Managing a Brand He Made Himself
The dancehall reggae artist Vybz Kartel. His new album, “Kingston Story,” will be released on Tuesday.
By ROB KENNER
Published: June 16, 2011
SHORTLY before 10 p.m. on the final night of Best of the Best, a reggae and hip-hop concert held over the Memorial Day weekend in Veterans Park in Miami, DJ Nuffy, the master of ceremonies, began to introduce the dancehall reggae artist Vybz Kartel. But Vybz Kartel wasn’t actually in the park, in Miami, or even in the United States. He was more than 500 miles away at Jamaica Jamaica, a fancy nightclub just outside Ocho Rios, because he has been denied a United States visa.
Niketa Thomas
In addition to his music Vybz Kartel said he is developing beverage and clothing brands.
“And now for your feature presentation, the biggest thing in Jamaica,” DJ Nuffy roared, adding “him look like Michael Jackson.” The sly remark — referring both to the artist’s enormous celebrity in the Caribbean diaspora and to his controversial practice of lightening his skin — drew laughter and mischievous cheers from the crowd of some 10,000 who stared intently at a screen on the stage where artists including DJ Khaled, Busta Rhymes and I-Octane had performed just moments before. “Let’s welcome via satellite, live to you, Vybz. Vybz. Vybz.”
The crowd shouted “Kartel” in unison as his image filled the screen. He wore a purple suit with a loosely knotted silk tie and button-down shirt, his pale brown tattooed face framed by aviator glasses and a mane of black hair extensions. “Yo, Miami, you know what time now?” he asked, checking his wristwatch as the stuttering digital beat for “Touch a Button,” his chest-thumping challenge to rivals, started to play. Before long Vybz Kartel’s rapid-fire flow had the audience spellbound.
Over the last few years Vybz Kartel (pronounced Vibes Cartel) has become the most talked about figure in dancehall, a genre that is to the roots reggae of Bob Marley as hip-hop is to R&B. More than any of his predecessors or his peers, Vybz Kartel understands that he is not just entertaining an audience but managing a global brand. At a time when major-label interest in the genre is at a low ebb, and most dancehall artists release a smattering of singles, he will drop a full album, “Kingston Story,” on Tuesday on the Brooklyn digital label Mixpak Records. Although there will be no P.R. blitz to push the work, Kartel, 35, is highly skilled at creating controversy and leveraging the media exposure into new opportunities. The secret of his success may be that Vybz Kartel doesn’t worry about conforming to expectations; he’d rather break the rules.
“Kartel has remixed the notion of what it means to be a dancehall star,” said the Jamaican novelist and essayist Colin Channer. “He’s a pop artist in the sense of somebody like Madonna or Lady Gaga, who are aware of how transforming their image makes them attractive to different segments of the public.”
When asked how he maintains his international notoriety while rarely leaving Jamaica, Vybz Kartel laughed and said, with his usual braggadocio, “We work with what we have, and we make miracles like Jesus.”
The satellite-feed performance is only the latest example of this artist’s innovative approach to advancing his career. “I feel very special,” Vybz Kartel said by phone two weeks after the performance. “A lot of artists don’t have any visa now, but I am the one they approached. The job was pulled off, and I was the first to do it.” (He said he had his United States visa taken away six years ago over what he calls “allegations”; United States officials are not required to explain the grounds for denial of a visa.)
But the show almost didn’t happen. A week before the concert Vybz Kartel’s longtime business partner, Corey Todd — an American businessman who formerly worked with the Pimp Juice drink brand owned by the rapper Nelly — gave a series of interviews on Jamaican television accusing Vybz Kartel of threatening his life. He publicly severed ties with Vybz Kartel, dissolving the ventures that the two had built together, including Street Vybz Rum and the popular Kingston night club the Building, where the satellite performance was supposed to have been staged. Two of Vybz Kartel’s top collaborators — the singer Jah Vinci and the producer Not Nice — also jumped ship with Mr. Todd.
“I didn’t threaten anybody,” Vybz Kartel responded. “That is definitely a lie, and we are going to pursue that matter in court.” No legal action had yet been taken.
Vybz Kartel (born Adidja Palmer) made his name through a prodigious output of music, flooding iTunes with two or three new releases each week, with songs like “Ramping Shop” and “Jeans & Fitted” becoming international hits on radio. “I’m the Jay-Z for Jamaica, don’t call me a faker,” he rhymed a few years ago.
