Vybz Kartel Lashes Out Again, Says He Is Not Responsible For Crime In Jamaica
Vybz Kartel (Adidja Palmer) is once again lashing out at the implication that he is responsible for the youth of Jamaica gravitating towards crime. He’s long been blamed for glorifying a gangster’s lifestyle and the issue was once again raised recently by Jamaica’s Children’s Advocate Diahann Gordon Harrison.
In a post on Instagram a few days ago, Kartel said “…let me tell you somn, I’ve been in (location loading…) 9 years now and guess who takes care of my kids? Me (and their mothers), not child advocates, not entertainers… my kids are a handful so I can’t help you raise ‘waste man’ and ‘waste gyal’ pickney. That’s not my job.”
“It’s just a career for you people … write a few reports, do a few interviews, call out the hottest artiste at the time. In the ’90s it was Bounty and before it was Ninja and Shabba … artiste artiste, never the legacy of JLP and PNP Cold War Proxy Conflicts, that breed the subsequent gun culture … always the artiste … never the fault of known dons who recruit from among the most impressionable and vulnerable of us … never the don/politicians who openly run garrison communities … it’s always the artiste.”
Harrison spoke at the Caribbean Conference of Seventh-day Christians at the Knutsford Court Hotel on January 26 saying, “This is the person they saw as the be-all and end-all of what you need to strive to be like. If you stop and just dissect for a moment a cross section of the type of lyrics that are contained in Mr Palmer’s music, certainly as a parent, that’s not the kind of music my children would be exposed to – not if I have anything to do with it… . And so we have to ask ourselves the question, who are the role models that are setting the examples for our children?”
Kartel previously fired back the those comments on February 2nd, with a video clip on Instagram titled ‘Scapegoat Mentality’.
Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS), Faculty of Humanities & Education,Dr Donna Hope, also shares Diahann Gordon Harrison’s opinion on Kartel’s influence in the industry.
She said: “I did my own research around that discussion in 2009-2010 and Vybz Kartel at that time was the most favourite artiste among young people, both children who were in problems as well as children who were not. So he was the favourite artiste, full stop. Because we gave them a list of other people – role models, like teachers, pastors, parents … the different groupings who are a part of the socialization networks in the country. The question we really asked was ‘who would you go to if you had a problem with that …, or where would you look for information about that … because we wanted to see who people considered to be important in terms of getting information about things that were bothering them, problems, etc.”