Jamaican society can be divided along class, language and culture lines. It’s rich vs. poor, English vs. Patois and uptown vs. downtown.
Correspondent Lisa Biagiotti, producer Micah Fink and director of photography Gabrielle Weiss examine the public debate that erupted earlier this year when graphic Dancehall music lyrics and images were banned from Jamaica’s airwaves. The public responses reveal the legacy of two Jamaicas dating back to the country’s slave history.
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- Watch all the Worldfocus In the Shadows video signature series
- Listen to Worldfocus Radio on LGBT politics and gay asylum
- Read about the controversy over music and dance related to daggerin’ and the variety of Dancehall music here: No daggerin’ on Jamaican TV and on Worldfocus.
- Watch Jamaican Dancehall artist Spice talk and sing about her life story: Dancehall artist sings of poverty plaguing Jamaica’s ghettos.
- For more information on homophobia and HIV in Jamaica, visit The Glass Closet, a multimedia project produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
03/16/2010 :: 02:50:42 PM
SleepyX Says:
Everytime someone pulls this uptown vs. downtown argument I want to vomit. People seem to forget that there is the a silent majority of Jamaicans known as the MIDDLE CLASS.
The whole problem of people like Ragashanti is that they purposely ignore the huge middle class that has comprised Jamaica since we received Universal Adult Suffrage.
The main motivation of these ideologues is to force their own vain ideologies onto the majority of Jamaicans, funded by this same majority so that they may live rich, but now with less responsibility (upper-class) or rich, and with no responsibility (lower-class).
Nothing they have to say applies to the normal Jamaican. Some of the highest electricity rates in the world, a devaluing dollar, mass unemployment, userous student loans, one of the highest homicide rates of the world, the marginalization of the Jamaican male, ridiculous taxes on imported computer parts, a drought and deforestation in the land of wood and water (some people have to be showering at other peoples houses now), police brutality and corruption (those girls that died at Armadale, six dead teenage girls, burnt to death), lack of overseas investment due to upper class corruption and lower class crime etc.
Dancehall music is just a red herring pulled out of the buttocks of Ivory Tower and lower class twits. Most Jamaicans fluidly transition between English and patois, another strawman shot down. And those massive mansions and shantytowns do not represent the majority of Jamaican living conditions (housing schemes, developments. ’60s era two, three bedroom bungalows) AT ALL.
Things are the things that affect me and a million other Jamaicans.