Akeem
Smith &
The Dancehall
Queens

With No Gyal Can Test, the Artist and Stylist Pays Homage to his Bombastic Roots

Interview: Deidre Dyer
Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Akeem Smith

This article is featured in Issue 3 of the SSENSE biannual print publication.

“I still feel like the same bitch at Gold Bar.” Akeem Smith is reminiscing about the first time we saw each other in 2009. I was dancing with some friends at the gilded lounge in NoLita, when Akeem strutted in—wrapped in a translucent plastic trench coat, a teeny-tiny baby backpack, and glistening finger waves in his hair studded with crystals. It was one of those nights where you just kept bumping into someone and with every turn a little bit of vodka and soda was spilled. Akeem was only in high school, but somehow was the best-dressed person in the club.

Then (and just as much now) Smith moves through the world with a certain aplomb and invincibility, whether in jeans and kitten heels and even more so, when cloaked in a full-on look. This flair for the dramatic and ease of being, even when squarely in the gaze of the room, is damn near a birthright for Smith. He grew up between New York City and Kingston, Jamaica. It was the bombastic women of the 90’s Dancehall scene who shaped the way Smith saunters across a room, whether seen or unseen.

Though Smith is most known for his inventive styling work—bringing to life runway collections for Hood By Air, Helmut Lang, Yeezy, and The Row—he has always maintained an artistic practice, specifically one that connected him to his Dancehall roots.

Smith’s induction into the Dancehall scene came at the hands of his godmother, Paula Ouch and the coterie of extravagantly-dressed women that made up the Ouch Crew. Paula, the fearless leader and designer of the Ouch fashion house and boutique in Kingston, was an ex-Marine who attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in the 90s and brought international flair to the Jamaican Dancehall scene. Their looks blended space age metallics with BDSM accents. Their moon boots were sourced from the punk shops on St Marks Place in the East Village. The Ouch crew was frequently called the Spice Girls for their colors, aerodynamic hairstyles and costume-level commitment to a singular, cohesive theme. Their looks were meticulously documented in the pages of Jamaican newspapers. In essence, Ouch looks were the stylistic predecessor of Rihanna & Nicki Minaj, when they’re really in their West Indian bag.

No Gyal Can Test brings viewers into some of the tensest moments of a bashment, when the video light graces the dancefloor. From preening to blasé indifference to incessant eye rolling, each woman at the center of the lens is sliced to a flash of metallic lustre, immaculate hair and scants outfits. Reluctantly receiving and all-at-once sneering at the attention. These nocturnal moments are further spliced as Smith stitches together new narratives, utilizing repetition and extreme zooms. “You're not going to see like a whole party," says Smith. “It is going to be this story that I've made up using archival footage.”

This body of original work from Smith features new media interpretations of vintage Dancehall videos and photos. But to simply call Smith’s work a curation of an archive would undermine the focus and determination that Smith has poured into bringing this project to life. The archive literally did not exist before Smith flew a small team to Kingston to track down VHS tapes and restore film negatives found through a close-knit community of pumpkin-vine family who were the documentors of the scene. After 12 years of concepting, researching and excavating, No Gyal Can Test is being presented by Red Bull Arts this fall and will tour North America, making stops in New York City and Detroit. Smith considers the hours and hours of video footage and photos to be an early form of social media, a pre-selfie documentation of who wore what and who came through of the Dancehall scene. “My show is not for us now,” says Smith. “It's literally for people in 2131. This could be someone's great grandmother and they’re grandchildren are seeing how they looked. It's going to be weird like, 'Look at Grannie's selfies.'" Here, Smith discusses the long road to amassing this treasure trove of Dancehall culture.

Top image credit : Akeem Smith, 2019. Photo by Paul Sepuya. Featured In This Image: Akeem Smith, Untitled, 2020 (still). Multi-channel video installation with sound.

Akeem Smith, Untitled , 2020 (still). Video with sound.

