"Gatekeepers without Gardens" Bonus Episode

The God's righteousness govern the world.

Broadcasting live and direct from the rolling red hills on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, from a magical place at the intersection of words, sound and power.

The red light is on.

Your dial is set.

The frequency in tune to the Roots Land podcast.

Stories that are music to your ears.

Henry, why you look so upset?

I'm not upset.

Angry.

I'm not angry either.

You know, I don't get angry.

I call the Most High.

Let him get angry.

Oh, okay.

Amen, preacher.

I'd say I'm more concerned.

Dismayed.

But first, see ya.

We're on the air.

Say hello.

We're on the air.

We're recording?

Yeah, we're recording.

Oh, okay.

Hello everyone.

And we have a lot of new listeners tonight, so let's not confuse anybody.

I'm Henry Kay, the host of Roots Land, and this is my part time co pilot, the enchanting Sia.

Born in the parish of St Thomas, Jamaica, reared on the mean streets of Kingston City.

I like that.

So, as you know, last week I appeared on the good ol Grateful Dead Cast, one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

And thanks to Jesse and Rich, the hosts, they gave our show a big plug.

So we have a lot of Grateful Deadheads in the house tonight.

Okay?

Okay, cool.

You remember the Grateful Dead, right?

Of course.

I married a Deadhead.

I remember.

I went to that show.

I've never seen so many people in my life.

So many people high dancing like maniacs.

Oh, yeah, they were dancing out in the streets.

You remember that?

There's nothing like a Grateful Dead show.

It was a blast.

And also thank you to Michael Stock from public radio station WLRN in South Florida, who had myself and Wayne Armand for his very popular and long running folk and acoustic music show here in South Florida.

Henry, you're supposed to remind me.

Yeah, things were busy.

We talked about this season of Roots Land and the Peter Tosh murder.

And Wayne Armand from the band Chalice delighted the South Florida audience with some acoustic songs.

It was a great show.

Thank you, Michael.

So things sounds like they're going great.

Why are you upset then?

I'm not upset.

Okay, then why are you?

Perturb?

Yes, perturbed.

Good word.

I'm perturbed.

Thank you.

Well, instead of explaining the situation, maybe it's easy.

I just read the email chain.

So this way you can tell me if I overreacted or I handled the situation appropriately.

Okay, so just a heads up, this was my second email to the very popular and influential reggae website reggae vil.

Monday, May 12, 8:04pm To Julian.

Hi Julian.

Just touching base once again trying to get the reggae fraternity behind the petition to reopen the Peter Tosh murder investigation.

There have been a lot of new details uncovered in this season's podcast.

I was hoping to get some support from you at Reggaeville.

Please let me know if there's any way to partner on some kind of promotion for this.

Thank you, Henry K.

And of course I put a link to the petition.

Polite, right?

Cordial.

I agree.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cordial.

Okay.

Here's his greetings.

Henry.

Thank you for your email.

Without having all the details, I'm not able to consider if that's something of interest, especially with topics like that and petitions.

I'm not keen to push it from the beginning, but sit back and observe what is happening.

And when it's newsworthy, we consider to run a news story.

A partnership to promote this is not an option.

Good vibes, Julian.

She doesn't want to get involved.

They don't want to spend the time to, you know.

Oh, I know.

It felt kind of cold.

Was a little cold.

Right.

Well, the site is based in Germany, not known for the warm and fuzziest crowd.

Right.

Henry, stop it.

We got lots of fans in Germany.

Let me just hear what you wrote.

Okay.

May 13th to Julian.

Dear keepers of convenient journalism, thank you so much for your refreshingly candid honesty about your editorial approach.

It's truly enlightening to see a reggae media outlet openly admit they have absolutely zero interest in investing any iota of research into a story they may actually have to work on themselves.

What a breath of fresh air in this age of pretense.

I particularly appreciate how you've laid bare the business model that so many non Jamaican reggae platforms operate on.

Sit back, let others do the heavy lifting, and then swoop in like vultures when something becomes quote, unquote newsworthy.

Which I assume translates to when other people have already done the work and you can safely regurgitate it without any risk.

Your quote, sit back and observe, end of quote approach is particularly noble.

It really captures the entrepreneurial spirit of modern reggae media.

I'm sure Bob Marley would be so proud to know that people claiming to carry his message forward are more concerned with playing it safe than for fighting for justice for his murdered bandmate.

But please don't let actual journalism interfere with your business strategy.

After all, someone might expect you actually research whether a story about police corruption, political assassination and silenced voices in Jamaica might be relevant to, I don't know, a reggae culture Website.

How presumptuous of me to think that the murder of a founding member of the Wailers might be worthy of attention before it trends on Twitter.

Blessed love and maximum wait and see energy.

Signed Henry K.

Wow.

Love it.

That's a great response.

Okay, good.

Didn't overreact, right?

I just said I love it.

Perfect response.

As a Jamaican, that's what these people.

Need to hear, you know?

You know, Sia, I've spent decades immersed in this music's heartbeat.

The record labels, the executives, the media.

And what continues to astound me is how those who position themselves as reggae gatekeepers so often proved to be merely its toll booth operators.

No one gets by without paying the toll.

I'm gonna go off on a little rant now, so why don't you stick around the studio?

Give me a little pinch if I go too far.

My pleasure.

Okay.

The letter I sent to Regavil wasn't just written in frustration, though there was plenty of that.

It was written in grief.

Griefer Peter Tosh, whose assassination remains unsolved.

Grief for my mentor Bob Andy, whose genius shaped a genre, yet who died without the global recognition he deserved.

Grief for Deadly Headley and Eddie Fitzroy and for all the architects of this global movement who've been reduced to footnotes while others profit off their foundations without giving them credit.

