Urban Vine Media

Reggae Sumfest Where Did You Go?

I’m still trying to shake it off.
The show & night didn’t feel like Reggae Sumfest. It felt like a night of Sting with higher ticket prices.

The support for the night: Shauna Controller, Shawn Storm, Queen Ifrika. Great artists. No Romaine Virgo, No Dahvid Slur, No Busy Signal. Are we serious? For Reggae Sumfest? That was the lineup we’re calling the main show now?

High cost to enter. Small turnout. And half the reggae fraternity sitting at home wondering, “When will it ever be our turn again?”

That’s the disappointment.

Sumfest came out of Sunsplash. Out of Bob. Out of the era where you’d see Cocoa Tea, Ghost, Sugar Minott, Maxi Priest, Agent Sasco, on one stage and feel the weight of reggae history. It was the premiere show. The one the world flew in for because they wanted Jamaican music at its highest level.

Now? Right now we probably only have one premier show left in Jamaica in the last year. And look around — all these great shows, these great festivals with our artists, are being kept outside of Jamaica.

We exported the culture and kept the name. Shows like Reggae Sunsplash Europe is doing well while we the originators are looking for bailouts.

Why? Because nobody wanted to own it. Government didn’t buy it. The fraternity didn’t buy it. Which is what we see regularly within our culture. Street Dances are cool but no one wants to be the pioneers and lead the way. The people with the money didn’t see $2 million as worth investing in our own legacy. So a non-Jamaican ended up with major shares. Someone with no fiber of this nation in them.

And we wonder why it feels like pop culture. Like capitalism. Like plagiarism of what Sumfest used to be.

The infrastructure didn’t help either. Right after Melissa we had nowhere proper to put it. Still no dedicated entertainment ground in Montego Bay 20 years later. Not just Montego Bay but no where on the island is set up to support culture. No stadiums no arenas. So the show suffers, the experience suffers, and the crowd stays home.

Where is Sumfest going? If we keep this up, it’s going toward being just another date on the calendar. Safe. Forgettable. No roots.

But it doesn’t have to.

We need to claim it back. Fund it. Build for it. Book it with intention. Put reggae and dancehall back at the center, not as the opening act.

Because the world doesn’t come to Jamaica for what they can get in Miami. They come for this.
Pride needs to be at the forefront of culture. There is clearly a lack of love and respect for the machine that has fed so many.