Deidre Dyer

Akeem Smith

Tell me about your family. Paint the picture of growing up in Jamaica.

If I reveal certain truths, I'll probably reveal too much, and other truths that's not necessarily mine to tell—but let's just say I was raised by a bunch of different people. I was bouncing around but not bouncing around in a bad way. I was already living in Jamaica with my dad. My godmother Paula [Ouch] decided to move back there because the Dancehall scene was so popping at the time. I always liked female company or being a fly on the wall. Eavesdropping on women’s conversations and things of that nature. So that's why I like being with them, with Paula specifically. Working on the show I started to understand how [these women were] subconsciously developing my social skills, my taste, things of that nature.

What was your earliest memory of fashion?

Dressmakers and tailors that used to make sick looks. Biggie Turner used to make sick looks. Larger Rodney used to make sick looks. He used to make Carlene looks. There's another dressmaker named Gracie. But specifically, since they were born in Jamaica, raised in New York, and were more familiar with how it operates in a foreign sense, like in an American Atelier. They brought that vibe to Jamaica. So they didn't seem so mom and pop. In the store they had the contact lenses, all the accessories they bought from St. Marks Place, the punk look. It wasn't just making outfits.

It was a full look, full lifestyle shop.

It was a full look kind of thing, and then Patricia Field bought their stuff. But I guess I saw their mode of operation. It was different from the mom & pops. I definitely noticed that from early on.

Photographer Unknown, chromogenic print, date unknown, OUCH Archive, Bequeathed to Akeem Smith.

It’s interesting because it probably didn't seem like just fashion, because Dancehall's such an immersive culture. When did you realize that creativity was at the core of this thing and making.

I thought it was very late, when I officially moved back to New York, when I was 12. I thought everyone was creative. They wouldn't look like this every day. I want to say it was like a drag thing even because everyone had their little swag. You still have your little swag in your everyday life.

It wasn't until I started getting older and going out, that I would go more all out. I felt like I was putting more of an extra effort into what I was visually presenting. I realized there was a lot of effort, not necessarily creativity. I say effort because not a lot of the looks, I felt, were the most creative. But the effort to [create] a look how you pictured it, I think that's super what I realized.

I started realizing how Jamaican culture and Dancehall, specifically, how it digested other western fashions that were going on. They would do punky looks, but it wouldn't look punk. It would still look Dancehall. I was really interested in the cycle of digesting what was going on. Whatever was in Paris trickled down to Jamaica. I was interested in that.

Aesthetically speaking, what was the Ouch Crew infamous for?

For me, what I felt they were known for was the crazy hair. They used to call them the Jamaican Spice Girls and things of that nature. Every girl that was a part of the crew had their own thing. It was Spice Girl-ish.

Photo Morris (1939 - 2016), chromogenic print, date unknown; Bequeathed to Akeem Smith / No Gyal Can Test Archive.

Tell me about Paula.

Paula's the one that started it. Her family had a store here already, and they were already designing, her and Debbie. Then they decided to go to Jamaica. I mean she went to FIT. She was a Marine Corps, and then when she got out of the Marines, her mom asked her what she wanted to do, and she said, "We're already dressing up, going out, and Dancehall stuff anyway. Why not just make this a business?" That's what happened. That's how it got started for sure.

How did you curate and find this archive?

I had the idea for the show 12 years ago. I started with some of the Ouch images from my Aunt Peaches and Winey Winey's collections. Paula had a decent collection of photos and newspaper clippings of Ouch stuff. But it's not only Ouch that’s included. It's a small community of people who used to dress up. I knew Mr. Morris, who used to take pictures for Ouch. He had the crux of all the images and all the negatives. I went down to Jamaica and paid for a small team to come with me, because I don't know how to save negatives. We stayed at my house in Jamaica, and worked on it there. Mind you, I had no money. All the little money that I was getting from my jobs, I used it towards this. We did that a bunch of times, maybe twice a year.

