New post on my blog: I oppose the moving of the fountain at Sam Sharpe Square... Let history not be reshuffled before we fully understand what happened in yesterday! No tampering with the evidence! #bloggerblast
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Montego Bay Jamaica's Official News Hub... Chronicling News and Life in Jamaica's Second City!
Friday, January 13, 2017
Sunday, January 01, 2017
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Leadership in the Bay
Montego Bay, needs revolutionary and dynamic leadership on the municipal level and representation on the national level! Star power, unorthodox plans, larger than life projects, projections for the future... The city bleeding like a wound these common thinkers cannot suture...
We don't need another hero!!!
Friday, September 30, 2016
Preparing for a Storm! #blog #bloggerblast #hurricane #matthewhurricane
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Thursday, August 18, 2016
Soul of the city! The Montegonian... We say #mobay #montegobay #blog http://ift.tt/1T3sEZ2
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Throw Back Thursdays, because mi musical taste is diverse! #lennykravitz # tbt #throwbackthursdays #blog #electricchurch
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Tuesday, August 02, 2016
The power of the people is stronger than the people in power!
#blacklivesmatter #badfriday #blog #reparations #reparationmarch
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Saturday, July 16, 2016
News Cycle Blues!
How I felt watching this evening's news, 7 yr old burnt, 1 sea soaked suicide, trn Security lovers murder, Tivoli, France, Turkey, Trump... Epic Cinematic... as Hollywood scripts become the evening
news! #blog
news! #blog
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Saturday, July 09, 2016
Tuesday, July 05, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Songs written for Montego Bay City: A Musical Exploration of MoBay!
My Top 9 Montego Bay Songs
The history of Montego Bay Music and Montego Bay in Music is a very long and storied one. A history too long for this post I have intended... At this moment I wanna peep at songs written for MY CITY, Montego Bay City! Why investigate the city by song you ask? Well...rumor has it that there is a song for every city in America. Many such songs never get further than the city limits others became international hits. Gerard Kenny’s 1978 ode to his hometown ‘New York, New York - So Good They Named It Twice’ spelled the re-birth of America’s largest metropolis after it almost went bankrupt in 1975 and one year after a city-wide blackout shut it down for 25 hours. So the ethos and the brand and the identity of a city we see can be inextricably linked to song and music. In Jamaica the focus is mostly on Kingston, granted Negril gets some good mileage in "Cottage in Negril," and "I want to go to Negril", Linstead is indelibly etched into Jamaican memory via the folk hit "Laad What a Night.. what a Satiday nite!"Memphis, Tennessee is touted to be mentioned in more songs than any other city in the world, “Walking in Memphis” by Marc Cohn is the one that readily springs to most people’s minds, and coincidentally is the song that inspired me to write a million unsung Mobay songs... but here are some songs titled and inspired by Montego Bay
Popcaan, while in Kartel's tow, seems to have picked up some affection for the second city as well!
This Montego Bay song by Queen Ifrica is to The Montegonian, the definitive Montego Bay song. Folksy, yet reggae and pop-ish, it has strong lyrics, vivid site choices in the city, it is grassroot and has local authority!
My next favourite Mobay song is by none other than the lyrically profuse and verbose, Lij Tafari... This Montego Bay talent I think is easily on par with Damian Marley lyrically, and is as fresh as Kabaka Pyramid and Protoje.
Bobby Bloom as a North American came to Jamaica and found his inspiration in which city?
The rest of the songs that follow are covers of Bobby Bloom's song and give unique and various sonic signatures to the song that make it somewhat their own...
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Time For A Change
“Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervour destroyed by mass media. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that – not heroes, not celebrities, not stars. A star’s place is in Hollywood; the revolutionary’s place is in the community with the people.”
