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From the column below: Late one night in the late 1990s, a Christmas dance was being held by a community on Spanish Town Road. During the merriment a man was lawfully driving past while fire clappers were being exploded. Believing that they were gunshots, he sped up and in the process hit down a pedestrian. The foolish man stopped.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
Misguided youth in a terminally ill society
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, November 01, 2009
One week ago, the Sunday Observer's front-page story titled "Bus Porn", which reported on a two-week investigation of the open, adult-encouraged sexual behaviour of schoolchildren on public transportation, gave us more than a hint of what we should expect from a sizeable chunk of the next generation.
The story may not have been original, but due to the fact that the reporter stuck to the task for two weeks, travelled on buses and taxis on various routes and skilfully blended into the menagerie of misguided youngsters and sick and twisted adult drivers and conductors, gleefully egging them on, it brought into focus for us adults not just the rawness of it all, but the reality that we are creating another generation even worse than the one which created them.
The idea that sex between a man and a woman is sacrosanct probably died with the last generation. In our society it has become the norm in inner-city communities where a culture of 70 per cent to 80 per cent unemployment among the youth has made it the most easily sold or bartered commodity among undereducated young women. Many of the takers are 'respectable' married men from upper-class communities.
Some time during the late 1990s in the Grants Pen community, an eight-year-old child 'agreed' to have sex with a 36-year-old man in exchange for patties and a drink. On the way, the man picked up a male friend and later, after both had badly damaged her, the child ended up in the hospital. When an older woman told me about it with tears in her eyes, an acquaintance of mine who was in his 40s said, "Den a weh she did expect? She too beggy-beggy." When I began to chide him, he simply said, "Mark, yuh nuh understand how tings run yah so."
We have for too long flirted with so-called intellectuals giving 'cultural' embellishment to the worst of the worst in dancehall music and the actual dances. These unintelligent academicians have narrowed down the criticism of the genre to a 'middle-class versus poor people' thing.
If they are to be believed, the sex, the violence and the sexual violence in much of dancehall music is a reflection of a people expressing their love for what happens naturally, sex. I will give them that and admit that they are correct. But the cloistered academicians, with a need to falsify the closeness of the social distance between themselves and the 'wretched of the earth', tend to find beauty and romance in every dung pile and lyrical filth they come upon in the ghetto.
The front cover of last week's Sunday Observer.
What they have stopped short of doing is telling us that not only do the DJs and music producers push these songs, but in doing so, too many of the songs openly encourage the very negative acts in the message.
Proper parenting in the ghetto is scarce, but there is nothing absolute about this because I have seen quiet wonders taking place in communities such as Trench Town with older women holding homework sessions with children on their verandahs. On Matthews Lane in downtown Kingston and Glendevon in Montego Bay I have met mothers who are just as concerned about their daughters' welfare as any parent from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens would be. The fathers, however, seem to operate below the radar.
But at dances in inner-city communities where the foul-mouthed DJs encourage the eager patrons to indulge themselves sexually - even in a few instances moving a bed to centre stage - sexual intercourse as coarse as one can get is cheered on with dozens of young children present. I am not saying that DJ music and dancehall is the genesis of the terrible breakdown in the society, but if the genre is discouraging children's exposure to adults' need for sexual exhibitionism then I am unaware of this effort.
This society was sick before dancehall music, but at some stage the music genre saw that the sickness was saleable and, powerful as it has been in its ability to carry a message (just ask the politicians), it has taken the message from behind the school gate and into the lives of our children.
But if the system is broken, as it is, and parents are too busy dolling up for dances, what do we do with misguided children whose parents neither have cars nor the time to ferry them to and from school?
Transit officers from a special police squad will have to marshal the children lap-dancing and having sex on buses. Laws must be instituted to haul the parents before the courts and subject them to hefty fines or community work. But as colleague columnist Betty Ann Blaine wrote recently, the focus cannot be just on the only parent present in the setting, the mother. In this respect, tough laws must be instituted to go after dead-beat dads who have been having a free ride for too long.
The same should go for middle-class parents who allow their underaged children to attend uptown nightclubs in this everything-is-everything Jamaica. In addition, the club should have its licence revoked.
