US visas still required

... but Beenie Man, Mavado, Bounty Killer, Aidonia, Ricky Trooper doing OK

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

With the United States (US) being the major live performance destination for deejays, in a scenario where not only are music sales down worldwide but dancehall seems to have been hit particularly hard, the loss of a US visa can be a deejay's death knell.

That bell tolled for four standout Jamaican deejays - Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Mavado, and Aidonia - in the first third of 2010, in addition to popular selector Ricky Trooper. Still, coming up to the end of the year, the afflicted quintet does not seem to have suffered greatly from being barred from entering the US.

The news came on Wednesday, March 31, that the entertainers' US visas had been revoked, the American Embassy offering no explanation. In one case, though, there seemed to have been a strong possible cause for the effect - in a March 21 post on OvaDiWallEnt's YouTube channel under the title 'Ricky Trooper Tells All', the selector spoke extremely frankly, brandished what seemed to be a real handgun but he later said was a lighter and demanded, "put dis pon YouTube!"

The video was duly posted.

Terrible blow

The cancellations came when a number of concerts they were slated for in the US had already been heavily promoted. All four deejays had been scheduled for the Best of the Best concert at Bicentennial Park, Miami, on May 30, with Beenie Man also slated for the April 3 Firestone Live in Orlando, Florida. Mavado was to perform on April 23 at Sneaky Petes in New York, and on May 8 at Club Nokia in Los Angeles.

Even in the best of dancehall times it would have been a terrible blow. However, in a recession where a number of popular stage shows simply folded, it seemed to be a death strike - but it wasn't.

By August, Beenie Man and Bounty Killer had finally buried the musical hatchet they had tried to bury in each other for 17 years, performing together on a Red Stripe concert in Negril, and Fully Loaded in Port Royal, then the Arthur Guinness Celebration at the National Stadium in October. They are slated to do the tag team again tonight at Sting, Jam World, Portmore, where they had their first encounter in 1993, the combination having proven to be extremely successful.

The two, along with Mavado, are also part of the LIME slate of artistes, announced in mid-October, which has seen them performing at a number of the telecommunications company's concerts islandwide. Aidonia performed at some stops on LIME Campus Crew tour across Portmore in October and November.

Ricky Trooper made it clear that the US is not the world, using the same outlet (and swagger) in a later Internet posting as he toured Austria and Germany. For Austria he said: "Some a talk 'bout yo dem tek weh yuh visa and yuh cyaan move, yo mi deh a Austria. Look behind me a di Alps dat, unnu see di Alps - Unnu cyaan stop mi from travel." And in Germany, Trooper declared: "one door close man still a fly all ova di wurl".

In a summer release, I'm OK, Beenie Man says, "them cancel me visa but everything nice". And despite the lack of local stage shows and not having a US visa, Mavado can do without Sting, which he was passed up on this year.