Huey P. Newton
“We don't need another hero”
Tina Turner
“As it's been said already, now let it be done, I tell you who we are under the sun”
Bob Marley
These days it seems the popular literary and rhetorical devices for writers and columnists is a combo of epiphany and personal testimony through which the writers seem to take you on a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations. I guess what readers have come to expect is vicarious insight, momentary wonder, a sliver of hope and small inner tingle and feeling that maybe it's all going to work out after all. Like the Bob Marley song "Every little thing is gonna be alright!" A semi social spiritual buzz or high of sorts!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I must regretfully inform you dear reader, my long time friend, that this gimmick, the DIY feel good high... it fails to meet the challenges that confront us today. These are complicated and difficult times and are not the days of tidy ready done solutions. The beasts that confront us now, the monkeys on our backs and the Elephant in our rooms don't care about anyone's experience of optimism or your personal gains. Given what is at stake, our great future... then letting our best and brightest waste their time – and the reader's time – cooking up more Chicken Soup for the Soul food crowd than Iyanla Vantz on a Sunday with a living room full of friend with heart break and spiritual influenza. It is repetitive regurgitation of pop psychology and expounding on FaceBook memes. I contend it doesn't fix a soul, the system doesn't change and in general that formula now just doesn't work.
Black authors, writers and leadership today have few or little successes and victories to boast of since the late seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. What of social or activist achievement and outreach? How far has it reached? All this is taking place because black leaders, TV personalities, politicians, musicians, journalists and writers are now into placebo politics and placebo innovation. They recycle on stale ideas and peddle them for more than they are really worth.
What I am getting at is this... those who tell us to “think different,” or it's "time for change" in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed, till re-runs become our history. Who doesn't watching 80's sitcom and cartoons on Youtube? I go to use new technology like the Internet and Project Gutenberg to read"old books." Who hasn't heard politicians recycle old policies and re-branded old documents? Everyone knows that guy in another community that reminds you of someone in your own community. Everyone knows the same jokes, we all hear those nowadays songs that you say but I know that song from somewhere before. We all chit chat on the ends and race each other to the puns and quips we see on TV and rehearsed.
I have an Uncle Bunny from England who is a lofty but inebriated philosopher... he calls it "the procession of the simulacrum" which is to say we are a species and generation of copycats. So it seems the system is suggesting and we are all conforming to the ideas that creativity, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on hustling and idea and inspiration and milking it for what it is worth. This is a system and generation hell bent on cracking the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power. Hence everybody peddles their new creative brand of whatever in their particular field. All the P's: JLP, PNP, politicians, pastors, performers, publishers. It' what I call a VistaPrint Paradox... people want to project the image of being unique and creative, but end up at a place that offers designs ready-made via a formula of templates.
We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to rustic charmed homes copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. This timidity is our path to the future and it cannot work. In the words of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I "we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Today more than ever there is a need for bold imagining and designing, different systems of valuation, exchange, accounting of transaction externalities, financing of coordinated planning, etc. Because states plus markets, states versus markets, these are insufficient models, and our conversation is stuck in Cold War gear.
The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in technology and science have improved quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now – is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, FaceBook for all its connectivity and social good, is still an agency which the U.. Government uses to spy on us. A new socio-economic architecture is needed.
However black thinkers and the intelligentsia at home and abroad are utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to come up with creative solutions to our current problems. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbors and friends.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the tough issues like history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions. Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation. Playing with new gadgets, trinkets and toys won't make life better and you know it. Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which has been embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration and validation", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and re-imagining our future, as well as change how we think.
We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to rustic charmed homes copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. This timidity is our path to the future and it cannot work. In the words of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I "we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Today more than ever there is a need for bold imagining and designing, different systems of valuation, exchange, accounting of transaction externalities, financing of coordinated planning, etc. Because states plus markets, states versus markets, these are insufficient models, and our conversation is stuck in Cold War gear.
The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in technology and science have improved quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now – is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, FaceBook for all its connectivity and social good, is still an agency which the U.. Government uses to spy on us. A new socio-economic architecture is needed.
However black thinkers and the intelligentsia at home and abroad are utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to come up with creative solutions to our current problems. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbors and friends.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the tough issues like history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions. Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation. Playing with new gadgets, trinkets and toys won't make life better and you know it. Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which has been embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration and validation", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and re-imagining our future, as well as change how we think.
