Left: Hope-Marquis. Right: Deejays Mavado and Vybz Kartel enjoy a light moment during a recent meeting at Jamaica House. The deejays were there to discuss the impact of their lyrical feud on the wider society. - Contributed photos

At last Tuesday's Gleaner's Editors Forum, held at the newspaper's 7 North Street, Kingston, offices, 40-year music industry veteran Michael Barnett blamed the escalation of the Gully-Gaza conflict on the media.

In a story on the forum, carried in The Sunday Gleaner, Barnett said, had it not been for media attention, the issue involving supporters of dancehall stars Adijah 'Vybz Kartel' Palmer and David 'Mavado' Brooks, would have long petered out. Barnett said: "At what point have we decided that these people are so important to us that everything they do is to be on the front pages of the paper? I think that the media need to sit down and decide what is priority."

Lyrical confrontation

Kartel and Mavado's onstage lyrical confrontation was the centrepiece of last year's Sting concert, held at Jam World, Portmore, St Catherine.

At the same forum, academics at the University of the West Indies (UWI), who focus on dancehall, were roundly criticised for supporting negative aspects of the genre, Barnett saying that it is often a matter of "self-promotion and not about the music".

"These are persons who left Jamaica, came back to Jamaica, and wanted to find a way to get known in a hurry, and so they jumped on the dancehall bandwagon," Barnett said.

Ironically, one of those persons who made the overseas trek and returned has led a study in which some of the findings support Barnett's take on the media's role in the Gully-Gaza conflict, which may now be waning from its most extreme polarisation after Kartel and Mavado performed together at West Kingston Jamboree earlier this month.

A study on violence and dancehall, led by Dr Donna Hope-Marquis, UWI lecturer in Reggae Studies, has found that there is no correlation between the two. However, Hope-Marquis has also interpreted some of the findings as an indication of the media's role in inflating the Gully-Gaza issue.

Clash with sides

Funded by the Office of the Principal at the UWI, through the Special Initiatives Research Fund, the research was conducted among 300 15-24 year-olds in Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine and Clarendon between June and August this year.

Hope-Marquis said that one person who participated in the study spoke to "clash with sides, especially Gully-Gaza". The term was not included in the questions respondents were asked to address.

"Young people at that time were not even thinking about Gully or Gaza," Hope-Marquis said. Interpreting the very minimal presence of the conflict in the respondents' answers, she said, "It was not even important until the media made it so."

Hope-Marquis, speaking to The Gleaner in mid-December, said if she had done that study at that time, she would have got a lot of Gully-Gaza responses because the media has made it important.

At the Sting concert, held on Saturday at Jam World, Mavado and Vybz Kartel performed separately, both speaking to the peace and paying respect to the other. However, when the MC asked the crowd at one point if they loved the peace initiative, there were very few hands ascended.