Late one night in the late 1990s, a Christmas dance was being held by a community on Spanish Town Road. During the merriment a man was lawfully driving past while fire clappers were being exploded. Believing that they were gunshots, he sped up and in the process hit down a pedestrian. The foolish man stopped.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
Misguided youth in a terminally ill society
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, November 01, 2009
One week ago, the Sunday Observer's front-page story titled "Bus Porn", which reported on a two-week investigation of the open, adult-encouraged sexual behaviour of schoolchildren on public transportation, gave us more than a hint of what we should expect from a sizeable chunk of the next generation.
The story may not have been original, but due to the fact that the reporter stuck to the task for two weeks, travelled on buses and taxis on various routes and skilfully blended into the menagerie of misguided youngsters and sick and twisted adult drivers and conductors, gleefully egging them on, it brought into focus for us adults not just the rawness of it all, but the reality that we are creating another generation even worse than the one which created them.
The idea that sex between a man and a woman is sacrosanct probably died with the last generation. In our society it has become the norm in inner-city communities where a culture of 70 per cent to 80 per cent unemployment among the youth has made it the most easily sold or bartered commodity among undereducated young women. Many of the takers are 'respectable' married men from upper-class communities.
Some time during the late 1990s in the Grants Pen community, an eight-year-old child 'agreed' to have sex with a 36-year-old man in exchange for patties and a drink. On the way, the man picked up a male friend and later, after both had badly damaged her, the child ended up in the hospital. When an older woman told me about it with tears in her eyes, an acquaintance of mine who was in his 40s said, "Den a weh she did expect? She too beggy-beggy." When I began to chide him, he simply said, "Mark, yuh nuh understand how tings run yah so."
We have for too long flirted with so-called intellectuals giving 'cultural' embellishment to the worst of the worst in dancehall music and the actual dances. These unintelligent academicians have narrowed down the criticism of the genre to a 'middle-class versus poor people' thing.
If they are to be believed, the sex, the violence and the sexual violence in much of dancehall music is a reflection of a people expressing their love for what happens naturally, sex. I will give them that and admit that they are correct. But the cloistered academicians, with a need to falsify the closeness of the social distance between themselves and the 'wretched of the earth', tend to find beauty and romance in every dung pile and lyrical filth they come upon in the ghetto.
The front cover of last week's Sunday Observer.
What they have stopped short of doing is telling us that not only do the DJs and music producers push these songs, but in doing so, too many of the songs openly encourage the very negative acts in the message.
Proper parenting in the ghetto is scarce, but there is nothing absolute about this because I have seen quiet wonders taking place in communities such as Trench Town with older women holding homework sessions with children on their verandahs. On Matthews Lane in downtown Kingston and Glendevon in Montego Bay I have met mothers who are just as concerned about their daughters' welfare as any parent from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens would be. The fathers, however, seem to operate below the radar.
But at dances in inner-city communities where the foul-mouthed DJs encourage the eager patrons to indulge themselves sexually - even in a few instances moving a bed to centre stage - sexual intercourse as coarse as one can get is cheered on with dozens of young children present. I am not saying that DJ music and dancehall is the genesis of the terrible breakdown in the society, but if the genre is discouraging children's exposure to adults' need for sexual exhibitionism then I am unaware of this effort.
This society was sick before dancehall music, but at some stage the music genre saw that the sickness was saleable and, powerful as it has been in its ability to carry a message (just ask the politicians), it has taken the message from behind the school gate and into the lives of our children.
But if the system is broken, as it is, and parents are too busy dolling up for dances, what do we do with misguided children whose parents neither have cars nor the time to ferry them to and from school?
Transit officers from a special police squad will have to marshal the children lap-dancing and having sex on buses. Laws must be instituted to haul the parents before the courts and subject them to hefty fines or community work. But as colleague columnist Betty Ann Blaine wrote recently, the focus cannot be just on the only parent present in the setting, the mother. In this respect, tough laws must be instituted to go after dead-beat dads who have been having a free ride for too long.
The same should go for middle-class parents who allow their underaged children to attend uptown nightclubs in this everything-is-everything Jamaica. In addition, the club should have its licence revoked.
Late one night in the late 1990s, a Christmas dance was being held by a community on Spanish Town Road. During the merriment a man was lawfully driving past while fire clappers were being exploded. Believing that they were gunshots, he sped up and in the process hit down a pedestrian. The foolish man stopped.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
and 
T&T, Guyana, Barbados and other countries for refusing entry of some of these local DJ's.
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