Taking it lying down Like Justin Bieber, Sean Kingston rose from nowhere to superstardom seemingly overnight. Though he may not be in the Chris Brown or Ne-yo tax bracket, the Jamaican native has done pretty well for himself. Judging by his videos, one would assume that the baby-faced singer/rapper is a happy-go-lucky chap with a [...]
Reggae: A German perspective While it is important for us as a people to write our own history and tell of our experiences from our perspectives, we often make unflattering comments of outsiders who promote and highlight our music, unnecessarily and unfairly. The lack of acknowledgement of foreigners’ contribution to the development of our musical [...]
Reggae/dancehall music has never been short of journeymen. These artistes may not have many hit songs but they keep plugging away, confident the big time is just around the corner. Singer Sophia Squire, who marks her 20th year in the music business this year, fits that bill. The soft-spoken Spanish Town native is promoting her [...]
Jurors in reggae star’s drug case to resume deliberations Tuesday Federal jurors deliberated for about seven hours Friday without reaching a verdict in the drug conspiracy trial of Grammy-winning reggae star Buju Banton and will return Tuesday to continue their work. Banton, 37, faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted of four drug [...]
Buju Banton guilty on three counts Jamaica’s reggae superstar Buju Banton, real name Mark Myrie, has been found guilty of three cocaine related charges. A 12 member jury a short while ago delivered the verdict in the Sam M Gibbons building in Tampa which houses the United States Middle District Court, Florida Division. Buju was [...]
‘Like A Lion’ roars on to airwaves Reggae artiste Cali P’s latest song, Like A Lion, has been creating waves since its release. The song’s greatest endorsement thus far is being used as the soundtrack for a documentary feature film of the same name about seven-time ESPN X-Games gold medallist, Tanner Hall.
The rocksteady rise of Rastaman vibrations It is a genre that has inspired decades of music, and yet British reggae is too often overlooked. A new documentary from BBC4, Reggae Britannia, seeks to put that right, as it takes us through the influence of Jamaican music on British culture from the early 1960s to the [...]
No one watching Sasha on stage with Turbulance performing Natty Pon The Frontline would guess that inside she was deeply dissatisfied with the direction her life was going. The girl who grew up in a Christian home, mastered the art of hiding her true feelings, put her reservations aside and went to make one hit [...]
Younger Marley wails for dad Bob IT WAS a redemption song in more ways than one. While hip-hop superstar Mary J. Blige was Raggamuffin’s headline act, it was Ky-Mani Marley’s reunion with his dad’s band The Wailers that stole the show. In front of more than 7000 fans at Parramatta Park, the second-youngest of Bob [...]
Downloading music illegally – A Jamaican pirate speaks <img src=”http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/assets/5805946/cds_w370.jpg” width=”150″ hspace=”8″ align=”left”> INTERNET pirates including those in Jamaica couldn’t stop the six per cent rise in global digital music sales to US$4.6 billion ($395 billion) in 2010. Vernon, a Jamaican musician and computer scientist, has over 10,000 illegal songs enough to continuously play for [...]