Dear Editor,

It’s another Black History Month here in the fevered heart of Jamaica, where rhythm is a language, and in dancehall, its most visceral dialect, there exists a paradox as old as fire itself. Fire warms, fire illuminates, and fire devours. We sing of its glow but flinch from its burn.

Today, our dancehall artistes — those modern-day griots — ask us to believe they are both flame and not flame, depending on which way the political wind blows. They demand we accept their light while denying their heat.

When Grace Hamilton, cloaked in the moniker Spice, strides into schoolyards to court the young, she becomes suddenly ‘decent’, suddenly ‘influential’ — a mentor, a guide, a sculptor of minds. Yet when her lyrics drip with slackness, we are told art is mere reflection, not catalyst.

When LGBTQ+ alliances are forged (and funded), artistes insist their words hold power to shift culture and bend morality. But when those same words degrade, dehumanise, or incite, they retreat into the sanctuary of ‘performance’.

Which is it? When does the flame burn and when does it merely flicker? I guess when she is Grace she is gracious, bland not ‘Spicy’!

This schizophrenia of influence is not born in a vacuum. It is curated, commodified. Beenie Man is Moses Davis. Bounty Killer is Rodney Price. Vybz Kartel is Adidja Palmer. These are not split souls but human beings who toggle between persona and personhood, depending on who demands accountability. To claim that a stage name absolves one of consequence is to pretend a mask can stop a bullet. If I, Yannick Nesta Pessoa, were to don the alias Ras Murdah and unleash havoc, would you indict the character and spare the man? Or would you see the farce for what it is — a carnival trick to evade the mirror?

Let us speak plainly: Teachers are not lesser influencers because they lack a bassline or a viral hook; they are the steady hands tending the soil where these very artistes once took root. Why then do we indulge the fiction that a microphone grants more wisdom than a chalkboard? If artistes truly believed their own rhetoric — that they eclipse educators — why do so many rush to universities, hungry for degrees they once dismissed as trivial? Why did the elders of our music, those robbed blind in the ’80s, claw their way back through learning, if not to escape the trap of being called ‘dunce’ in a world that preys on the uneducated?

This is not a condemnation of dancehall — a genre that pulses with the resilience and rebellion of a people. It is a plea for integrity. To the architects of our culture: You cannot sell us the lie that your art is both firefly and not forest fire. If your words can uplift, they can also corrode. If your voice can heal, it can also harm. The same children you serenade in schoolyards are the ones who dissect your lyrics in dim-lit rooms, searching for meaning, for identity.

We must stop laundering responsibility through pseudonyms. A man cannot be Moses on Monday and Beenie on Tuesday, shedding sins like a snake sheds skin. Artistes, you are neither gods nor ghosts. You are flesh and bone, shaping the world with every verse. Own it.

In the end, the question is not whether artistes influence — they do, as all fire does — but how do they choose to wield that sacred, terrifying power. Let us stop pretending the stage absolves the soul. Let us demand a culture in which the artiste and the human are reconciled, and the mask does not erase the face but reveals it.

And if anyone is offended, then it’s Ras Murdah, not Yannick Pessoa who has done so.

Yannick Pessoa

yannickpessoa@yahoo.com