Western Jamaica's Burgeoning Conscious Community
When one thinks of poetry, dub, culture, history and the arts in Jamaica, most people think Kingston, Edna Manley, Red Bones Cafe, The Ranny Williams Centre, Reggae revival, Jah 9, Protege, Jesse Royal, Kabaka Pyramid, Chronixx, Damian Marley...
Stretch your brain now and see if you can think of any Western Jamaican musicians in that vain... I am willing to bet you couldn't think of any or know any. You do know they exist though right? It is time you know artistes like... new western Jamaican artistes Mentor, Lij Tafari, Lusion, Jovexx, Antwain, Marley Fire, I-Mara, Raydaar, Teacher Dee, Naphtali/Omar, Okonko, Kempo and The Young Jamaica Ensemble these are names represent a western Jamaican authentic arts and reggae musical experiences to be had, if one is going to say they are an adept aficionado of western Jamaican music. Other names like Kolumbo, Mycus Chip and Fury echo of the quasi-street conscious ethos of Jah Vinci's calibre, with shades of both dancehall and reggae in their game. This generation of artists is worthy successors to Montegonian reggae and culture legends like White Mice, Jah Cure and Queen Ifrica. With regard to dub poetry, names bubbling in the local market are Blabber, Kofi Kulcha, Skripcha, Marley Fire, Venise Samuels amongst many others.
This crop of artistes offers cultural enrichment and entertainment that isn't available elsewhere in Jamaica. The hub and foundation of much of the stunningly beautiful music being made in Montego Bay, with amazing insights and great beats, is created in The People's Arcade and Coomb's Lane. Upcoming studios like Skull Yard and foundation studios like Victory One, Vidal and Half-a-Dread are helping to propel both new artists while keeping grounded with foundation artistes. Out here, being produced in the west are songs to dance and vibe to as well as deep cerebral lyrics to creep inside of and crawl through your psyche. This music takes you outside your conventional conceptualization of Jamaican music as most popular Jamaican music is Kingston based, biased and centred. These western Jamaicans give you a different perspective. A true reggae aficionado can no longer ignore the energies being emitted from Western Jamaica.
Although the mainstream often associates contemporary Jamaican music with the harder dancehall of artists like Beenie Man and Vybz Kartel, the Jamaican listenership has an under-reported love for melodic pop and smooth flows. Downtown dances play Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers remains popular and local supergroup L.U.S.T. – Lukie D, Trilla U, Singing Melody and Tony Curtis – scored a hit with a cover of Air Supply's "Just As I Am." Today the airwaves being taken over by local music station Fyah 105, has re-proven that Jamaican ears hunger and are eager to hear global rhythms, and join the procession of new music and musical global consciousness that is flowering all over the planet.
I say to you now, go research these names, these artists... listen to my sampling of videos... witness the blossoming of Mobay Music... the western consciousness revival!
Stretch your brain now and see if you can think of any Western Jamaican musicians in that vain... I am willing to bet you couldn't think of any or know any. You do know they exist though right? It is time you know artistes like... new western Jamaican artistes Mentor, Lij Tafari, Lusion, Jovexx, Antwain, Marley Fire, I-Mara, Raydaar, Teacher Dee, Naphtali/Omar, Okonko, Kempo and The Young Jamaica Ensemble these are names represent a western Jamaican authentic arts and reggae musical experiences to be had, if one is going to say they are an adept aficionado of western Jamaican music. Other names like Kolumbo, Mycus Chip and Fury echo of the quasi-street conscious ethos of Jah Vinci's calibre, with shades of both dancehall and reggae in their game. This generation of artists is worthy successors to Montegonian reggae and culture legends like White Mice, Jah Cure and Queen Ifrica. With regard to dub poetry, names bubbling in the local market are Blabber, Kofi Kulcha, Skripcha, Marley Fire, Venise Samuels amongst many others.
