Ode to The Killer

Why Bounty Killer, the Ghetto Gladiator, Is Jamaica’s Greatest Modern Artist After Bob Marley

Before Bounty Killer, modern Jamaican music barely registered for me.

I was steeped in the older currents — Bob Marley, the ethics and weight my parents played on repeat: Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, Michael Jackson, Hooked on Themes, Hooked on Classics, Luther Vandross, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. My sister ran New Kids on the Block, Madonna and George Michael.

That teen-pop brightness never touched me.

I was the morose Star Trek kid, hopped up on the moral codes those earlier records seemed to preach. Music, in my young mind, carried a social obligation. It had to mean something larger than the riddim.

When dancehall first reached me through Yellowman and the rest, it sounded like ABC kiddy rhymes. The slackness that did catch my curiosity remained at a distance. I had not yet stepped fully into that world.

Then Bounty Killer arrived, and the obligation found its voice in dancehall.

I discovered him somewhere around eighth or ninth grade, somewhere between “Excuse Mi Pass Mi Cellular Phone” — that hook that seized the Jamaican consciousness, naming an object of fascination and ambition in one clean stroke — and the emergence of that now-legendary moniker: People Dead.

An Image I made when I dreamt of writing the Killer's Biography

By ninth grade, the class was divided clean down the middle: Bounty versus Beenie. Daily clashes at every missed session and lunchtime. Desks became drums. Aspiring deejays stood up and represented.

I was Team Bounty.

No hesitation.

For me, he was Jamaica’s Batman and Punisher rolled into one body. The Ghetto Gladiator. The Poor People’s Governor.

In the same way that 1930s Superman became a champion of the working class, Bounty stood for the corner, the lane, the youth who had no champion outside their own families. He gave me a modern Jamaican vocabulary of freedom — and, more importantly, the courage to be myself, to stand up and fight.

If Bob Marley said “Get up, stand up,” Bounty was the living enactment.

He was the ideological marriage of Tosh’s fire and Marley’s call, brought down to street level and set loose in the dancehall.

The Killer would excite imagination when he connected with The Fugees who I had been hearing about from my conscious cousins. Bounty brought them to my ears live and direct. Then there was Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang, Jeru the Damaja whose signature I'd see in restaurants all over Brooklyn in the 90's when I stay with my Uncle Junior and his division of the family. Bounty felt like and was the real grassroots artist, linking with other global grassroots artists, and that felt massive to me.

Years later, around 2001 or 2002 at UWI Mona, Bounty came to speak at the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre.

I went with a placard.

It read:

BOUNTY KILLER FOR PRIME MINISTER.

People gave me the side-eye. There were quiet suggestions that perhaps I should put it away. Fan-boy. Groupie.

This is an incomplete drawing of Bounty I did a few years back

The lecture began with a slow burn. Low energy. Bounty seemed almost timid in the academic setting. Carolyn Cooper worked the room, managing the rising undercurrent. It felt as though the audience was approaching some threshold beyond which the room might overwhelm him.

So I waved the placard harder.

Someone showed it to him.

He smiled.

And something changed.

From that moment, Bounty took command of the lecture hall and never gave it back.

Afterward, Ibo Cooper stopped me and a Barbadian sister, Amanda Lynch Foster. He introduced himself. I recognised the face but did not yet place him as the man behind one of my favourite songs, “96 Degrees in the Shade.”

He asked what we thought of the lecture.

Amanda gave a somewhat half-hearted answer.

I dived in.

I was determined that Ibo Cooper was not going to leave thinking we were soft or that we did not understand the Killer.

I told him Bounty was the greatest thing ever.

Ibo looked at me and said, in essence, that Bounty was singular — the greatest of his generation.

It felt like winning a prize.

Like answering some deep question correctly when a Rasta elder or shaman tests you in the road.

I carried that moment with me.

Then the industry shifted.

Another incomplete piece of the Killer in his youth!

Back in Montego Bay, Bounty’s hold began to loosen. Kartel rose. I was mentoring young people, doing street activism, and the youth around me began saying, Bounty time done.

One Sumfest, with Gaza at full strength, I found myself down the road arguing Bounty versus Kartel.

They butchered me.

Big man and youth alike were telling me Bounty was going to die that night.

I was dejected.

Then one youth gave me the only piece of hope I had to hold on to.

He said:

“Rasta, Kartel a me artist, but me nah go follow him and dis Bounty. A him gi we computer and computer lab a Albion Primary. A him make me know how fi use computer. Mi cannot dis the Killer.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

Because there it was.

The part of Bounty Killer that the mythology often misses.

The part that exists beyond the lyrics, the clashes, the gun salutes, the feuds and the spectacle.

Impact.

Inside the festival grounds, a friend announced that he was going to boo Bounty. Before the set, he aimed his fingers at me, miming blanks and gunshots — your artist dead.

Then Bounty marched out.

The crowd erupted.

And the same man who had been firing imaginary bullets at me moments earlier was now firing them into the air, giving Bounty one of the biggest forwards and gun salutes of the night.

I could hardly believe it.

Everybody who had spent the day burying Bounty in conversation was now resurrecting him with their voices.

The media said he took the show that year.

To me, it was something bigger.

It was Bounty being Bounty.

Because this has been the strange, almost mythological arc of his career. He gets declared finished. Then the people prove otherwise.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Bounty Killer did not simply entertain me.

He personified a fight I already carried inside myself and gave it a public face, a Jamaican vocabulary and a volume loud enough for everybody to hear.

He transformed the social obligation I had once attached almost exclusively to the older music of my childhood into something that could live inside dancehall without surrendering its spine.

That is why I place Bounty Killer where I do.

Not because he is flawless.

Not because every lyric is profound.

Not because he has the smoothest voice or the most commercially successful catalogue.

But because Rodney Price became an institution of Jamaican consciousness.

He made the street intellectually and politically consequential.

He made struggle audible.

He gave generations of young Jamaicans a vocabulary for resistance, ambition, defiance and survival.

And sometimes, crucially, he turned words into material action — like the youth who remembered that Bounty Killer had helped bring computers and a computer lab to Albion Primary School and therefore could not simply “dis” the man because the musical tide had changed.

This album was my religion from grade 9 or 10 to near cxc's end!

That is the thing about greatness.

It is not always measured by sales.

Sometimes it is measured by what remains in people after the song ends.

For the cellular-phone moment that first caught my ear.

For the classroom wars.

For the desks that became drums.

For the placard that changed the temperature of a lecture hall.

For Ibo Cooper’s verdict.

For the youth who refused to dis the man who had opened a door into the digital world.

For every time Jamaica declared the Ghetto Gladiator finished, only for the people to rise when he walked back onto the stage.

Give thanks.

Rodney Price.

Bounty Killer.

The Ghetto Gladiator.

The Poor People’s Governor.

After Bob Marley, perhaps no modern Jamaican artist has embodied the fighting spirit of the Jamaican street — its anger, ambition, contradictions, intelligence, humour and indomitability — quite like him.

He didn't just tell a generation to stand.

He showed them how.