They just canceled a show here in Charleston, Sc because of these sodomites....this is fucked up....Colin stay away
Buju's 'batty bwoys' fight back
BY ERIC LYTTLE
Published: Thursday, October 1, 2009 12:47 PM EDT
Rick Cautela’s cell phone has been ringing non-stop for a week and his e-mail inbox has been flooded. The owner of the North Side live music club Alrosa Villa said it’s gotten so bad he had to buy a new phone.
“That was my family cell phone, the one my wife also uses,” he said. “I don’t know how they got the number, but someone posted it on the Internet.”
Cautela said he received about 300 calls and another 400 e-mails in about three days, “all of them negative, some of them threatening. I don’t know what to believe.”
What’s all the fuss about?
The calls started after Cautela agreed to pick up a concert by reggae artist Buju Banton. The show is scheduled to take place Friday at the Alrosa.
Banton, a four-time Grammy nominee, has emerged over the past decade or more as one of the world’s most popular reggae artists. He’s also become one of its most controversial, landing himself firmly in the crosshairs of the gay community for a song he wrote called “Boom Bye Bye.”
The song promotes the brutal murder of gays, and includes lyrics like, “If a man comes near me, then his skin must peel. His skin must peel. Burn him up bad like an old tyre wheel,”
It also talks of shooting “batty bwoy”—a Jamaican derogatory slang term for gay men—in the head with “Di Uzi.”
The song, however, is two decades old. Banton hasn’t performed it in years and has promised not to perform it again. And even if he wanted to perform it in Columbus, Cautela wouldn’t allow it. “I’ve already instructed my sound man to learn that song and pull the plug if he plays it,” Cautela said.
But Cautela isn’t apologizing for hosting the show, either. “I may lose some customers, but I think there are a lot of exaggerated stories out there and that some people are making this bigger than it is. I think they want to be proud they were able to stop shows.”
Just as this issue of The Other Paper was about to go on the presses Wednesday night, Alrosa Villa owner Rick Cautela called to say he was going to add a second Buju Banton show on Saturday.
“The promoter and Banton’s management had been asking me if I’d take it,” Cautela said. I thought about it long and hard Tuesday night and decided to do it, I’m apparently so mud with this already that I might as well.”
Cautela said the industry sites like Pollstar were showing the Banton date at Alrosa as Saturday, Oct. 3 anyway—which had originally been the date of the Banton show at the LC that was canceled.
“This way I can split the crowd up, and have 600 each night rather than trying to cram 900 in on one night. It actually makes for a safer show.”
“Boom Bye Bye” was written in 1988, when Banton was just 15 years old. According to a press release from his manager, Tracii McGregor, titled “The Voice of Jamaica Will Not Be Silenced,” the song was written in response to a widely publicized case in which a man had raped a boy in Jamaica.
So why has it taken so long for the gay community to mount its protests?
Actually, the protests are nothing new elsewhere—just here in Columbus.
The song created an international controversy among the gay community when it was re-released on a popular dancehall rhythm disc in 1992 and began getting commercial airplay in the U.S.
That controversy, however, waned as Banton released more music—none of which contained anti-gay sentiments—to a growing audience. He’s been nominated four times for the Grammy for best reggae albums for 1995’s ’Till Shiloh, 1997’s Inna Heights, 2004’s Friends for Life and 2006’s Too Bad.
But the backlash against Banton was reignited in 2004 when a London-based group called OutRage! began a European campaign against a number of reggae artists, including Banton, Beenie Man and Capleton, for performing what OutRage! called Murder Music. A number of shows were canceled then and Banton was removed from Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival lineup.
The year, the anti-Banton efforts in the United States seem to have reached new levels of organized fury. The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center initiated this year’s protest by launching a phone- and e-mail campaign against concert-promotion giants AEG Live, owners of the House of Blues chain, and Live Nation for scheduling Banton shows this year.
The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center had “raised a human cry,” as spokesman Thomas Soule put it, in 2006 when Banton performed at the Los Angeles House of Blues.
When the Southern California gay community noticed Banton was scheduled to play the House of Blues in L.A. again on his 2009 tour, in support of his new release, Rasta Got Soul, the group sprang into action. “AEG Live and Live Nation are headquartered here,” said Soule, “so it became a local issue for us. Our CEO sent letters to AEG and Live Nation. We got no response at all from AEG. They wouldn’t even take our calls. And Live Nation kind of said, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but not much else. So we issued a statement, and created a Facebook Event page, encouraging our supporters to call and write. Within 24 hours, both AEG and Live Nation canceled their shows with Banton.”
