Here comes trouble
David Katz
An extract from Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae
When the noughties faced the 2010s, Jamaican popular music was set for another unexpected regeneration. As dancehall continued its jagged evolution, like-minded artists emerged from a disparate progressive underground to shift Jamaican popular music’s predominant focus in content and form, stimulating a level of overseas interest not seen since roots reggae’s late-1970s heyday. The movement that would come to be dubbed the reggae revival tastefully referenced the work of Junjo Lawes, Sly and Robbie, and Channel One while launching headlong into the future, and it was concerned with much more than music, encompassing the visual arts, literature, dance, martial arts, yoga, the culinary arts, and Rastafari spirituality, fostering a collective vision whose leading lights worked together for the betterment of all – rare sentiment in the cutthroat realm of the Jamaican music industry.
Among the most prominent were the songstress and yoga teacher Jah9, who channelled the spirit of Billie Holiday for a new form she called jazz on dub; the astute sing-jay Protoje, who tackled songs of social protest and love ballads in equal measure; Kabaka Pyramid, whose style was an unprecedented melding of roots reggae and rap; and Chronixx, the outstanding singer-songwriter whose thoughtful lyrics and unusual phrasing had a way of getting under the skin, an ease with moving between different genres helping him to achieve the greatest permeance internationally.
The reggae revival emerged as the island faced a transitionary phase of instability, culminating in the Tivoli Incursion in 2010, which lasted several days, resulting in hundreds of detentions and at least seventy deaths. In the precarious aftermath, Manifesto Jamaica (a non-profit organization formed in 2010 to empower Jamaica’s disenfranchised youth) began staging ART’ical Exposure events with rising talent on Friday nights at the arts café and bookstore Bookophilia, located near the Bob Marley Museum on Hope Road. In addition to live sets by Jah9, Protoje and Kabaka Pyramid, there were poets performing alongside music acts, and workshops held on various arts-related topics, paving the way for similar festivals in 2011 and 2012. Saturday night live sessions held at Jamnesia, a surf camp and arts space in Bull Bay, established by Billy Mystic of the Mystic Revealers band, were equally important in fostering the reggae revival’s rise.
The Kingston Dub Club was another important space that helped the reggae revival to gain acceptance. ‘The Kingston Dub Club had very little success at first,’ said founder Gabre Selassie. ‘It was inspired by the original Dub Club in London and my intention first and foremost was to provide a different option where music was concerned. It was for the people to get a fair chance to enjoy them own heritage and culture, and to receive the blessing of reggae music that makes one know themselves and know history, look into themselves, and know Jah. We had it going in various venues but because it was new and ground-breaking, a lot of the club owners weren’t with that kind of vision so I knew that it just needed somewhere to be undisturbed and grow.’ Hence the move to Selassie’s home on Skyline Drive in Jack’s Hill, one of uptown Kingston’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.
And from its early days at Skyline Drive to the present, Chronixx has been a frequent guest performer, the guiding light of Rastafari a perpetually important feature of his work. ‘My thing was always spiritual, more in the realm of where ideas and thoughts live,’ Chronixx explained. ‘All my songs are essentially about love, so compassion and love are like the bass notes.’
Born Jamar McNaughton in Spanish Town in 1992, his mother a dressmaker and shopkeeper and his father the dancehall performer known as Chronicle, Chronixx was raised between two of the city’s underprivileged communities. ‘I made my first song when I was five and it was about life in the ghetto, about curfew and police and military presence in the community, and people who don’t have much to eat. The song say, “A soldier want come bust through we gate, but nobody no want fi pick up the rice grains.” So, these were the words in my meditation as a little youth.’
He made his recording debut as a pre-teen in the family gospel group, Hearts of Worship, though the songs remain unreleased. Subsequently, Chronixx began concentrating on music production, since the kind of music he wanted to make was out of favour. ‘Me’s a more Afrocentric kind of vibes – that’s how it resonates in me as a youth who is born in Jamaica as an African – so I wanted to do music that could facilitate my spirituality and introduce more people to what spirituality is. But people wasn’t really interested in that kind of thing, so I had to learn how to produce and record myself.’
