KEEP IT CLEAN
Jack Scorpio says sound clashes don’t have to be nasty
Veteran sound system selector Maurice Johnson, better known as Jack Scorpio, is insisting that musical battles between artistes or disc jockeys do not have to be violent or nasty.
“Sound clashes can definitely be clean with the focus on the rhythm of the music played and less focus on the negative,” the popular 1980s sound system head told THE STAR.
“I always say the lyrics are what you say from your mouth, and in my days of clashing, we did not use songs with badword or even make songs that tell songs about people parents,” he continued.
Jack Scorpio was an MC for Clean Clash, which was executed as part of the Jamaica Music Conference (JMC) series of events last Saturday. The event was held at House of Dancehall on Cargill Avenue under the theme Hit Me with Music. It featured King Addies Music, which is based in New York, Revolution Sound from Washington, DC, and local sound system, St Mary’s own Nexxt Level.
CORDIAL CLASH
The participants were to perform in a cordial clash to demonstrate to the audience that disc jockeys have the ability to challenge each other without the use of explicit language, disrespectful name-calling and without sullying their colleagues’ reputations. Nexxt Level was declared the winner. “Clean Clash has the potential to attract wider attention. I think the next staging will be bigger. It is a nice stepping stone to the conference’s goal to restore sound system entertainment — once it promote better,” Jack Scorpio said.
The veteran selector said that some of the nowadays selectors have should be blamed for the state of the music.
“Dem tek over the business, the selectors require artistes fi curse and say the worst things when recording a dubplate. Sometime they encourage the explicit language and get too raw,” Jack Scorpio said. He also said that the improvement of Jamaica’s entertainment industry heavily depends on the relationship between production and promotion of the artistes’ lyrical content.
“There is a reason to be proud of young artiste like Protoje, Chronixx, Romaine Virgo, Christopher Martin and Nesbeth, who try stay on the positive end and believe the music can reach international level without cursing.”