Billboard a moving target

It was once said that local songs were unable to achieve much crossover success because international audiences found it hard to understand Jamaican dialect. Still, artistes such as Shaggy, JC Lodge, Sean Paul, Shabba Ranks and Super Cat have all had hits on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts, the main indicator of mainstream success. It is easy to recall Shaggy’s Boombastic, JC Lodge’s Telephone Love, Maxi Priest’s Close To You and more recently, Sean Paul’s Temperature, which have all been Billboard hits. This speaks to the growth of reggae/dancehall music and persons within the local industry have attributed this success to image and proper marketing.

Reggae icon, Joseph Hill, dies

Joseph Hill, lead vocalist of reggae group Culture, collapsed after doing a show in Germany yesterday morning. He was 57.
His daughter, Andrea Hill, said he died from a liver failure. She described him as a “well rounded, well known and well loved” individual. Mr. Hill’s last performance in Jamaica was at the Reggae Sunsplash show, held in St. Ann earlier this month.

Hidden treasure Jennifer Barrett serves warning

One of the paradoxes of Jamaican music at this time, in that while she is steadily creating a name for herself on the European circuit, on the home front, very little is known of her. Having honed her vocal ability while touring with the internationally famous Wailers Band, Jennifer Barrett came out with Warning, her latest solo effort since she parted company with that outfit. “I used to tour with the Wailers Band, and the experience was a rewarding one,”she admits unreservedly.

Busy Signal Steps Out in a big way

Nearly two years after his explosive single Step Out was released, dancehall toaster Busy Signal emerges with a focused album, also titled Step Out. The album doesn’t sacrifice Busy’s intensity as a deejay. It, however, sharpens his street credibility as a ‘voice’ for the ghetto youths.

Splicing Wars – Selectors cut and paste, artistes fume

Local sounds are faking artistes’ voices and selling the dubs for their own benefit. The practise of cutting and dubbing another person’s voice over a recording done by an artiste is called splicing and according to some artistes, this is a big problem often worthy of bigger fights.

Turbulence’s Silly Girl creating waves

Silly Girl, the first single off Turbulence’s new album Ex-Girlfriend (Tads Records), has been creating quite a buzz. According to Turbulence, the song, which is currently making strides on the charts, wasn’t directed towards his former lover, singer Sasha.

“Silly Girl is my favourite song on the album. People say is Sasha I am singing about, but that’s far from the truth,” Turbulence explained while on the set of the video shoot for Silly Girl in Beverly Hills on Wednesday night.

Reggae rebelution: For Jamaican singer-songwriter Tanya Stephens, politics is only half the battle

Tanya Stephens has already been a dancehall diva and a Swedish rock star. So on her extraordinary sixth album, the Jamaican singer-songwriter went for broke. Wearing a red beret and combat fatigues and singing movingly with the kind of sweeping vision that made Bob Marley a world figure, Stephens presents herself as a revolutionary — or more precisely, a rebelutionary.

”Change must come,” Stephens sings not stridently but soulfully, in the plaintive nasal voice that has made her reggae’s strongest artist. She repeats the lyric, for good measure, on Welcome to the Rebelution, the call-to-arms opening track of Rebelution.

DVD Review: Classic Albums – Bob Marley And The Wailers, Catch A Fire

Early on in their relationship, someone asked Bob Marley if Island Records owner Chris Blackwell was his producer. Bob said “No Mon, he’s my translator”. While that was a good joke, because of Bob’s heavy accent, Bob might have been more accurate is saying that Chris was his interpreter for the work he did on the early Wailers albums.

Singer, minister, now Dr Carlene Davis

Carlene Davis has been dialling in quite a few numbers in recent years. Apart from the 15 secular albums she produced between 1980 and 1994, she has been racking, up a few gospel albums, to date, six and counting. The figures do not stop there, as Davis recently completed her doctorate in pastoral counselling from the Trinity Theological Seminary in South Florida.

Watch what you say!

Artistes and members of their entourage have defied the laws of the English language and have rebuilt their own words and interpretations of their meanings. Call it what you may, whether a new fad, way of thinking or another state of mind, the trend has been spreading like an epidemic.