Guyana: Singer banned by National Broadcasting Association

Martin Goolsarran, a spokesman for the state-owned radio outlet, National Communications Network, said that Vybz Kartel’s music – and its obscene and hardcore lyrics – brings nothing positive to the entertainment industry.

This was reported by The Associated Press and by the Jamaican ‘Pop Culture Examiner’ Jodee Brown on the news-website Examiner.com

This is the first time that the government has taken such action against a specific artist. According to Jodee Brown, the spokesman hinted that the Broadcasting Association currently is reviewing the lyrics of other musicians and could also take them off the airwaves, though he declined to name which artistes were being investigated.

In August 2011, Vybz Kartel made a last-minute decision not to turn up for a show at a a government-supported summer music festival in Georgetown, Guyana, after allegedly receiving death threats from people in the island. The same thing had happened two years earlier when Vybz Kartel was invited to perform in Guyana in 2009, wrote Jodee Brown.

A concert on 9 October, in Copenhagen, Denmark, arranged by the Somali network in Denmark was blocked by a group of 70 religious fundamentalists.  According to reports in Danish daily paper Politiken, the group told the musicians that “music is the work of the Devil”, and then tried to stop audience getting into the venue.
Somali journalist and musician Abdirazak Osman, who arranged the concert, was offered cash by the fundamentalists if he would cancel the concert.

By midnight the blockade was stopped by the local police. No arrests were made.