The two mega-companies didn’t just cancel their L.A. shows—they also canceled shows they had scheduled in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Las Vegas, Dallas and Houston.
It instantly became a national story, and the LGBT grassroots effort spread with the news. In Ohio, Xavier University student Cameron Tolle and Ohio State University student Dustin White picked up the mantle, organizing a Facebook Event page—“Keep Buju Banton out of Ohio!!!”—to protest a September Banton show at a club called Annie’s in Cincinnati. The effort worked, and Annie’s canceled the show.
They then turned their attention to PromoWest, which was promoting an Oct. 3 Banton show at the Lifestyles Community Pavilion. The local LGBT community applied similar pressure to PromoWest, and again, within hours, the Columbus show was canceled.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” Tolle said that week. “We didn’t want (Banton’s) hatred to have a platform anywhere in the state. This crosses the line of free speech and enters hatefulness. And a lot of the people who would be offended are core customers of PromoWest. It was a very empowering two days. It says a lot about how easily the LGBT community can mobilize.”
But the battle was not completely won. Soon after PromoWest canceled Banton, it was announced that the Alrosa Villa would pick up the Columbus show.
In the viewpoint of Banton’s camp, the LGBT community became an angry mob, and turned the reggae artist into a scapegoat for its platform. Tracii McGregor, Banton’s manager, said via e-mail, “Honestly, I can count on one finger the amount of times any gay rights group has reached out to us for clarity or finding a resolution in the last five years. And why should they when they get so much more mileage from harassing local promoters and venues and feeding their one-sided, sensational drivel about Buju to their community and the media?”
The only Banton song the LGBT community takes issue with is “Boom Bye Bye,” which McGregor says was never released on an official Banton album. It has, however, appeared on a handful of reggae compilation disks, and protesters take issue with the fact that he still profits from it. Indeed, it is the most downloaded of his songs on the Amazon.com website.
But McGregor said the singer makes no money from it. “Buju Banton wrote and recorded the song as an exclusive dubplate for a local Jamaican producer when he was only 15 years old,” McGregor wrote. “He does not own the master or control the rights to the song, and therefore, does not profit from it.”
Gay rights activists also point to a YouTube video of Banton allegedly performing it in 2006 in Miami as evidence that he still performs the song live.
But what about the YouTube video? McGregor offered an explanation: “To be clear, Buju Banton does NOT perform “Boom Bye Bye.” The song is not and has never been a part of his live set.”
McGregor counters, “The footage from the Miami in 2006 is not a performance of the song. Look and listen closely. Buju actually says, ‘If I say ‘Boom Bye Bye. . .’ with the intent of going into his own discussion of the controversy surrounding the song and, unfortunately for him, the crowd ran with it. That was the first time he took that approach, and of course, the part where he begins to contextualize is not shown. The ensuing performance, however, was actually of ‘Massa God World A Run,’ which non-fans often mistake for ‘Boom Bye Bye’ because both songs start out the same and utilize the same ‘riddim.’”
Since his 1995 release of the Grammy-nominated album ’Till Shiloh, Banton has adopted the Rastafarian religion and has consistently issued songs dubbed “conscious reggae,” with themes of peace, love and enlightenment.
In 1994 he joined with Jamaica AIDS Support to launch Operation Willy, a nonprofit charity to promote safe-sex education and raise funds for children who are HIV-positive or who have lost parents to the disease.
Yet, he’s never fully given the gay community what it thinks it deserves from the author of a song that promotes the brutal murder of homosexuals—an apology.
In fact, sometimes he’s sounded downright surly. A Billboard.com story from 2006 about Banton’s “renewed controversy” with gay rights groups quoted the singer: “Fuck them. I have never bashed any gays before, and if I bashed gays, I bashed them 16 years ago. There’s no tolerance from (the gay community). I’m not a gay-basher. I’m not a homophobe.”
“He went on record with a song,” said Thomas Soule of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. “He made a public statement—a statement of violence and murder against gays. If you go on record, it’s the record unless you say something to change it. You can’t just say, ‘That was year’s ago.’ We can’t just assume he’s different now unless he says so. And he’s never come out and said the song was a mistake, or that he now believes that killing gays is wrong. His reluctance to do that says as much as anything.”
