JACKASS SEY DI worl' no level. Jackass sey did music ting no fair to de people dem whe go a school go study more time.
There was one thing about the recently concluded Rising Stars competition that really struck Jackass. Here were these top three persons who could really sing and none of them had voice training. It was all a matter of natural talent, church choirs and "me jus' a sing from me a pickney, cause me jus' love it".
So what about the people who have gone to school to learn to sing, who have done voice training? Did any of them enter the Rising Stars contest and not make it too far? Or did they turn up their noses at this 'pop' contest (although a $500,000 main prize is nothing for anyone to turn their nostrils in the air on)?
But putting Rising Stars aside, there isn't any major force in Jamaican popular music that Jackass can think of who has come through the voice training route. Not to say that some may not have had voice training at some point, mind you, but not from this highly scholarly and studied background.
And we are talking about people who can really sing, OK.
Like Jimmy Cliff, Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Ernie Smith, Sanchez, Barrington Levy. Like Cynthia Schloss. None of them came up through the music schooling system. They just had a talent and honed it through years and years of practice (and lots of it paid for through public performance, too).
SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION
The world is not level at all. Look at how much trouble and expense some people go through to train their voices and here comes someone who has not done any training, has not spent any money on learning the lives and styles of the greats, sometimes does not even know any scales apart from those in bathrooms and supermarkets, who gets all the contracts, the fame, the money and are remembered as having made a significant contribution to music.
But it is not only in music that, as Jamaicans say, 'studiration beat education'. Look at how many people spend years and years studying and end up slaving away for a wage that can hardly cover the monthly bills, then somebody else starts taking a plane to Curacao and places like that and end up buying the kind of house that you might see on 'Yard yards'.
Or a person studies management and ends up managing a business that someone who went into farming made enough money to set up.
That is not to say, of course, that education is of no use and a waste of time, that 'street smarts' are enough to do any and every job and it does not make sense that somebody goes to school. No, it is just that many times the rewards of going to school do not match the effort that is put out.
And we must never forget one thing, that the person who earns a lot of money without going to school is pretty likely to lose it (Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson), or spend a whole lot of it having people who did go to school (and we are not talking about primary and high school here, OK) taking care of it for them.
That's just what lawyers, accountants, investment bankers and such the like do.
But still Jackass sey, di worl' no level. Jackass sey people whe go school go learn fi get nuff reward too!
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