Entertainment

Five Questions with Junior Kelly (Part 1)

Junior Kelly - CARLINGTON WILMOT

TODAY THE STAR poses one of five probing questions to our featured artist for April, Junior Kelly.

Q: What do you see as the positives of our music?

A: "The first one is that different avenues start open up now in the music. Once upon a time you either a produce the music or a play an instrument or yu a perform, but now yu have the dub poets a pop up and now yu have people a make a good living from choreography. People who dancing inna the dancehall and who get a name and who a go pon tour. Jah bless him soul the same Bogle and others widen the scope and the business aspect of it that a one of the positives of it, more people a feed from it as opposed to the traditional singing and musicians etc.

The next positive is that yu have dancehall music (don't know who started that term) start open up some avenues within different genres like the hip hop market to name one. People now have their eyes on the dancehall music and therefore have their eyes on the rest of the industry. If more and more artistes can get signed, it will get wider and wider till it get colossal.

Another one is that some of the time we have outside people, particularly people from Europe making offers. I have tons of offers from European people who want to voice me and carry me on tours all over, so one of the good things is that a lot of outside people, whenever they hear an artist like me, they don't judge me based on the amount of airplay or street credibility which is in Jamaica. No, they judge me by the work that I put out, the richness and the quality of the work. That's how I am as big as I am in Europe and those places, because they don't watch the charts here, they don't listen to what is going on here. That's a positive because it makes people outside looking in do not judge us on street credibility and hype. They look beyond it 'cause they look on it from the days of Bob even when we don't see the richness.

(See Kelly's responses to other questions about the music, the country, and other issues tomorrow and later this week.)