The Alrosa’s Rick Cautela was with Carl Root, owner of Roots record store on North High Street and longtime local reggae promoter, when the call came that PromoWest had canceled the Banton show. “He looked at me and said, ‘You want it?’”
Banton played the Alrosa in 2006—one of six times he’s appeared in Columbus, all without protest or incident. “It was a great show for us,” Cautela said. “He did a fine, very spiritual show about his message. There was nothing about gays and no problems at all.”
The Alrosa has been putting on reggae shows for about seven years, most with Root as the promoter. “Carl has been good to me.”
In December 2004, “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, the former lead guitarist of Pantera was shot and killed, along with three others, on the Alrosa stage by a deranged gunman who himself was shot and killed by police. In the months that followed, many of the metal and rock bands the Alrosa typically booked stopped wanting to play the stage where Dimebag had been killed, Cautela said.
“It was a very difficult time for lots of reasons,” Cautela said. “After the shootings, Carl came to me and loaded me up with shows. He saved the Alrosa. I owe him. He had a lot of money staked on this show.”
About the protesters, Cautela said their concerns kept him sleepless at night—until the calls and e-mails started getting nastier. “I certainly don’t agree with the sentiment of that song. But that was years ago. He doesn’t play it now. Rappers say all kinds of things. There are guys with swastikas on stages all the time, and no one makes a big deal. Professional athletes kill dogs, beat women, murder, and they’re forgiven. Why can’t they forgive this guy who made a mistake when he was 15?”
Soule, of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, knows why. “There’s a difference between what Eminem says, or Axl Rose says. Being homophobic is different than calling for murder. People don’t have to like the LGBT community. We believe in freedom of speech. But there’s some speech that’s not covered by freedom of speech. It’s that brutality that separates Buju from the others. It’s violence against, not dislike of.”
“And if he’s singing about love and peace and light, it really shouldn’t be that hard to take the next step and say publicly that it’s not OK to commit violence against gays. His unwillingness to distance himself from this only reinforces the notion that he still believes it.”
“It takes courage to stand up against violence against gays when you’re from a Jamaican culture that is among the most homophobic in the world? Don’t tell us,” Soule said. “We know all about the courage it takes to stand up against culture and society.”
Buju's 'batty bwoys' fight back
BY ERIC LYTTLE
Published: Thursday, October 1, 2009 12:47 PM EDT
Rick Cautela’s cell phone has been ringing non-stop for a week and his e-mail inbox has been flooded. The owner of the North Side live music club Alrosa Villa said it’s gotten so bad he had to buy a new phone.
“That was my family cell phone, the one my wife also uses,” he said. “I don’t know how they got the number, but someone posted it on the Internet.”
Cautela said he received about 300 calls and another 400 e-mails in about three days, “all of them negative, some of them threatening. I don’t know what to believe.”
What’s all the fuss about?
The calls started after Cautela agreed to pick up a concert by reggae artist Buju Banton. The show is scheduled to take place Friday at the Alrosa.
Banton, a four-time Grammy nominee, has emerged over the past decade or more as one of the world’s most popular reggae artists. He’s also become one of its most controversial, landing himself firmly in the crosshairs of the gay community for a song he wrote called “Boom Bye Bye.”
The song promotes the brutal murder of gays, and includes lyrics like, “If a man comes near me, then his skin must peel. His skin must peel. Burn him up bad like an old tyre wheel,”
It also talks of shooting “batty bwoy”—a Jamaican derogatory slang term for gay men—in the head with “Di Uzi.”
The song, however, is two decades old. Banton hasn’t performed it in years and has promised not to perform it again. And even if he wanted to perform it in Columbus, Cautela wouldn’t allow it. “I’ve already instructed my sound man to learn that song and pull the plug if he plays it,” Cautela said.
But Cautela isn’t apologizing for hosting the show, either. “I may lose some customers, but I think there are a lot of exaggerated stories out there and that some people are making this bigger than it is. I think they want to be proud they were able to stop shows.”
Just as this issue of The Other Paper was about to go on the presses Wednesday night, Alrosa Villa owner Rick Cautela called to say he was going to add a second Buju Banton show on Saturday.
“The promoter and Banton’s management had been asking me if I’d take it,” Cautela said. I thought about it long and hard Tuesday night and decided to do it, I’m apparently so mud with this already that I might as well.”
