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t’s New Year’s Eve, and the roads that lead to Jamaica’s National Stadium are filled with food vendors manning their oil-drum grills. Some sell orange bandannas like the pair Vybz Kartel wore when he walked out of the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre five months earlier, on July 31, 2024. Jamaicans from across the island have taken Knutsford Express buses into Kingston, and foreigners have booked nearly all of the hotel rooms in town to see Freedom Street, Kartel’s first concert since 2011.
Inside the open-air arena, which is also home to Jamaica’s soccer team and its annual independence ceremony, fans yell above the vuvuzelas. A little after 11 p.m., the house lights go down and Kartel rises up from beneath the stage wearing a gray pinstripe suit with gold trimming made by Solomon’s, a Trinidadian tailor. “Yo, yo,” he says. Thirty thousand people erupt, and he launches into his opening song: “Mi nuh have time fi nuh jail time, dat a waste time/Mind pon mi money and money pon mi mind.”
Kartel has been one of Jamaica’s most celebrated entertainers since the early 2000s, when he established himself on the dancehall circuit, deejaying with brazen delivery on riddims and mixtapes that were shared across the Caribbean. In 2009, he achieved a new level of fame with “Pon de Floor,” a collaboration with Diplo’s Major Lazer project, and he vaulted even higher when that song was sampled on Beyoncé’s hit “Run the World (Girls),” earning him a co-writing credit on one of her signature anthems.
Fifteen years ago, Kartel was one of the country’s brightest success stories. He had made it out of the ghetto, crossed over into the mainstream, and represented Portmore, his hometown, at every turn. But in September 2011, he was arrested on a flurry of charges including marijuana possession and homicide. Two and a half years later, he received a life sentence for murdering an associate named Clive “Lizard” Williams. Kartel has always maintained his innocence.
Throughout his career, he has been both celebrated for his poetic style and condemned in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries. Dancehall lyrics are often coded, marked by innuendo. Kartel raised the bar with unapologetic lyrics about sex, hustling, and loyalty, bucking against traditional West Indian respectability rooted in British colonialism. The charges against him stoked his detractors’ views that he is a negative influence; some called his comeback show the “Criminal Concert.” Even so, his warm welcome at the National Stadium — and at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, where he played his first U.S. shows in 20 years this April — demonstrates his magnetism.
Kartel left Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre in July 2024 braced by his fiancée.
© The Gleaner Co. (Media) Ltd.
“This is a historic event,” Ricky Platinum, a music selector, or DJ, who helped warm up the crowd before Kartel’s performance, tells me backstage. “Talk about a very influential artist, to be locked up for so long, manage to come out, and still have the people dem pay attention.”
Joelle Powe, a filmmaker from Kingston who produced a documentary about dancehall called Out There Without Fear, puts it another way: “He has incredible charisma. It’s not just that he was locked up. He elicits a response as if he was a kind of holy figure.”
A WEEK AFTER THE SHOW, I meet Kartel at an outdoor lounge in uptown Kingston. It’s a more relaxed interview format than he anticipated. Most of his meetings with the press involve cameras and lighting equipment. “This is all you need?” T.J., his manager, asks me. “You’re just sittin’ down reasoning?”
Kartel greets me with a jovial air, wearing a long-sleeved Versace button-down with a black skully. We start talking, but his phone buzzes and dings incessantly. Sidem Öztürk, his fiancée, calls asking where he is. “Come down, babe,” he tells her, flipping the phone’s camera to reveal the pool nearby. Then, he takes another call in patois before hanging up. “Let me put di phone deh pon silent.”
He tells me that he started his day with a prayer and a spliff. After our conversation, he wants to hit the studio. It’s one day until his birthday, and he is oblivious to the surprise party that his team is organizing for tonight. “Tomorrow, I’ll be 49,” he says. “I used to say ‘Ohh, I’ll be 20 next week!’ But when you’re 48, it doesn’t sound the same. No. You’re like, ‘Shit. I’m going to be 49.’ ”
His motivations to host Freedom Street were layered. More than anything, he felt he had to prove a point: “If you want me to jump the wall, just say I can’t do it.” He also needed to thank his fans for their loyalty. The typical energy exchange between the entertainer and the audience had been obstructed by prison walls for almost 13 years. “The production of the show was crazy,” he says. “I’m coming up from underneath the stage like Michael Jackson, and the whole place inna turmoil.”
