Jamaica Day 15: How to Cut a Jelly, “Free Your Mind” Blasting the Block in Kingston, Baby Goat, Our Clockwork is Orange, Shumba Youth, by Davin Michael Stedman
This is how you cut a Jelly. You just need a small sword. This is what Cocunut water is supposed to taste like.
Just a baby Jamaican goat cruising around my neighborhood eating delicious foliage.How do feel about our song ‘Free Your Mind’ blasting on the block in Kingston? (Video is below.) I am just along for the ride man.
Jamaica gonna’ do what Jamaica is gonna do with this song. The predictions are that this song can go to Top 10 in Jam Rock. If it hits #1 in Jamaica can we have a party in Seattle?
If this song hits #1, I may even get visibly drunk, which is a rare sight. Because everything crazy I have done on stage has been sober. I can’t wait to really get on a big stage here. I’ll be a thoughtful singer-songwriter. I’ll strum my cowboy chords.
But when it’s a show, I am going for the gusto. But nobody goes harder than these Dancehall singers. They make the ballistic Jamaican American Busta Rhymes seem like Enya.
But I am secretly preparing a banger called Three Wheel Motion. I am not hitting a big stage here without nuclear weapons. When I come back I want all the singers dropping their versions of that Sick Donkey Records Riddim.
There are different rules here in Black Nashville. Let em’ try to smoke me off my own track. This is the culture that invented Hip Hop. You take the Jamaicans out of the equation in the late 70s Bronx, you got no turntables, no sound system, no DJs.
If R&B had a baby and they called it Rock & Roll, how do you think Hip Hop was born? You notice how it changed when it left the Bronx and the West Indian culture. You know how Bone Thugs-N-Harmony was pretending to be Jamaican toasters, and failing in the most incredible way. They failed like Mick Jagger failed at singing Soul: to the bank.
For Jazz NOLA is Mecca. But for Hip Hop this is New Jerusalem.
…and seriously, Michael Bolton is huge here. Like Kenny G big in Houston big.
Our Clockwork is Orange (IS this our Culture, after all?)
Imagine the reaction if 17 kids were shot in cold blood in Kingston, Jamaica. Or Iraq.
I was just talking to a Jamaican that is migrating to Canada or Switzerland, but not America because we live in a devolving idiocracy of hyper racist fascism.
I could not disagree, but I said we also have good things like ever shrinking National parks.
The thing is the individual isn’t a poor migrant but an experienced corporate accountant.
How many school shootings in Canada? How many concerts in Jamaica have 500 people shot in the back?
Are we sure we aren’t the sh_thole? At a certain point, other nations are going to close their doors to us and our dollar.
As a wise Rasta from Eastern Europe told me up at Nine Mile.
“If you guys don’t get it together, Russia, China, and their allies are going to turn a key and make the American dollar irrelevant, and with that goes your American Power. But you are a nation that is also full of intelligent people that are not going to sit by and stand for this stupidity.”
Oh are we? Maybe this is what happens when a nation is disintegrating as a culture.
Is school shootings part of our Culture, going back to 1999?
Yes. Where are the travel warnings not to enter American schools?
An enlightening discussion in the studio with British-Zimbabwean artist Shumba Youth. Listen to the thoughts of an experienced Brixton Selecta and Singer discuss his first visit to Jam Rock.
I learned the meaning of Windrush. Think of it as the Jamaican Mayflower, when Jamaicans discovered England.
