Smiley Culture

Smiley Culture, a British reggae musician, has died during a police raid on his London flat. The circumstances of his demise remain unclear. He was suspected of dealing cocaine and was killed by a knife wound during the raid, although it has yet to be established who was wielding the weapon.

Mr Culture was perhaps most famous for a 1984 hit “Cockney Translation”, in which he acted as translator between two dominant dialects of south London: indigenous cockney and Jamaican patois. A sample stanza:

Say cockney fire shooter, we bus' gun
Cockney say tea leaf. We just say sticks man.
You know dem have wedge while we have corn
Say cockney say be first my son! we just say gwan!
Cockney say grass we say informer man
When dem talk about iron dem really mean batty man
Rope chain and choparita me say cockney call tom
Cockney say Old Bill we say dutty Babylon

For non-Londoners or non-Jamaicans, a third translation into stuffy English is probably needed. "Tea leaf" is rhyming slang for thief; "wedge" and "corn" mean money; "iron" (in Cockney rhyming slang, "iron hoof", or poof) and "batty man" refer to homosexuals; "Old Bill" and "Babylon" are slang for police. "Rope chain", "choparita" (or "chapareeta", apparently a chain bracelet, presumably connected somehow to the Spanish chaparrita which means something, or someone, short) and "tom" refer to jewellery, as in the Cockney "tomfoolery".

What is interesting about this track, besides the bewildering vocal dexterity displayed by Mr Culture (see video below), is its social context. Some considered it a novelty song, but it came at a time when racial tension was rife in London. Just a few years earlier Brixton, a tough West Indian suburb of South London, had seen race riots. But many of the black youths were second generation Brits, and thus a tension existed between their British and West Indian roots. This was captured in the lyrics of the song. Paul Gilroy, a social historian at the London School of Economics and the author of “There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack”, is quoted in the Guardian:

The implicit joke beneath the surface of the record was that though many of London's working class blacks were Cockney by birth and experience, their "race" denied them access to the social category established by the language which real (i.e. white) Cockneys spoke. Cockney Translation...suggested that these elements could be reconciled without jeopardising affiliation to the history of the black diaspora.

If social division is embodied by language, then a walk down Brixton’s Electric Avenue today would be informative. The area is still mixed—half of it poor and plagued by gun crime and gang violence; the rest becoming gentrified. But the distinct languages of the street have now melded. It would be rare to find a teenager, whether black or white, talking either Cockney or Jamaican. Instead youths of all hues speak what is sometimes called Blockney, equally comfortable calling their companions "bruvs" or "geezers". To them, the need to translate from Cockney to Jamaican would be merely anachronistic.

Update 18/3/11: The inquest into Smiley Culture's death has been told that the singer died after stabbing himself in the heart with a kitchen knife during the police raid.