Sh-Shabba
Do yourself a favor and never look into what Shabba Ranks thinks about anything
We talking like hustle and flow crazy or worse?
Now I wanna know how bad it is.
This needs a lot of back story:
In Jamaica batty boy is derogatory term for gay person. Rude boy means gangster. The song by Boom Bye Bye from Buju Banton has a chorus that goes “boom bye bye inna batty boy head, rude boy no promote no nasty man, dem haffi be dead” and it gets worse from there and describes hunting down gay people and killing them. The dark irony is that this song and all dancehall songs crossed over into world wide mainstream through gay clubs.
But this was a little too far for people even in the early 90s when the US government was busy passing laws like the Defense of Marriage Act and purposefully mishandling the AIDS crisis. People were like “you can’t play songs about murdering gay people and calling for them to all be shot” and this caused a controversy in few countries.
Anyway Shabba Ranks was at the height of his popularity, he just won a grammy, and was positioned to be bigger than Bob Marley he had an interview on British TV where the hosts asked him about this song and he was like “Yeah, gay people should all be crucified, the bible say they living in sin” and went on to defend Buju Banton and the song and expressing violent homophobia.
He got fucking cancelled after that way before that was a term. Buju Banton was 15 when he wrote it and was pretty much repeating what other people would commonly say at the time, unfortunately this sentiment wasn’t uncommon. After having a few break out hits went to jail for a long time on drug charges and has since apologized for the song, removed it from his catalog, refuses to collect royalty on it and no longer performs it.
Holy fuck. Thanks for taking the time to educate us on this scum. I can’t even think of what to say other than various profanities. Fucking garbage humans.