Destinee Condison for Rolling Stone
Kartel tells me that he felt he was in “justice purgatory” during the murder trial, which began in the fall of 2013. He was found guilty and was incarcerated between the Horizon Adult Remand Centre, St. Catherine prison, and Tower Street for the next decade. In 2014, he was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder, and his physical health became a subject of concern among observers. “It is my fervent hope that I will not die within the precincts of the prison,” he wrote in a 2024 affidavit. “The cell is a literal oven, and each day, I felt like I am being burnt alive.”
From the outside in, it sometimes seemed as if Kartel was enjoying the privileges of celebrity status during his prison term: Visitors sat with him in his cell, and his lawyer confirms that he really could get lobster for dinner. At one point during our conversation, he shows me pictures he took of himself wearing a pink Ralph Lauren polo and Timberland boots. “This is me and T.J. in prison when he came to visit,” he says about his manager. “Them times I used to bleach the shit outta my skin.” (Kartel tells me he bleached because he wanted to show off his tattoos, but then he got bored: “While I’ve been in prison, I’ve been Black, I’ve been brown, I’ve been chocolate. I’ve been purple, blue. For me, it was always about fashion and style.”)
His seven children visited him only on prison-sanctioned family days. “I don’t want them to think it’s a bed of roses,” he tells me. “You can come see your dad, and he’s dressed up and all. But no, it’s still prison. Stay out.”
Kartel found ways to stay relevant from the moment he was arrested, dropping new music consistently. As technology evolved, he started to deejay directly into one smartphone, while listening to the riddim on another; a team of sound engineers produced the vocals he’d send them from prison. (Ricardo “RedBoom Supamix” Reid, a producer, tells me he relied on a voice restoration app to smooth out Kartel’s voice, which was affected by Graves’ disease.) A lot of what Kartel recorded during this time had a metallic sound because his voice ricocheted off the concrete and steel. “I figured it out that I could use the mattress,” he says, describing how he cobbled together a makeshift studio. The best quality mic he had was an iPhone 5S.
When the wardens searched his prison cell before dawn looking for contraband, his devices were often confiscated. Until he could get replacements, he passed time by reading Colson Whitehead and Danielle Steel. Kartel tells me he filled 400 songbooks with lyrics. He doesn’t refer back to them, though. “Funny enough, since I’ve come out, I’ve gone right back to putting the headphones on and saying what comes to mind,” he says.
Music wasn’t the only thing Kartel was able to work on while he was incarcerated. The manufacturing and branding for Str8 Vybz, his new rum brand, were established while he was in Tower Street. “I’m telling you, the only thing I couldn’t do is leave,” he says. The rum comes in four varieties. He recommends an overproof blend called Fever. “It’s distilled so smooth, it will trick you,” he says. “Be careful, otherwise you’re going to wake up naked in a hotel with eight drunk hookers.”
“If you want me to jump, just say I can’t do it.”
At the beginning of December, Kartel traveled to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to visit the Angostura distillery, where Str8 Vybz is bottled. He recalls meeting the factory workers: “They took me through the process, how the rum is made, how it’s packaged, labeled, and distributed.” He felt a deep sense of gratitude when he saw the oak barrels where the rum is aged. “I met the dude who has been making them for the past 50 years. I actually met the people who were putting in the work. It meant a lot.” He attributes his fortune to a newfound faith: “God is the greatest, bro.”
KARTEL’S MOTHER, THERESA, gave birth to her son Adidja Azim Palmer on Jan. 7, 1976. She and his father, Norris, raised him 15 miles west of Kingston, in Portmore, with his brother and four sisters. His block was called Gaza, named after the Palestinian territory. “This means resistance,” he tells me. “Fighting, never giving up.”
