Decline and fall of Gaza Empire

Daniel Thwaites

Last week, I touched on the dark pleasure of seeing an exalted one fall, specifically Bruce Golding after the Tivoli debacle. This week, it is the Gaza Boss crumbling, and there is no pleasure in seeing a talented charismatic man, however tattooed and bleached, go down.

Jamaican prison is no lark, as anyone who has looked inside one will know. Kartel has sung about it: "Listen, yuh cyaan get [sex] a prison!" That's serious deprivation. Still, everyone has noticed he's gaining weight in custody, so if Government's food is agreeing with him, and if he continues to balloon and bleach, he could emerge looking like Heavy D, and sounding like Dutty Berry. I hope not.

Listening to some of the commentary, it's clear that the verdict is causing a fair deal of moral disorientation and confusion. So let's acknowledge that there is a constituency for whom, if you clothe any nonsense or evil in the rhetoric and raiment of 'ghetto' or 'sufferer', anything is excusable. Never mind if the one-time sufferer currently cruises around in Range Rovers, manages a harem of hundreds, owns great tracts of property, and flies out regularly to chill in expensive hotels in exotic destinations.

Let's take a step back. Whenever some talking head, inevitably from the university, appears on television to tell me what is and what is not 'Jamaican culture', I test it against my granny. After being orphaned, she grew up in the most straightened circumstances in Kingston's inner city, and nobody in the history of Jamaica has more right to call themself Jamaican more than she. Yet, she would have stared coldly at some of what is peddled as 'our culture', recognised it immediately as crap, and rejected it out of hand as dutty slackness.

Her moral universe wasn't particularly rigid in most parts, but Yahweh and His Bible sat atop, and there was nothing lower than cat and dog droppings. Naturally, therefore, it concerns me that I've enjoyed Vybz Kartel's musical droppings for so many years, meaning that I've been bouncing to the lyrics of a man often singing about murder, who, it turns out, wasn't joking or being metaphorical.

jamming to murder music

I'm not sure where that leaves me morally, or any of the rest of us for that matter, but more worryingly, I think we're losing the ability to ask ourselves whether it's OK to jam to murder music. I don't plan to stop either, because Kartel music too sweet!

Perhaps, like many of my contemporaries, I've been thoroughly corrupted. How much of this burden I can share with the wider society, and how much I must shoulder individually, is an interesting speculation. One thing for certain is that I won't find any guidance from the intellectual wing of the Gaza Empire about any of it. The academic Teacha's pets are more likely mesmerised by the rent-a-crowd that gathered to chant "Free Werl Bawse!" since craving popularity has long replaced the more difficult quest for sound judgement.

Back to the trial: I'm not minded to discount Pastor Bunting's prayers, but more immediately, there was an 11-citizen jury, 10 of whom have settled the biggest entertainer case since Don Drummond killed Marguerita. Vybz is - well, was - the Teacha, Werl Bawse, ringleader, and the undisputed leader musically, organisationally, and ultimately in the design to recover his 'shoes'.

I attribute the swift deliberation to Kartel being unable to shake the impression that unlike other deejays who may end up in court because they happen to have done a crime, he was a criminal who happens to also deejay. But, boy, can he write lyrics and deejay!

Underlying all of this is that Kartel is uncommonly charismatic and intelligent, and perhaps even something of a genius. He dominated the charts for years, but more than that, he seemed to set his own terms of engagement, and led what was virtually a movement that had no clear objective except his own exaltation and adulation. One of his skills was in controlling the public narrative about him, and staying in the news.

I think it would have been a tremendous body blow to the already rickety criminal justice system if the prosecution's case had collapsed. The opposite is also true: The guilty verdict has been a blow for law and order, and a reminder that, if only occasionally, the system can bring a hard case to conclusion.

If the justice system was on trial, it seems to have passed, but only barely and partially. The prosecution did a great job with what it had. The judge did a good job with talented and pushy attorneys. And the jury, apparently resisting bribery and intimidation, ultimately delivered.

With all of that, the fact that the police tampered with the phones after they were seized as evidence is an instance of such ridiculous bungling that it defies description. My barber, the epitome of the reasonable man, and on whose common sense I would happily rest my fate, was convinced that the "chop him up fine-fine" text was fabricated. Having followed the matter closely, he believed the overall verdict correct, even though appalled at police incompetence.

Well, if the justice system was on trial, I felt that part of our intellectual establishment (using the word "intellectual" liberally, of course), was also on trial, and it has failed. Our failure of nerve to preserve the better parts of our culture and the better part of ourselves is the real shocking vibes.

We are told that Mr Adidja Palmer would not permit his children to listen to the music of Vybz Kartel. What are we to make of that? When Madonna said that she disallowed her children from listening to her music, what was the proper reaction? Contempt. If, as we are told, the art we consume has nothing to do with our behaviour, I wonder why the producers of some of it are so careful to guard their children from their own puss droppings?

Here's the real deal: Some heavy money dropped downtown for that rent-a-crowd, and the trail behind the money to the bribed juror could lead into interesting places. There are serious rumours of witnesses suppressed, others killed. Still, it feels like the right side has won, so Busta Rhymes can busta move back to wherever, and we can begin to clean up the mess.

Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.