ABOUT: “E- PICK ”
“E- PICK ” is a weekly Saturday post on www.mckoysnews.com, where Amber Crowl (Radio Personality, Host, Writer and Activist) discusses happenings in Jamaican Music, Entertainment Topics and Cultural Ideas. Amber welcomes your questions and comments on Mckoy’s News. and you can send e-mails to irieamber@gmail.com.
In this week’s E-Pick it’s all about comments made by controversial Deejay Popcaan. These comments were expressed on BBC 1 Xtra channel in the U.K. while the artiste was being interviewed.
The video is online so feel free to check it out if you are interested do so, but basically I want to focus on the part where Deejay Popcaan says “99% of Dancehall artiste dem hate popcorn, because a mi talent weh di almighty gimmie”
Now, this is a strong statement which makes me wonder, could he be right? Well, the Deejay says that he is referring to artistes who play major roles in dancehall, but stopped short of calling names. He also said that these artistes don’t like it when the younger ones rise an that he learned from Vybz Kartel that the more you rise the more people will hate you. So, I am sure he ruffled more than a few feathers with this kind of talk during an interview and I personally believe that the percentage is a bit exaggerated, but Popcaan does have a point…
Any dancehall fan must know by now of the in-fighting which takes place among artistes. Actually, artistes have developed quite a negative picture of how artistes act and behave, not only with fighting amongst themselves but also in the way they choose to live with people after the “big lights” begin to hit or after them “buss’. Word on the street is, too many artistes are living bad among themselves, with their friends and family members. When it comes to in-fighting, it is obvious to me that EGO is a big part of the fight. I think that some artistes do fall into the “ego trip” and some take years to come back out, while others just seem to get from bad to worst. The ego is what makes it hard for an artiste to be able to stand up to competition, especially from younger competitors. Of course character, maturity, social upbringing and other factors do come into play in this situation but ego is the main motivation here. Deejay Popcorn believes that he is a target for other artistes because of his talent, and that in itself is ego at play.
You see, talent is a funny thing. Just like they say “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, talent is relative and the owner of the talent will always see him or herself as good at what they do. Sometimes they even see themselves as being way more talented than they actually are, or than public opinion would have it. Seems to me that Deejay Popcaan is essentially saying that he is in the 1% of most talented artistes in Jamaica? I wonder who else makes up the 1%??? Hopefully like I said earlier, the percentage is exaggerated and that Popcaan can adjust the figure in the future. Because being hated by 99% of your colleagues or competitors sounds extremely dangerous and very uncomfortable to me.
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