You see, there's something fundamentally broken in how we.

We.

Yes, we, I include myself in this indictment, have allowed reggae's global story to be written.

We've permitted its commodification without its contextualization.

We've celebrated its sound while sanitizing its substance.

We've allowed those who have never walked Kingston's gullies and trenches to decide which stories are marketable and which are too uncomfortable to tell.

The reggae media landscape has become an echo chamber of recycled press releases, anniversary celebrations and safe, digestible narratives.

The minute you start asking uncomfortable questions about who profits, about which voices get amplified about political assassinations, suddenly you're too political for platforms that exclusively exist because artists like Peter Tosh and Bob Marley were friggin political.

But here's what I realized over 30 years in this Reggae was never meant to be comfortable.

From its inception in Kingston's tenement yards, this is a music of resistance, of truth telling, of speaking power to those who would rather not hear it.

Peter Tosh did not stand on that One Love Peace concert stage in 1970 and deliver an eight minute condemnation of Jamaica's political establishment.

Because he was seeking playlist inclusion or for likes and subscribers.

He did it because truth was his only allegiance.

And what have we done with that truth?

We've packaged it, branded it, sold it as aesthetic without substance.

We've turned the revolutionary into recreational.

This past week, one of our listeners informed me that a post about the Peter Tosh murder investigation petition was removed from the Reggae Reddit forum.

You know what Reddit is, right?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, just checking.

Yeah, who doesn't?

That's right.

A post asking reggae fans to request the Jamaican government to reopen the Tosh murder case was taken down by the moderators.

So why did they remove the post?

Who knows?

Maybe it wasn't reggae enough for them.

Maybe too controversial.

Hmm, interesting.

It just goes to show, the digital gatekeeping around reggae has become so divorced from its origins that Peter Tosh, founding member of the Wailers revolutionary Voice, can somehow be deemed not relevant or a violation of rules in a discussion about the very music he helped define.

And with names like South Florida, Grown Tony and Jen in Florida, Ritardo Montablan, the Reggae Reddit moderators sound more like a cast of a 70s porn movie.

I wonder if any of these reggae moderators have ever experienced the Kingston streets where the music was born, or if Jamaica exists for them only as a convenient backdrop for vacation photos and streaming playlists.

Somehow, just a few hand chosen anonymous people control what a group of 60,000 members can see and hear.

The ease how these digital spaces become colonized by those with no stake in the culture's survival is both fascinating and terrifying.

Invisible hands shaping visible narratives, deciding which truths deserve oxygen and which can be quietly suffocated behind moderation rules.

How easy would it be for Babylon to infiltrate and compromise that kind of platform if they haven't already?

Even established institutions like the Jamaica Gleaner have perfected this art of selective invisibility.

Our show Roots land debuted over four years ago.

We have a number one global rating, listeners in 170 countries, and two signal awards.

Yet their senior entertainment writer can't find space between celebrity gossip and AI generated press releases to acknowledge a Jamaican music history podcast that's resonating worldwide.

Our team's emails vanish into the same void where countless Kingston artists have sent their demos and press kits.

It used to be the trash can.

Now it's the trash folder.

And I'm not saying this to be arrogant, but I just keep thinking, if a podcast with our visibility gets this treatment, what hope does that young artist from Trenchtown or Tivoli or Grant's Penn have?

The kid with nothing but talent and hunger building Beats on borrowed equipment, writing lyrics that captured today's Kingston with the same raw power that Tosh once did.

How does he or she ever break through this reggae industrial complex, with its strategic neglect of actual Jamaican voices, couldn't do a more effective job of making Jamaican reggae irrelevant if it operated from an official handbook titled how to Erase Culture While Appearing to Celebrate It.

And the Jamaican government bears special responsibility here.

While countries like France have aggressively protected their cultural patrimony, ensuring that only sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region can bear its name, Jamaica has allowed reggae to become a global generic, disconnected from its origins and diluted beyond recognition.

Imagine if Jamaica had trademarked reggae decades ago, designating it exclusively for music produced on the island, the way champagne is reserved for grapes grown in that specific French soil.

Everything else would be sparkling rhythm music or some such approximation.

The revenue alone would have transformed the lives of so many of the music's pioneers, ensuring they received proper healthcare, housing, and dignity in their final years instead of struggling while their creative contributions enriched others.

And this isn't just about royalties and economics, although those do matter desperately.

It's about cultural sovereignty, about who controls the narrative.

It's about ensuring that when future generations hear Rege, they understand not just its sound, but its soul.

This willful blindness to Rege's revolutionary core is not accidental.

It's strategic.

The gatekeepers without gardens, those who harvest Rege's fruits without nurturing its roots, serve as the final, perhaps most effective line of defense for systems of power that Rege was born to challenge, born to disrupt and dismantle.

Their selective storytelling completes what began with bullets and blood and brutality.

Yet beneath their superficial stewardship, the real work continues.

At ghetto street dances and Jimmy rigged home studios across Kingston's garrisons, in digital archives built by dedicated historians and in oral traditions maintained by elders, the unfiltered story persists, evolves.

The custodians that matter never stop their work, even when cameras weren't rolling and platforms weren't paying attention.

This is why we're here.

Not just to document what was, but to plant reggae's flag firmly back into the soil that birthed it.

Roots deep enough that no moderator's delete button, no editorial dismissal, and no corporate sanitation can uproot it ever again.

Like reggae, the truth has a rhythm all of its own, a persistent beat that keeps going even when the music stops playing.

The music just stopped playing.

Yeah, the show's over.

Until next time.

Roots, Land, Family.

Keep the beat going.

Yeah, keep the beat going.

Produced by Henry K.