I’m sure you encountered some real characters while collecting footage. West Indians can be very doubtful like, "What do you want? You want this for what?”

I guess Caribbean people in general could usually sense BS really quickly. I don't know why people trust me, really, honestly. I wish I could tell you. I made it a monetary thing, for sure. If I was going to pay these two white guys to come help me save the photos, I definitely helped out a lot of people with real money.

It's about being transparent and I was super always transparent. I’d tell them, I don't know what I'm going to do with all this. I think it just needs to be saved, and archived because that really would've a loss. I'm super aware of Black history barely having any first-person narratives. The art space is great because they appreciate and preserve, and that's why I'm showing it in this context and making what I already think is art even artier.

I'm not trying to reclaim it, this is me. I don't have that kind of identity crisis like that. It's more about positioning, and informing, and giving them a voice really within it. I'm not into the gay boys telling women how to dress. Even though I do that for a living, it's not my thing. My thing is maybe bringing out the essence. Not even that. That sounds even weird.

It’s shining a light on their artistry. This was creativity, in a very multimedia, 360 cultural way that can be glossed over and just considered parties on an island. It was creative. It was commerce.

I would say it was a nocturnal economy for sure. People are coming to it thinking they're going to understand Caribbean women a bit more and I think they're going to be even more confused.

I remember seeing your video Lexus, Benz & Bimma at Martos Gallery in 2019. The notion of trying to understand Caribbean women is so difficult when it was just a montage of just eye cutting, teeth kissing, catching the video light, and preening for the camera. In those moments of display and show, they're just more loose. They’re even more….

Alien.

Exactly! There's so much more character being put on, just like you said with the Spice Girl correlation. How would you describe the importance of the camera and the video light in a party?

It’s not necessarily video light, per se. But I look at [Dancehall videos] as the first form of social media. It was like a Hallmark card in a way because this was how people from other places saw you. It's not like now where people can be their own video man. Whereas before, that's how you would show you were having fun or if you looked good at a dance. I say it's like with the Hallmark cards because when on the camera people are like bigging up themselves. They're bigging up their wives, they're bigging up their husbands. Their baby's father.

I remember watching videos on BCAT (Brooklyn Community Access Television) and the clip would be at the end of someone's birthday and I'd be like, "Me wan bigg up di birthday gal. Yuh dance was well nice!"

Dancehall is a great place for me to start with because it's super small but it has such a big world culture, in comparison to some of the cultures that I want to explore in the future. Dancehall let's me have the world's attention. It's more relatable. It has a wide reach. And that's because of the sonic loudness, the individual loudness.

I remember the first time I saw you out and about. It was at Gold Bar. You came in wearing a see-through PVC trench coat and you had finger waves in your hair with little gems embedded in it. .

I was probably still in high school. That was like 2009.

I remember seeing you and saying to myself, "Who is this?" Even back then, you were giving that full-look energy—the hair, the shoe, the jewelry, the this, the that.

Yeah, it all matters. Down to the toenail color. It all matters. I'm so specific with styling and shit like that. I'm like you need an eggshell not white toenail. It's an eggshell white. That's a different type of white. It's a blessing and a curse.

What happened to the Ouch crew?

They decided since the scene wasn't the same they're just like, "Oh, let's just be normies and be fab normies, and live a suburban life.” And that's cute too. Paula pops up every now and then. You know, leaving a bit of mystique in the Dancehall. You know? I think that's interesting.

That's the legend. That's the legacy.

Yeah, it's like a mist. That's good for them. But for me I'm just like you have something so potent that could've been. Imagine if it would've been like a real business. Even if it would've turned into something like Frederick's of Hollywood. That would have been nuts. Like an actual Dancehall house turned into something that makes products everywhere. It could have grown. Like Isaac Mizrahi, he's doing things on the Home Shopping Network. It would have been cool if they could have really been more transgressive with it, if it was all about fashion. But clearly it wasn't. It was just like the culture, everything matched, you know.