The fact that cognitive science has tied the definition of “too fast” to
interpretability becomes useful for my purposes because it may point toward the source of discomfort and ambiguity that many Kittitians/Nevisians confront in the moment of perceiving a musical performance as “too fast.” Utilizing research methodologies that incorporate the terms and concepts of the community that is being studied has become foundational to a new, self-conscious branch of social science. This is particularly true for current thinkers whose interests lie in decoloniality as an academic and practical project in the global south. Walter Mignolo has used the term modernity/coloniality as a textual and visual representation of modernity and coloniality as conceptually
inseparable in the present world system, thereby emphasizing that, “coloniality is constitutive of modernity, not derivative of it.”102 He historically positions post-
Enlightenment thinking as the driving force behind colonialism as an epistemic project of domination. Decolonial thinking enables him to highlight the long history of
colonialism as the ever-present underside of modernity. Mignolo points out that
modernity includes a systematic incorporation of a colonial episteme that redefined and
102 Walter Mignolo, “Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the colonial Horizon of Modernity,”
in Enrique D. Dussel, Carlos A. Jáuregui, Mabel Moraña, eds. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 26.
then erased ‘indigenous’ categorizations and replaced them with Eurocentric
categorizations that simultaneously applied a schema of valuations that designated non- Europeans (and their cultural artifacts) as inferior. In an effort to counteract the cultural ramifications of coloniality, Mignolo proposes decoloniality and what he calls border thinking as “factional” thinking that “works on specific sets of issues built on particular historical legacies, languages, sensibility, experiences, and sense affected through smells and food, bodies, and sexualities, music and everyday life.”103
This is where cognitive science methodology appears myopic and Eurocentric in its universalizing/globalizing of fastness. Thus, this type of approach falls short in its usefulness for an interrogation of the specific, Afro-Anglophone Caribbean discourse around the state of being too fast. Still, what border thinking emphasizes is thinking from the outside created by the inside. Meaning that border thinking as an act, foregrounds and represents ideas that have been historically “repressed by the dominance of hermeneutics and epistemology as keywords controlling the
conceptualization of knowledge.”104 Mignolo suggests that border thinking as decolonial
thinking ultimately, “presupposes an awareness of and a sensibility for the colonial.”105
Considering this, I examine some of cognitive science’s terminology in order to carve out points of departure for considering how “too fast” may be conceived of as a product of the particular historical and cultural context of coloniality.
One of the prevalent generalizations in music cognition studies argues that a range of 100 to 140 beats per minute (BPM) is that of the “preferred tempo” and that a range of 80-160 beats per minute is the “tempo octave in which every piece of music should be
103 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 34.
104 Ibid., 23. 105 Ibid., 26.
interpretable.”106 Again, what has been left conspicuously un-emphasized, however, is
that the people and results represented in such a study are hardly generalizable. This makes the specific tempo octave presented by cognitive scientists a particularly ineffectual reference tool in varied cultural settings. However, the base idea that
interpretability constitutes the threshold for tempo preference, is a functional idea that, with significant contextualization, is more easily and accurately transferable.107
Both cognitive scientists and musicians accept that once a piece of music moves beyond the extreme of the metric interpretability— once it gets faster-- the human tendency is to perceive the rhythm as unfolding at a slower speed occurring at a multiple of the actual rate.108 That is to say, there is a metric range, or a set of tempos that may
not be considered too fast because they are, for example perceived as half as fast as the calculated BPM would suggest. Indeed, the condition of any piece of music’s being too fast lies in a tempo range that is not actually at the extreme ends of the metric continuum from slow to fast. The moment when rhythmic sound becomes too fast is that in which it becomes decidedly uninterpretable to the listener—a moment that does not necessarily correlate with the actual presence of an excessively fast rate of musical presentation. If we see interpretability as a concept that takes on meaning only in relation to those who are using it, then it functions solely as the idea of a threshold. In this discussion it is the threshold into being and sounding “too fast.” The question, then, is what ideas and actions—manners of being or sounding-- constitute the milieu in which fast, and thusly
106 Martin F. McKinney and Dirk Moelants, “Ambiguity in Tempo Perception: What Draws Listeners to
Different Metrical Levels,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24, no. 2 (December 2006):155-166.
107 Here I am considering “tempo preference” to be directly related to the perception of a musical
performance’s being “too fast.” One can assume that the perception of the state of being “too slow” would occur similarly. However, slowness it not considered in the current discussion.
108 Dirk Moelants, “Preferred Tempo Reconsidered,” Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on
“too fast” work in St. Kitts and Nevis?
The vast majority of the Kittitian youth’s popular music that is described by many Kittitians and Nevisians to be, among other things, too fast, hovers around 160-170bpm. Some other genres of Caribbean music that receive significant airplay within St. Kitts and Nevis, particularly power soca from Trinidad and Tobago, are, in terms of BPM, also significantly fast-paced. And yet, within the Kittitian/Nevisian community soca from elsewhere is not regarded with the same tempo-based disapprobation. Surely the fierce nationalism that characterizes much of Caribbean citizenship plays a part; music from elsewhere does not incite much moral concern unless it is understood as a detriment to national culture.109 It is clear, then, that a music’s designation as “too fast” for the
Kittitian-Nevisian community involves much more than a metric assessment.
As we have seen, tempo is just one small and un-isolatable aspect of being too fast. Recognizing tempo as codependent on other, intersectional factors suggests that no tempo taken and examined alone is too fast. Each instance of tempo and fastness is necessarily a conceptual product of a web of factors. Necessarily, this web (itself a condition of modernity/coloniality) is what Mignolo refers to as the colonial matrix. The colonial matrix is a concept not unlike the idea of intersectionality as popularized by law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s desire to “demonstrate the way that prevailing structures of domination shape various discourses of resistance” was in direct response to feminist and antiracist scholarship that failed to recognize the interdependence of factors such as gender and race in the unique experiences of women of color.110 For
Mignolo, the colonial matrix is constituted by the various intersections of the economic,
109 See Deborah Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
110 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against
civic, political and epistemic systems where neoliberal capitalism, the criminalization of non-heteronormative sexualities, the conflation of nation and state power, and the negative valuation of non-European thought are always at play and provide the backdrop for any and all occurrences and interactions in the colonial and postcolonial world.
If, as Mignolo suggests, places such at the Caribbean are parcels of the
“imaginary of the modern/colonial world system… [and] they are also the grounding of a system of geopolitical values, of racial configurations, and of hierarchical structures of meaning and knowledge,”111 then the particularly Kittitian and Nevisian colonial system
framing the discursive reactions to local music--as well as most of the local interpersonal interactions—is decorum. As I will demonstrate below, in St. Kitts and Nevis, being too fast is intimately tied to decorum as an overarching principal that, in self-consciously keeping the methodological aims of cognitive science in mind, can be broken down roughly into interpretability (content) and appropriateness (context), which are denotative categories that are locally rooted in a colonial episteme via the conceptual historical opposition of sense and nonsense. The following historical contemplation of interpretability and appropriateness reveals the fraught colonial context of both the speech and social economies of decorum in the small island Caribbean.