Cautela said the industry sites like Pollstar were showing the Banton date at Alrosa as Saturday, Oct. 3 anyway—which had originally been the date of the Banton show at the LC that was canceled.
“This way I can split the crowd up, and have 600 each night rather than trying to cram 900 in on one night. It actually makes for a safer show.”
“Boom Bye Bye” was written in 1988, when Banton was just 15 years old. According to a press release from his manager, Tracii McGregor, titled “The Voice of Jamaica Will Not Be Silenced,” the song was written in response to a widely publicized case in which a man had raped a boy in Jamaica.
So why has it taken so long for the gay community to mount its protests?
Actually, the protests are nothing new elsewhere—just here in Columbus.
The song created an international controversy among the gay community when it was re-released on a popular dancehall rhythm disc in 1992 and began getting commercial airplay in the U.S.
That controversy, however, waned as Banton released more music—none of which contained anti-gay sentiments—to a growing audience. He’s been nominated four times for the Grammy for best reggae albums for 1995’s ’Till Shiloh, 1997’s Inna Heights, 2004’s Friends for Life and 2006’s Too Bad.
But the backlash against Banton was reignited in 2004 when a London-based group called OutRage! began a European campaign against a number of reggae artists, including Banton, Beenie Man and Capleton, for performing what OutRage! called Murder Music. A number of shows were canceled then and Banton was removed from Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival lineup.
The year, the anti-Banton efforts in the United States seem to have reached new levels of organized fury. The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center initiated this year’s protest by launching a phone- and e-mail campaign against concert-promotion giants AEG Live, owners of the House of Blues chain, and Live Nation for scheduling Banton shows this year.
The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center had “raised a human cry,” as spokesman Thomas Soule put it, in 2006 when Banton performed at the Los Angeles House of Blues.
When the Southern California gay community noticed Banton was scheduled to play the House of Blues in L.A. again on his 2009 tour, in support of his new release, Rasta Got Soul, the group sprang into action. “AEG Live and Live Nation are headquartered here,” said Soule, “so it became a local issue for us. Our CEO sent letters to AEG and Live Nation. We got no response at all from AEG. They wouldn’t even take our calls. And Live Nation kind of said, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but not much else. So we issued a statement, and created a Facebook Event page, encouraging our supporters to call and write. Within 24 hours, both AEG and Live Nation canceled their shows with Banton.”
The two mega-companies didn’t just cancel their L.A. shows—they also canceled shows they had scheduled in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Las Vegas, Dallas and Houston.
It instantly became a national story, and the LGBT grassroots effort spread with the news. In Ohio, Xavier University student Cameron Tolle and Ohio State University student Dustin White picked up the mantle, organizing a Facebook Event page—“Keep Buju Banton out of Ohio!!!”—to protest a September Banton show at a club called Annie’s in Cincinnati. The effort worked, and Annie’s canceled the show.
They then turned their attention to PromoWest, which was promoting an Oct. 3 Banton show at the Lifestyles Community Pavilion. The local LGBT community applied similar pressure to PromoWest, and again, within hours, the Columbus show was canceled.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” Tolle said that week. “We didn’t want (Banton’s) hatred to have a platform anywhere in the state. This crosses the line of free speech and enters hatefulness. And a lot of the people who would be offended are core customers of PromoWest. It was a very empowering two days. It says a lot about how easily the LGBT community can mobilize.”
But the battle was not completely won. Soon after PromoWest canceled Banton, it was announced that the Alrosa Villa would pick up the Columbus show.
In the viewpoint of Banton’s camp, the LGBT community became an angry mob, and turned the reggae artist into a scapegoat for its platform. Tracii McGregor, Banton’s manager, said via e-mail, “Honestly, I can count on one finger the amount of times any gay rights group has reached out to us for clarity or finding a resolution in the last five years. And why should they when they get so much more mileage from harassing local promoters and venues and feeding their one-sided, sensational drivel about Buju to their community and the media?”
The only Banton song the LGBT community takes issue with is “Boom Bye Bye,” which McGregor says was never released on an official Banton album. It has, however, appeared on a handful of reggae compilation disks, and protesters take issue with the fact that he still profits from it. Indeed, it is the most downloaded of his songs on the Amazon.com website.
But McGregor said the singer makes no money from it. “Buju Banton wrote and recorded the song as an exclusive dubplate for a local Jamaican producer when he was only 15 years old,” McGregor wrote. “He does not own the master or control the rights to the song, and therefore, does not profit from it.”
