the brutal murders of dark-skinned Dominicans and Haitians during the Parsley massacre, sexual abuse against women and girls, and exceptional violence against any defectors to the dictatorship—that solidified the contemporary tíguere as “a vehicle for class-racial mobility” (Ramírez, 2018).

Returning to the scene, Nacho Dominicano 1 (Susaeta Ediciones Dominicanas, 2019) is an elementary-level literacy book that forms part of a Nacho Dominicano series (Polanco, 2022). Created at the behest of Juan Bosch, former president whose democratization attempts in 1963 focused on education reform, Nacho Dominicano became a household name, for it was, and remains, formally assigned throughout all Dominican schools (Lilón, 2017). Additionally, Nacho Dominicano 1 includes a teaching manual for educators and parents (Susaeta Ediciones Dominicanas, 2019). The violent objects that surround Nacho Dominicano 1 in the music video, then, speak less to an inherent violence characterizing Dominican culture, and Black masculinity specifically, and instead suggest how violence is symbolically and literally taught by the Dominican government.

It was under the violent and oppressive Trujillo dictatorship that the tíguere took shape. Trujillo modeled and embodied what it meant to be a tíguere, and as ordinary men adopted these characteristics as a form of survival under the regime, the tíguere became a “cultural touchstone in the Dominican Republic” (Brown, 2019). In the context of the music video, Nacho Dominicano 1 transforms from a nostalgic tool for child-rearing into a symbol of the national inheritance that is being a tíguere. This violence is then taught forward, as Treintisiete raps, “Wilmer baja aonde Steven, que trajo una caja e tiro/La puse a mi manera y la menor bajó del kilo.”9 As the scene shifts to Treintisiete lighting the blunt, violence becomes pleasure, for, as Tokischa confirms at two minutes and four seconds, “Hay que arrebatase pa pode deconetase/Hay que metese un punto pa endrogase y relajase.”10

Sex work, too, runs the yard. At one minute and fifty-six seconds, Tokischa stands in front of a chalkboard that reads, “Sistema de Patio” (Tokischa, 2022). Two women surround her, twerking on the floor as they face two tígueres in a way that visualizes oral sex. As children’s bookbags hang on the walls, the classroom appears complete; learning has begun. Since the late-nineteenth century, Dominican nation-building projects construct idealized womanhood in the image of the nurturing mother and teacher, whose commitment to education, within and outside of the home, functioned to correct moral problems and, thus, promote “social uplift and national progress” (Mayes, 2014). Of these moral concerns was prostitution, often projected onto Black women’s bodies and equated to a loss of national sovereignty.

Yet, in the mid-twentieth century, the Dominican Republic’s economy changed along neoliberal lines. It was the fraudulent election of Joaquín Balaguer, made possible by aggressive U.S. intervention, that transformed the island’s once agricultural- and industrial-based economy to one reliant upon international tourism (Cabezas, 2009).11 Despite “becom[ing] one of the principal tourist destinations in the Caribbean region,” as Cabezas notes, the Dominican hospitality and tourism workforce earn below the national average, with young, female workers forming much of this sector (Cabezas, 2009). This economic restructuring decreased lower and working-class Dominicans’ access to basic social services, and in so doing, created channels for international sex tourism. In towns like Sosúa, where tourism and impossibly low wages form the crux of the economy, many rely on sex work to make “fast money” and survive (Brennan, 2004).12 Tokischa speaks to this dynamic at one minute forty seconds, rapping, “Lo cuero no le maman guebo a pariguayo roto”13 as someone holds a sign that reads “No mamo gratis”14 (Tokischa, 2022).

As the scantily clad educator teaching kinds of sex work, Tokischa playfully blurs the boundaries between national respectability, degeneracy, and the home-as-classroom. Through her role as the audience’s teacher, Tokischa leans into the Dominican national expectation of women as feminine and maternal while simultaneously subverting this very image. As the teacher-turned-sex worker, she becomes a “tíguera,” a “subject who has to hustle to make ends meet and move up the socioeconomic ladder” (Ramírez, 2018). In so doing, she collapses and pokes fun at the gendered, racialized imaginary of Dominican nation-building projects. It is this kind of performance, “which emphasize[s] the playful, the ‘dirty,’ the ‘crazy,’ the sexual, and the best-left-hidden” that demonstrates “powerful ways of resisting the pressures of gendered respectability in… Caribbean… contexts” (Ramírez, 2018).