In the late noughties, Chronixx was making beats for some of hardcore dancehall’s prime movers and writing songs for conscious dancehall artists. The closing of the studio in De La Vega City and the death of a brother in 2009 were temporary setbacks that only increased his determination to succeed, the way forward coming through a connection with Teflon of Zincfence Records. ‘Our main thing was to work with other artists, so I would write the songs and we would try to get other artists to record the songs […] but it didn’t work out very well, because a lot of these artists was very unreachable for us, or unaffordable. So, I started singing the songs myself.’
The resultant work was released digitally as the Hooked On Chronixx EP and several of its songs received heavy airplay in Jamaica throughout 2012. Chronixx, Teflon, and the Nunes twins of Jah Ova Evil Records mixed roots reggae and dancehall in unprecedented ways, yielding a captivating blend of styles seemingly opposed to each other. There was the aspirational ‘Wall Street’, the forceful ‘Warrior’ and the heartfelt ‘African Heritage’, which spoke from a Rastafari perspective, as well as ‘Behind Curtain’, which warned of duplicitous friends, and the allegorical ‘Start A Fyah’, which explored the legacies of slavery and related historical injustices.
As Chronixx’s music gained greater airplay, Chris Blackwell signed him to a publishing deal, apparently because his phrasing and clear enunciation recalled Frank Sinatra’s, the link introducing his work to a whole new audience. 2013 was a breakout year, with outstanding hits including the spirited ‘Ain’t No Giving In’ and ‘Mi Alright’; ‘Odd Ras’, which proclaimed his individuality and refusal to get caught up in nonsensical trends; the devotional ‘Alpha & Omega’, produced by King Jammy’s son, John John, riding a reconfigured Scientist dub of Freddy McGregor’s ‘Leave Yah’; ‘Smile Jamaica’, a musical love song to the island released by Hamburg’s Silly Walks; and the defiant ‘Here Comes Trouble’, a massive international hit, which sampled Ini Kamoze’s ‘Wings With Me’ (its compelling rhythm yielding another significant hit in Jesse Royal’s ‘Modern Day Judas’). The solidness of the Zinc Fence Redemption band helped Chronixx to impact on festival stages overseas, the lengthy, high-calibre and filler-free sets cementing his reputation as the frontrunner.
The Start A Fyah mixtape, produced by Major Lazer’s Walshy Fire, helped raise Chronixx’s profile internationally, and in 2014, the launch of the Chronixx Music label allowed him to take better control of his output. Debut EP Dread & Terrible went straight to the top of the Billboard reggae charts, helped by the outstanding hit ‘Capture Land’, expertly produced by Winta James, which reminded that Jamaica, the Caribbean, and much of the Americas was built by enslaved Africans on stolen land. 2016 saw the release of the mixtape Roots & Chalice, produced with New York’s Federation Sound and Chronixx’s first full-length album, the Grammy-nominated Chronology, finally surfaced in 2017, blending popular previously released singles with impressive new songs such as the emotive ‘Skanking Sweet’, which spoke of music as powerful solace, and the scathing ‘Likes’, a minimalist dancehall track that warned of the alluring falsehoods of social media.
In March 2020, Chronixx released ‘Dela Move’, touted as the first single from sophomore album Dela Splash, which at the time of writing has yet to surface, its delayed release due in part to the uncertainties brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, lockdown had its positive sides, according to Chronixx; free from the constraints of constant touring, he could concentrate on being a family man, and take stock of the need for self-sufficiency. ‘If going on a flight is so big of a part of your ecosystem and your economical world, then you have a very dumb world and a very brittle ecosystem; anything that turns the airplane off will affect your livelihood and your sustenance. It’s the same thing as importing food, and these things are the foundation of life. So, whatever you have to sacrifice, it’s definitely worth it. Like whatever we are doing, we are supposed to be able to sustain it from Jamaica alone, as artists, by any means. We are supposed to get our basic and most essential things from our community.’
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