Gay rights activists also point to a YouTube video of Banton allegedly performing it in 2006 in Miami as evidence that he still performs the song live.
But what about the YouTube video? McGregor offered an explanation: “To be clear, Buju Banton does NOT perform “Boom Bye Bye.” The song is not and has never been a part of his live set.”
McGregor counters, “The footage from the Miami in 2006 is not a performance of the song. Look and listen closely. Buju actually says, ‘If I say ‘Boom Bye Bye. . .’ with the intent of going into his own discussion of the controversy surrounding the song and, unfortunately for him, the crowd ran with it. That was the first time he took that approach, and of course, the part where he begins to contextualize is not shown. The ensuing performance, however, was actually of ‘Massa God World A Run,’ which non-fans often mistake for ‘Boom Bye Bye’ because both songs start out the same and utilize the same ‘riddim.’”
Since his 1995 release of the Grammy-nominated album ’Till Shiloh, Banton has adopted the Rastafarian religion and has consistently issued songs dubbed “conscious reggae,” with themes of peace, love and enlightenment.
In 1994 he joined with Jamaica AIDS Support to launch Operation Willy, a nonprofit charity to promote safe-sex education and raise funds for children who are HIV-positive or who have lost parents to the disease.
Yet, he’s never fully given the gay community what it thinks it deserves from the author of a song that promotes the brutal murder of homosexuals—an apology.
In fact, sometimes he’s sounded downright surly. A Billboard.com story from 2006 about Banton’s “renewed controversy” with gay rights groups quoted the singer: “Fuck them. I have never bashed any gays before, and if I bashed gays, I bashed them 16 years ago. There’s no tolerance from (the gay community). I’m not a gay-basher. I’m not a homophobe.”
“He went on record with a song,” said Thomas Soule of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. “He made a public statement—a statement of violence and murder against gays. If you go on record, it’s the record unless you say something to change it. You can’t just say, ‘That was year’s ago.’ We can’t just assume he’s different now unless he says so. And he’s never come out and said the song was a mistake, or that he now believes that killing gays is wrong. His reluctance to do that says as much as anything.”
The Alrosa’s Rick Cautela was with Carl Root, owner of Roots record store on North High Street and longtime local reggae promoter, when the call came that PromoWest had canceled the Banton show. “He looked at me and said, ‘You want it?’”
Banton played the Alrosa in 2006—one of six times he’s appeared in Columbus, all without protest or incident. “It was a great show for us,” Cautela said. “He did a fine, very spiritual show about his message. There was nothing about gays and no problems at all.”
The Alrosa has been putting on reggae shows for about seven years, most with Root as the promoter. “Carl has been good to me.”
In December 2004, “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, the former lead guitarist of Pantera was shot and killed, along with three others, on the Alrosa stage by a deranged gunman who himself was shot and killed by police. In the months that followed, many of the metal and rock bands the Alrosa typically booked stopped wanting to play the stage where Dimebag had been killed, Cautela said.
“It was a very difficult time for lots of reasons,” Cautela said. “After the shootings, Carl came to me and loaded me up with shows. He saved the Alrosa. I owe him. He had a lot of money staked on this show.”
About the protesters, Cautela said their concerns kept him sleepless at night—until the calls and e-mails started getting nastier. “I certainly don’t agree with the sentiment of that song. But that was years ago. He doesn’t play it now. Rappers say all kinds of things. There are guys with swastikas on stages all the time, and no one makes a big deal. Professional athletes kill dogs, beat women, murder, and they’re forgiven. Why can’t they forgive this guy who made a mistake when he was 15?”
Soule, of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, knows why. “There’s a difference between what Eminem says, or Axl Rose says. Being homophobic is different than calling for murder. People don’t have to like the LGBT community. We believe in freedom of speech. But there’s some speech that’s not covered by freedom of speech. It’s that brutality that separates Buju from the others. It’s violence against, not dislike of.”
“And if he’s singing about love and peace and light, it really shouldn’t be that hard to take the next step and say publicly that it’s not OK to commit violence against gays. His unwillingness to distance himself from this only reinforces the notion that he still believes it.”
“It takes courage to stand up against violence against gays when you’re from a Jamaican culture that is among the most homophobic in the world? Don’t tell us,” Soule said. “We know all about the courage it takes to stand up against culture and society.”
all of his shows on the coast are sold out.