Just as the proliferation of violence reflects a national inheritance, so too does sex work, not only as a result of twentieth century economic changes but in the ways that slavery used Black women’s sexuality and reproduction as objects for profit. As Tokischa teaches this lesson forward, sex work becomes the way to make do, as well as the vehicle for enacting forms of pleasure. Rapping, “Lo menore atienden punto pa comprase una cubana/En la escuela singan a la profe y le dan marihuana,”15 sex work, drugs, and violence turn into networks of dependability and care, the system that makes the yard somewhat livable.

4. Bad Bunny—El Apagón

Released on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane María’s landfall in Puerto Rico, “El Apagón” is an ode to Puerto Rico in all its pain and glory. At two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, as day shifts to night, hundreds of people rush in to party at the Guajataca Tunnel (Bad Bunny, 2022). Located in the northwest municipality of Isabela, the American Railroad Company built the Guajataca Tunnel in 1904 as part of its expansion of the Compañía de Ferrocarriles de Puerto Rico (Gómez, 2015). In the late nineteenth century, the Spanish built railways from the island’s southern municipality of Ponce toward the capital, San Juan, in order to transport Spanish troops and military supplies throughout the island. Upon the United States’ conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898, the federal government absorbed the Spanish railways under the American Railroad Company, building railways and tunnels from San Juan to the southwest municipality of Mayagüez. This served to connect the island’s most prominent sugar-producing estates to San Juan’s port, ship sugar into the U.S. mainland, and export products such as coffee and tobacco to Europe.

As Lisa Pierce Flores notes, the shift towards agricultural export rippled onto the island’s economy, as local producers “could no longer negotiate with former trading partners individually” (Pierce Flores, 2010). With the U.S. becoming the largest consumer of Puerto Rican sugar, the cost of goods on the island rose dramatically, leaving the majority of locals in abject poverty. Given that sugar estates were originally Spanish plantations, the scene inside the Guajataca Tunnel links to both U.S. and Spanish colonialism. With contemporary peoples flooding into the tunnel within the scene, time becomes non-linear, as the legacies of colonialism collapse onto the present moment. Puerto Rico remains a colony; as such, the past is, quite literally, an ongoing struggle of capital extraction.

This is emphasized lyrically, as someone begins to repeat, “me gusta la chocha de Puerto Rico”16 (Bad Bunny, 2022). At first glance, the lyric appears as vulgar nonsense, given that “chocha” is used freely in colloquial, Puerto Rican Spanish. In the context of the tunnel, which can also be read as a canal, Puerto Rico’s “chocha” speaks to the ways in which the Caribbean symbolically, and literally, birthed the modern world and its attending, capitalist institutions. This birth is ongoing; it “repeats itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth,” bridging the past of the plantation onto the now of daily life (Benítez Rojo & Maraniss, 1996). This birth was, and remains, nonetheless painful, yet the use of “me gusta” invokes a paradoxical pleasure. To enjoy Puerto Rico’s “chocha” is, perhaps, to find pleasure in birthing and being born of plantation violence, for without it, Puerto Ricanness, in all its pain and beauty, simply would not exist.

This paradoxical pleasure is made visually evident,17 as the song reaches its climax at two minutes and fifty-five seconds, and bodies burst into dance while singing along (Bad Bunny, 2022). In the context of Puerto Rico, this scene is technically vulgar, not necessarily for the “perreo” style of dancing where bodies grind onto one another, but because of the evident queerness. Queer and trans flags fly in the background of the scene, and the majority of dancers involved form part of “Laboratorio Boricua de Vogue,” one of the island’s ballroom communities (Jo [@__callmejo__], 2022).18 While the Puerto Rican government has, somewhat, made strides toward LGBTQ+ equality at the juridical level, to be queer and trans in Puerto Rico is nothing short of dangerous, for the legacies of Catholic coloniality that position heterosexuality as the ideal remain strong (La Fountain-Stokes, 2018).

