‘Strut’: Steven Seagal’s horrifically offensive attempt at reggae
When you think about the musical heritage of Jamaica, your instant thought is likely to head towards a combination of reggae, ska, rocksteady and dancehall. For a tiny island nation, the wealth it has to offer in terms of stylistic innovations that have successfully managed to make impressions all over the world is truly impressive, and recognising its worth and contribution to the pantheon of musical genres is something that many other artists from outside of the country have managed to do in a tasteful and appreciative manner.
For the most part, that is. You see, reggae and all of its offshoots are genres rooted in Black culture from Caribbean communities, and the themes of the songs are often related to the plight and suffering that they have endured at the hands of white colonialists and oppressors. Reggae is intrinsically connected to black history, and while it’s perfectly okay for people of other ethnic backgrounds to appreciate it and its splendour, performing in the style is something that ought to be handled with the utmost caution and respect.
Of course, there have been examples of white artists who have managed to incorporate elements of reggae and ska into their music in such a fashion, with acts like The Specials being a mixed-race group that honoured the traditions of the genres in order to make their own spin on things, and The Clash, who proudly embraced reggae music via a punkish slant. It’s hard to call either of these examples culturally appropriative when the intention behind them is purely respectful and not meant to denigrate the original progenitors of the genre.
On the other hand, you get people who take things too far, almost portraying themselves as caricatures of Caribbean culture by donning dreadlocks and Rastafarian attire, and putting on a toe-curling patois vocal inflection that feels like nothing but a grossly offensive parody. It’s belittling to the people who pioneered the music, culturally insensitive to their heritage, and takes an incredibly vain, self-centred and myopic person to think they’re creating anything but second-hand embarrassment for onlookers.
So, when some rich and out-of-touch chud like Steven Seagal, a man with no barometer for feeling shame, comes along and decides he’s going to have a stab at making his own reggae/dancehall crossover track, you either run for the hills and cover your ears until it’s deemed safe to return to civilisation, or you let him go ahead and make a complete numpty of himself for the world to see. For some reason, we let him take the latter path, and now we’re unfortunately left living in a place that has been blemished by the existence of ‘Strut’.
Letting Seagal, a professional martial artist and actor of dubious ability, make music of any kind is almost certainly a recipe for disaster. How he managed to convince anyone, let alone the Queen of Dancehall, Lady Saw, to assist him with making a song as abhorrent as ‘Strut’ for his debut album, Songs from the Crystal Cave, in 2004, remains a mystery. Even though that era might still qualify by some people’s metrics of being ‘different times’ where performing racially insensitive cosplay was ‘just a joke’, I’d argue that a song this foul has no place in any time period.
Yes, the music alone is a ghastly pastiche of dancehall and reggae, and Seagal’s butchering of the island’s accent and dialect is enough to make the skin crawl, but the lyrical content takes things to another level of reprehensibility. Vomit-inducing lines like “me want the punani, see for make me nice” and “the gyal dress is just as pretty / not just there to cover her kitty” are not just unabashedly tasteless for how they see Seagal attempt to use Jamaican slang, but also manage to stir in some graphic misogyny for good measure. I’ll spare you having to read more examples of his aggressively off-colour lyricism, but as you might imagine, it’s hardly Chaucer.
It’s rare that you get to see something so ridiculously out of touch with the issue of cultural appropriation, which makes you wonder if this song was made in a vacuum bereft of all contact with the outside world. Seagal is so far removed from understanding what is considered socially acceptable that you almost feel bad for him that people kept telling him he could do this – and then you remember it’s Steven Seagal.