This crop of artistes offers cultural enrichment and entertainment that isn't available elsewhere in Jamaica. The hub and foundation of much of the stunningly beautiful music being made in Montego Bay, with amazing insights and great beats, is created in The People's Arcade and Coomb's Lane. Upcoming studios like Skull Yard and foundation studios like Victory One, Vidal and Half-a-Dread are helping to propel both new artists while keeping grounded with foundation artistes. Out here, being produced in the west are songs to dance and vibe to as well as deep cerebral lyrics to creep inside of and crawl through your psyche. This music takes you outside your conventional conceptualization of Jamaican music as most popular Jamaican music is Kingston based, biased and centred. These western Jamaicans give you a different perspective. A true reggae aficionado can no longer ignore the energies being emitted from Western Jamaica.
Although the mainstream often associates contemporary Jamaican music with the harder dancehall of artists like Beenie Man and Vybz Kartel, the Jamaican listenership has an under-reported love for melodic pop and smooth flows. Downtown dances play Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers remains popular and local supergroup L.U.S.T. – Lukie D, Trilla U, Singing Melody and Tony Curtis – scored a hit with a cover of Air Supply's "Just As I Am." Today the airwaves being taken over by local music station Fyah 105, has re-proven that Jamaican ears hunger and are eager to hear global rhythms, and join the procession of new music and musical global consciousness that is flowering all over the planet.
I say to you now, go research these names, these artists... listen to my sampling of videos... witness the blossoming of Mobay Music... the western consciousness revival!
Thursday, June 02, 2016
A City Under Seige
“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
~ Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
As we ride through the intense heat and crime wave washing the city in tsunami like fashion, the schemes, shanty towns, communities are erupting as the victims of poverty, global financial warfare, IMF debt, personal debt, urban and spiritual decay begin to break out violently and virulently. Sometimes I wonder if the public knows what is happening... do you know what is happening in Paradise, in Norwood, in Flankers, in Meggy Top, in Salt Spring, in Granville, in Cambridge, in Orange and Sign? Peoples lives are shattered, men are in splinters, women in despair, children losing fathers and mothers to guns and disease. Children living with the faint anguish of hunger in their little eyes. Then there are the unknown valiant heroes, the ones who with out pay, not given the respect due, the ones running youth clubs and residents associations, not in the name of politics, but simple activism, to simply take up the challenge of building a better community, trying to safeguard the future, some conservative, some vanguard, but all unknown heroes who are not worshipped on facebook or instagram, the ones the media and the press miss. And rising fast out of the shadows, brooding in these dire economic times, the evil, the misguided, the perverted... spreading its tentacles out into communities, spreading warfare, spreading rumors, spreading mental diseases, ruining young children.
Do you get the picture? Or is your mental image of Montego Bay still pretty girls at parties on twitter, youtube and instagram, is it Burger King and the HipStrip, is it romanticized garrisons through Samsung lenses and photo effects? Is it escapist worlds that Fairview and Ironshore and Coral Gardens can be? Is it Casinos and taboos? Is it playing politics on FB? Did you miss the bodies at KFC, at Whitter Village, in Paradise, in Cassava Walk, in Gulf, In Waltham, in Salt Spring, Sam Sharpe Square, Taboo parking lot, Pier One... or was your time spent on 50 Shades of Grey, Avengers 2, rum bottles, chasing skirts, stroking your own ego, taking selfies, posing, posturing... not really doing anything? I know I do the FB and IG thing but life is more than that. I know I seem filled with righteous indignation or some righteous anger, but it isn't that, I am writing from a place of utter despair and brokeness hoping someone hears, that more of you step out into the battle field and fight to change our future, that more of you commit your brains to good ideas and spend your computational and processing power in productive and positive fashion. Surely I am not prososing that we all become good little socialist working for the common good that everything will turn out to be sunshine and roses... but he have to commit ourselves to the hard challenges that confront us now.
The last two years was a year like no other for me in Paradise... I have watched Chik V decimate the community, as well as cancer, AIDS, gunshot, heart attack, strokes, diabetes and the list goes on. The passing of community members and staple in what seems to be an unending cycle of trauma. The trend continued into the new year as people whittle away... as violence continues to visit the community, as people come to realize Marcus Mosiah's prophecy, not knowing themselves till their back is against the wall, as they can't no food to eat and no money to spend. Now to have Zik V at our doorsteps!