Queer pleasure juxtaposed by the tunnel perhaps speaks to the paradox of “la chocha” through Puerto Rico’s “political queerness.” First proposed by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, political queerness suggests that, if queerness refers to the active choice of deviating from mainstream ideologies, Puerto Rico’s continuous decision to remain a “Free Associated State,” something between total independence and statehood, is akin to queerness (Lugo-Lugo, 2018). This ambivalent political stance does not negate the violence of U.S. colonialism but instead allows for freedoms that neither full statehood nor independence could provide. In this way, the paradox of “la chocha” comes alive: to simultaneously love and hate being colonized and extracted from, to love and hate being Puerto Rican.

As the song returns to its chorus at three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, everyone joins in to sing, “Puerto Rico está bien cabrón” (Bad Bunny, 2022). According to the Real Academia Española, “cabrón” is a vulgar word, signifying a person who does bad things (“Cabrón, Cabrona”). In Puerto Rican Spanish, however, “cabrón” can mean anything: an expression of frustration, the difficulty of an experience, something fantastic and enjoyable, and even a friendly greeting (Dialecto Boricua [@dialectoboricua], 2025). Thus, “cabrón” can be read as both pain and pleasure, especially in the context of the tunnel. The use of “está” is also slippery. While “está” translates to “is” in English, Spanish has two forms of “is”: one that implies an inherent, unchanging quality, “es,” and one for temporary, mutable conditions, “está.” In this way, the chorus implies what it means to be Puerto Rican: things are (conditionally) amazing, just as they are (conditionally) haunted by the past-present of colonialism. An alternate future is possible, but for now we remain in the paradox, joyfully singing along to that chorus, the “promise that this night might never end, that there is no world but this one, that everything is possible, that the reservoir of life is limitless” (Hartman, 2019). Amidst the unceasing violence, what else can we do but enjoy that vulgar ride?

5. Coda

Since childhood, I have loved music, especially Caribbean genres. When I was around five or six, I was gifted my first CD and instantly became obsessed with it: Elvis Crespo’s Suavemente (Crespo, 1998). I loved Suavemente so much that, sometime in first grade, I took the album to my Catholic school since, on Mondays, students could bring CDs to quietly play in the classroom while working. As I popped the disk into the player and Crespo belted the opening line “¡Suavemente, besame!”, my teacher immediately paused the song, confiscated the CD for the day, and said, “absolutamente no, esto es demasiado vulgar.”19 I was confused, to say the least. “Vulgar?” I thought, “Isn’t there more to this song than just… vulgarity? What’s so bad about vulgarity, anyway?” This curiosity stuck with me, and, as the case studies in this project demonstrate, vulgarity stands in for more than, simply, immoral excess.

The pedagogies of the vulgar highlight the ongoing hold that colonialism and plantation slavery have upon the Caribbean; the gendered extraction of labor and capital that produce the terrible circumstances by which Caribbean peoples experience daily life. As such, these pedagogies invert vulgarity onto itself and ask us to reconsider what might actually be vulgar: sexual dance styles, for example, or the long-standing violence Western modernity inflicts upon, and is made possible through, the Caribbean? If, as Alejandro Benítez Rojo reminds us, the Caribbean birthed the modern capitalist world, that it was (and is) upon the Caribbean’s exploitation that our current reality makes itself over and over again, what are the stakes of this reckoning? What can be gained, both within and beyond the Caribbean, from resisting the tendency to reduce urban Caribbean musical genres, and their dance styles, to mere vulgarity? Deborah Thomas says it best:

The Caribbean teaches us, therefore, that sovereignty is embodied practice, process, and dialogue. It teaches us that we must move beyond liberal juridical-legal definitions to embrace the relations among the political, the spiritual, and the sensual…that a robustly reflexive decolonial praxis can challenge the binaries of here and there, then and now, us and them, which should invite us to build anthropology anew out of the crucible of coloniality. (Thomas, 2022).

As such, the pedagogies of the vulgar bring the paradoxical beauty of violence to the fore: the ways that Caribbean peoples step into the vulgarity imposed onto them and create forms of livingness and pleasure amidst constrained freedom. It demonstrates a roadmap for approaching freedom, a kind of freedom so firmly planted within the recuperation of Being that it begs us to build worlds and disciplines anew, outside the confines of coloniality. Our liberation—physical, spiritual, sensual, and emotional—lies in this pedagogical praxis. To turn the unfortunate into something beautiful, what could be more Caribbean than that?