In “Mek Some Noise,” Timothy Rommen investigates attitudes toward the incorporation of popular music forms in the church services of the Full Gospel community. The Full Gospel community is a loose association of Protestant churches in Trinidad, consisting mostly of churches that are of pentecostal and charismatic persuasions (4, 17–18). Rommen considers two traditions that are “foreign” to Trinidad: North American gospel music and gospel music done in the Jamaican dancehall style. He also considers two musical genres that are indigenous to Trinidad: gospelypso and Jamoo (Jehovah's or Jah music). North American gospel music includes traditional hymns, African American gospel music, and contemporary praise and worship styles made popular by the charismatic movement. Gospel dancehall has its origin in Jamaica where gospel artists employ the catchy rhythms and poetic style of dancehall (an offshoot of reggae) to proclaim their Christian message. Gospelypso emerged in Trinidad in the 1970s in the context of a national quest to fashion an indigenous Trinidadian cultural identity. Putting Christian lyrics to the local calypso music was the response of young Trinidadian artists who embraced the cultural nationalism of the period. Jamoo is a style created by and associated with a Trinidadian musician known as Ras Shorty I (formerly Lord Shorty). Leaving behind the raunchiness of his calypso career, Ras Shorty I in the latter part of his life created Jamoo, which utilizes a blend of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Trinidadian styles to promote Trinidadian nationalism and traditional moral and cultural values.

The central analytic tool that Rommen uses is what he calls the “ethic of style.” By this he suggests that the Full Gospel discourse about and practice of including or excluding certain musical styles in worship services is based on an ethic that judges what style is an appropriate medium for the Christian message. The data for the study was collected in fieldwork done in Trinidad between 1998 and 2002. Observations of worship services and concerts alongside interviews with Full Gospel pastors, parishioners, and gospel music artists generated most of the data.

The main finding of “Mek Some Noise” is that church leaders and older church members reject gospelypso, Jamoo, and gospel dancehall as inappropriate for Christian worship while younger members and contemporary gospel artists tend to embrace them. North American gospel music is less controversial and receives almost universal acceptance, except among some young people who find traditional hymns uninspiring. According to Rommen, the rejection of local and regional genres and the embrace of North American genres reflect the Full Gospel identity that was fashioned by its missionary past and is sustained by its current desire to be part of global evangelical Christianity. The discourse on cultural relevance and authenticity advanced by younger generations and gospel artists privileges the local over the foreign because the local genres appeal to their sense of Caribbean identity as well as their musical sensibilities. For church leaders, the ethic of style operates as a means of maintaining control of what is acceptable through a discourse on pollution or contamination. Gospel dancehall and gospelypso, in particular, are rejected because of their local associations with moral and sexual permissiveness (dancehall with “slackness” and carnival with bacchanal). Jamoo's purity is in question because its Christian message is ambiguous.

Rommen goes on to argue that proximity is a decisive factor influencing acceptance or rejection of musical genres by the elders of Full Gospel churches—acceptance of the foreign and rejection of the local and regional. While there is an obvious issue of geographical proximity related to the rejected and accepted genres, it is somewhat misguided to privilege proximity as determinative. As Rommen's own research shows, there is a store of local choruses that are widely sung in Full Gospel churches, sometimes to rhythms borrowed from local popular music; and there is widespread acceptance of local and regional forms by the younger generation. Furthermore, if Rommen is going to take his older informants seriously, he should privilege their association of calypso and dancehall with the secular, irreverent, and salacious. With respect to gospel dancehall, Rommen needs to highlight the historical and cultural competition between Jamaica and Trinidad as a factor in its rejection. Resistance to Jamaican music culture is not confined to the Full Gospel community but extends also to the cultural guardians who see the adoption of Jamaican styles (secular or religious) by a younger generation as a threat to local Trinidadian culture.

While Rommen offers a richly textured exploration of the Full Gospel struggle over musical styles, the study is marked by some enigmatic curiosities. Foremost among these is the inclusion of Jamoo in his analysis. Why include Jamoo, which is religiously ambiguous? It is more a medium of promoting cultural values (some of which may be taken from Christianity) than an explicitly Christian genre. Furthermore, the primary exponent is somewhat inscrutable, having no formal link to a particular Christian community and making no unambiguous claim that the genre he invented is Christian.

A second curiosity is that the most ethnographically rich section of the book focuses on a Baptist church instead of a pentecostal church. Apparently, Baptist churches can fall within the ambit of Full Gospel. However, throughout the book, prior the seventh chapter, the author tends to focus on pentecostals, so much so that he feels the need to justify his choice of Mt. Beulah Evangelical Baptist Church as the focus of this chapter. His justification is that focusing on this church enables him to illustrate the issues that congregations encounter in applying “the ethic of style” to their choice of music (152). The question of why a Baptist church would be more amenable to this kind of illustration than a pentecostal church remains unanswered.

Finally, the book is too heavily overlaid with interpretive glosses invoking prominent theorists from ethnomusicology and other disciplines. The glosses are so frequent and extensive that they stifle the local data, not allowing it to stand on its own merits. I understand that the initial write-up of the research may have been addressed to a certain academic audience to whom the author needed to prove his facility with these theorists. However, the removal of these glosses or their restriction to a concluding chapter would have released the data from the drag of overly technical jargons and theories and freed it to work its particular Caribbean magic.

Notwithstanding my criticisms, “Mek Some Noise” is an engaging study in ethnomusicology highlighting the issue of how the Full Gospel churches of Trinidad make ethical and musical choices in a music-rich environment. The ethic of style that rejects local and regional music genres is particularly noteworthy, since scholars of pentecostalism have frequently attributed its global spread to its ability to adapt to and adopt local cultural forms, especially music. Scholars and students of Caribbean studies in general and Caribbean religious studies in particular will find here a thoughtful analysis of a contemporary phenomenon that calls out for more academic research. Ethnomusicologists will find much to contemplate both in terms of the richness of the data and Rommen's theoretical tool, “the ethic of style.”