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Like Jay-Z he is as much an entrepreneur as an artist. He said he is planning to release a book analyzing his lyrics, similar to Jay-Z’s best seller, “Decoded.” Vybz Kartel is constantly making headlines with his X-rated lyrics, his leaked sex tapes, his well-documented arrests and for lightening his complexion in a culture with a long tradition of black pride. The skin-bleaching brouhaha is an enlightening case study.
“How you going to liberate the black people when you bleach out your skin?” asked Vybz Kartel’s erstwhile mentor Bounty Killer, voicing a widely repeated question. “You’re supposed to be proud to be a black man.”
In February the New York radio D.J. Dubmaster Chris of 93.5 FM banned Vybz Kartel’s music on his show during Black History Month. “If you don’t stand for something,” he said, “you’ll fall for anything.”
But Vybz Kartel parlayed the publicity into his first-ever live morning show interview on Hot 97 FM, one of the most influential hip-hop radio stations in America. “This music stuff — what people say about me good or bad — I don’t take it personally,” Vybz Kartel explained later. “It’s business.”
While working on “Kingston Story” the producer, Dre Skull, said he saw firsthand how Vybz Kartel took care of his business. Most of the album was recorded in Not Nice’s bedroom studio during a series of four one-night sessions. “One of the most exciting things about this record is that we did it with no A&R’s, no outside songwriters and no other producers,” said Dre Skull, who runs Mixpak from his apartment in Brooklyn.
Dre Skull was also impressed with how prolific a songwriter Vybz Kartel is. “Your average U.S. artist might do 300 songs over the course of a really successful career,” he said. “Kartel must have written three or four thousand songs, if you add it all up. The man is a master of his craft.”
Mr. Channer, who organizes the annual Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, agrees. “Kartel is one of the best writers in any form to come out of Jamaica in the last 15 years,” he said. “It’s just that he likes to write about nothing but sex and guns.”
Vybz Kartel recently announced that he would no longer record songs with violent lyrics in favor of “more cultural” fare but added that explicit sex, as with the new album’s “Go Go Wine” remained fair game.
He got his break in the late 1990s writing hits for Bounty Killer, one of the most popular dancehall artists of the last decade. He rose to prominence as a performer in 2003 with the song “New Millennium,” which featured his trademark intricately constructed polysyllabic rhymes delivered in densely coded patois — the diametric opposite of mainstream hits. His career has been marked by run-ins with the law. Last July he was detained by the police as “a person of major interest” shortly before the accused drug lord Christopher Coke was extradited to the United States where he is now on trial.
“Why was I in jail?” he asked. “They said I was a gang leader. It was ludicrous. And I don’t mean the rapper.”
But there is no doubt that he exerts a powerful influence over his listeners. His 2010 hit “Clarks,” he said, offers proof of his clout in the global marketplace. The catchy song about the storied British shoe brand — long a staple among dancehall fashionistas — received worldwide airplay, sparking a rush on Clarks retailers in Jamaica and elsewhere. This month the company announced a 19 percent uptick in sales in the United States last year, pushing profits past £100 million (about $164 million) for the first time in its 186-year history.
“Those Clarks people, they are like me, they know how to capitalize on what’s happening,” Vybz Kartel said. “That’s why I decided to come with my own shoe line. ’Cause I got a knack for making things move off the shelf.” Although his rum and condom lines have been discontinued, he said he’s developing new beverage and clothing brands.
Meanwhile he said his line of “cake soap” — a detergent usually used for laundry — is selling briskly. “When people were talking about whether I bleached my skin, I made a joke that I used cake soap,” he explained. “I made some songs about it, and cake soap started to sell like hot bread in Jamaica.” Recognizing an opportunity he rushed his own brand of cake soap to market.
Mr. Channer, the novelist, likens Vybz Kartel to Anansi, the trickster character of Afro-Caribbean folklore. “Many cultures have a trickster figure,” he said. “The trickster finds a way to get something when there seems to be nothing.”
Throughout the controversies, Vybz Kartel seems to be enjoying a laugh as well as a tidy profit. “It’s fun for me to watch people hate me, and it’s flattering to watch people love me,” he said. “But 10 years from now the public is going to love somebody else. Vybz Kartel is going to become irrelevant, and I can accept that. That’s why a lot of artists are bitter, ’cause they can’t accept that. Get over it. Stop trying to be Kartel. You can’t. It’s all about making that money while I’m in the limelight.”
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