Somethings like Youth Club and Residents Association prove to be a glimmer of hope, but the wider circumstance of Paradise, it's surrounding Norwood and even Montego Bay. The economy isn't exactly stagnant, the ratings from international agencies show that, so now how does government and the private sector pass the savings of lower light bills and oil prices to the consumers, as children are missing school more often, children are becoming parentless, the population is thinning, not through conscious effort but through owing to the economics of living, the simple costs of living. More people are applying for ways to leave the country. As the maddening crowd hurries on into elections and carries a season of irrational debates to communities, whilst the unsung heroes, suffer and wilt away.
As we see what seems to be an epic crime wave washing the city and western Jamaica with reports of shootings in the city almost daily. One can say without a doubt that this epidemic of cancerous crime is out of hand, radical approaches to joblessness and unemployment have to be put in place, the economy addressed, the culture fixed, religious institutions doing more social outreach, more entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, then better crime fighting techniques, 21st investigations and forensics!
As a people we need a serious and comprehensive and dynamic coming together, pooling of resources and ideas to secure the future of the community. Homework programs, safety nets and cheap solutions for children who are skipping schools, more culture and cultural events, we need to bolster the effort in youth club, in residents association in the senior citizens associations. Support entrepreneurs, buy local more, clean up our hearts and seek a more spiritual life... not religious but spiritual... inject more love into the youth into our families... we need now an in-gathering... build back, rebuild. We need a new and revitalized "Save-the-dollar" Initiative, one that is robust and encompasses, social media and online crowdfunding, pooling members of the diaspora, reaching out to grassroot, involving conventional banks and the private sector being patriotic... at least a few banks. This bolstered with novel ideas like local community or parish currencies like the "Bristol Pound" and Bitcoin.
Let us meditate on the successes of the Sunshine Girls, Reggae Boys, Merlene Ottey, Herb Mckenley, Shelly Ann Fraser, Cuthbert, Campbel-Brown, Asafa, Bolt, Swimmers, Special Olympians, Onandi Lowe, Walter Boyd, Tessanne, Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, Harry Bellafonte, Andre Mcdonald, Claude McKay, Shaggy, Sean Paul, Dustin Brown... So much so much... IF ONLY WE HAD POLITICIANS that performed to the same standard and calibre that ordinary citizens step out to achieve... JAH we woulda be capital of planet Earth!
Yes the politicians are inept, yes some police corrupt, yes lots of exploitive businesses are there and yes some business leaders join Chamber of Commerce to advance their personal missions and as personal platform. Yes this country and this city is a mess, a tangled web. Yes yes yes, but wasn't our god Anansi? Were'nt we the first storytellers... so it is time we imagined a new tale... one where we survive, where we are the victor and there is no armageddon. Isn't it time we committed truly in our hearts to be agitators for change, to begin to curb the potential disaster of the things we do and things we create.
I don't know about you, but I cannot close my eyes to these things... I will not! There are couples living in hovels, Rasta Elders and shut ins living in leaking houses and rotting board, children hungry and every fast food place throws away unsold food at 10-11pm. This city has broken heart, it is filled with a history of injustice, sons and daughters of slaves that ran up and down on the Barnet Estate, Jarrett Estate, scions of insurrectionists that participated in the Christmas Rebellion and the others, generations of uncompensated families, a cycle and trend that if you don't know history, you wont see it carry on into today. I don't want to ever become numb to these things, comfortable with human suffering and injustice, but some I worry that it may make me bitter and angry. I wonder if this is just the vestiges of idealism in me and the dying flickers of youth. But until the flicker of every last revolutionary fervor dies in me and no ember or spark is left, let it be known from Maroon Town, to the Hill on which Sam Sharpe teacher's College stands to the Clock, up Jarrett Street and on to Sam Sharpe Square...
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