On “Whine Pon the Edge”-a fast tune that held at number one on a preponderance of dancehall charts throughout the spring, fitting somewhere between “Dutty Wine” and “Hot Fuk” in the sex-with-your-clothes on set-Busy’s raspy flow sounds ominous even while the frantic Pon the edge, pon the edge, pon the edge mantra conjures treacherous ledges to be avoided as much as clitori to be rubbed. “Unknown Number,” with it’s “gangsta nah answer fi no private call” catchphrases ( You number block, no badda caaall mi/ Cause mi nah go answer even if a mi mommy) is the ubiquitous ringtone, perfectly capturing the paranoia beneath the relative quiet. Born Reanno Gordon, Busy was the first young gunner to put a face and a sound to the name Alliance, and in the last year or so, his grimy and lyrical tunes like “Curphew” and “These Are the Fucking Days” have played like the soundtrack to the heavy manners of ’08. But if you had to assign that spirit a single name, it would be Busy Signal. If there’s a movement in reggae that embodies the somber spirit of the time, it is undoubtedly the crew of Bounty Killer protégés called the Alliance: badmen, masters of gun talk, spokesmen for the garrison.
In the past year Virgin records dropped Beenie Man, MTV cut loose its Caribbean channel Tempo and other media outlets began looking elsewhere, leaving dancehall all dressed up and nowhere to bust. There’s a sense that just when dancehall finally smashed through the platinum ceiling of mainstream consciousness, the major labels flopped, abandoning Jamaica to fend for itself. Although this is still Jamaica, where music saturates everything like fluoride in tap water, the water these days has a new bitterness to it. As above, so below: in the dancehall, fast riddims have given way to downtempo JA rap, the fashion is more muted, the dances less expressive. With no results to show for their traffic stops and ever-tighter curphews, the police have begun poking their M16s into previously sacred corners of public life, shutting down the street dances.
Oil prices and food shortages send the cost of living up even as the guns scare away investment and jobs. Despite draconian police presence and predictions for the last several years that the level of gun crime couldn’t possibly get any worse, by mid-year Jamaica had been repeatedly called out in the international press with new statistics fingering it as one of the most violent places in the world. Ask anybody in Kingston what they’re getting into these days and the answer you get will most likely be some phrase or another indicating that 2008 is a time to lay low, if not physically get flat.