Jamaica 0508

Decay is an old friend and colleague. Most people who know of him, know him because of all the grammy awards and platinum records he's won for producing albums by artists from Sublime, Sugar Ray, and the Bangles to Tony Bennett and Paul McCartney. To me he's just a super tuned-in, ultra creative guy I've been talking with for almost 30 years. I've been asking him to write for DWT for a couple years now and today he sent me a meditation from Jamaica:

Went to a church to rehearse with their boys choir, getting ready for a chorus they will be singing on a new Matisyahu song, "On Nature."

We are men of nature,
We are made from the Earth.
At the end of my eighty
I'll return to the dirt."

The church is on the same grounds as a school that is affiliated with the church. About 15 kids are standing in the street outside the gate with handwritten signs that say "park." There's a cricket match in progress across the street, and the school/church grounds are being used as a parking lot.

The school building windows have bars on them, even the second floor windows. We have just passed a prison, and it looks the same. One set of bars keeping people in, one keeping people out.

We pull up to the church, and I notice that many of the panes of window glass are broken out. I ask the driver why so many windows are broken, and he points down & up, "There's rocks, and there's windows." Of the windows that are still unbroken, the glass varies in kind-- some wired, some bathroom glass, some clear. They fix the broken windows with whatever they have available. It has the effect of a church window, a mosaic with a message, yet this sacred meaning is hidden, other than the sense of necessity.

Inside the church, there are 30 ceiling fans spinning. As I look up, I see the roof open to the elements on the right side of the transept. Six pieces of wood are broken and gone out to the sky, and all the plaster is missing over a large area around the holes. There is water damage on the walls and floor, and down through the nave there is water damage on the ceiling, showing that the leak has traveled back about 80 feet towards the main church opening. The plaster is ready to go, an ongoing drama, falling action.

The boys are practicing a Christmas song, even though it's still May. I ask a woman about the roof, and she says they'll have to do a concert to get the money to fix it.

The choir director doesn't seem that interested-- or, he's skeptical-- about doing the Matisyahu piece. They're getting $2,000, and I'm now thinking about the roof repair, but he is circumspect with me. I'm in the middle of Kingston, and I'm the only gaijin I've seen for 30 minutes, since I left the hotel lobby. So I'm trying to figure out if I'm paranoid, or if the song lyric breaks a rule that I'm not aware of, or a combination.

We're supposed to rehearse, but after I play him the song on a car CD player, the director asks if we can just rehearse at the studio. That would be better for me because it would be more focused, but I can't get his angle. I ask him bluntly if this singing is something that he really wants the choir to do, because if he doesn't want to be involved, it's ok with me and I can keep looking. He says "No, we'll do it." I still don't feel that he wants the boys involved. But, the roof...

It's so complicated. The poverty, and the dignity, hope, and the need to destroy. The immense effort to keep a society intact, to teach, to try to keep the kids from going bad, to keep one church window unbroken... To remove the bars...

Standing outside the church, the kids sound so sweet singing the high Christmas song in the heat and humidity. Boys' voices, unchanged, not yet broken by time, or whatever it is that breaks things.

-by Decay