Adidja was nearly a year old during the 1976 election cycle, when Jamaica was in a rapidly escalating state of political and economic conflict. Michael Manley, the prime minister at the time, had asked Bob Marley and the Wailers to play the Smile Jamaica concert in an effort to calm tensions in the country. Marley went on to perform just days after being shot in an attempted assassination. That concert helped establish a new precedent, in which politicians were free to recruit musicians to advance their agendas.
When Adidja was 11, he realized his knack for poetry. A few years later, in class at Calabar High School, he started to write songs that he’d test out in Portmore’s dance halls. He soon fell in with local sound systems, collectives of music selectors and deejays, known as Soul Signal and Electric Force. On the intro to his 2015 album, Viking, he recalled the moment he heard Buju Banton for the first time: “Dancehall, that was it. Couldn’t get any bigger, couldn’t get any better.” He took on the stage name Adi Banton in tribute to his idol, and in 1993, he released his first single, “Love Fat Woman.” Three years later, he formed a group called Vibes Cartel with two dancehall entertainers named Mr. Lee and Escobar. When that group disbanded, Adi Banton morphed into Vybz Kartel. He has adopted many monikers over the years: Di Teacha, Worl Boss, the Godfather, the Lyricist.
Kartel performing in New York in 2005, as his career began to take off
JOHN RICARD/FILMMAGIC
Bounty Killer, the dancehall superstar, recognized Kartel’s talent, and brought him on as his protégé and ghostwriter. In 2004, they released a song together called “In My Eyes.” Bounty Killer later recruited a barber and rising deejay named Mavado. All three worked together under Bounty’s collective (called Alliance) until Kartel decided to break out on his own. Mavado took the move personally, and the result was a rift that came to be known as the Gully-Gaza war, a beef that was generally fought on the airwaves and in dance halls. Mavado called Kartel out by his government name: “When this squeeze, it leff Adi head at ease/Him flat like banana leaf.” Kartel clapped back over the Self Defense riddim: “Barber boy, me a go all out/Shot yuh in front yuh mumma, mek she bawl out.”
Violence surged in Kingston and in Portmore. The Gleaner, Jamaica’s oldest newspaper, published a scathing editorial in 2009: “Now the followers of the gun hawks themselves — Vybz Kartel (Gaza) and Mavado (Gully) — are shooting, stabbing up and beating one another — not metaphorically or lyrically, but literally, physically, actually,” the late journalist Ian Boyne wrote. “Now the fans themselves can’t go into certain dance halls and have the pleasure — and the freedom — to hear the two reigning kings of badmanism and gangsterism played without threats to their own personal security.”
Jamaica’s prime minister at the time, Bruce Golding, called a peace meeting between the two artists. “We’re not really enemies,” Mavado said while sitting next to Kartel. “It’s just about music. We have the fans … and people take it to a different level.” (Golding later had to resign after he resisted the extradition of a reputed drug kingpin.) Despite the truce, both artists were forbidden from performing in Barbados, showing the ongoing repercussions of the conflict. “Thumbs Up for Barbados Prime Minister as he cancels Vybz Kartel, Mavado concert,” a local headline read.
Thousands of miles away, in Nairobi, Kartel’s music resonated with a group of young men who worshipped him. They formed their own ruthless gang and named it Wadando Gaza. He denounced them in a statement: “Kartel does not support these things.”
VYBZ KARTEL’S REACH is matched by his productivity: He has released more than a dozen albums and hundreds of singles and mixtapes in the past two decades. His originality and use of metaphor are key to his mass appeal; even his songs about sex involve double entendre. Among his most well-known singles is “Romping Shop,” a 2009 duet with Spice. “Deal wid yuh breast like me crushing Irish/Spice, I neva love a pussy like this,” Kartel sings. The track prompted the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica to issue a total prohibition on songs and music videos that endorsed sex.
Kartel took this as a personal attack. He published the text of the so-called daggering ban in his 2012 book, The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, co-authored with Michael Dawson, a self-proclaimed Garveyite and owner of MECA, a dancehall venue. Kartel criticized the BCJ’s efforts to stamp him out: “You banned me the moment I became extremely popular because I am not afraid of speaking the truth about what I see being done to ghetto people,” he wrote.
“I’m telling you, the only thing I couldn’t do is leave.”
The censure was rooted in the widespread narrative that most music from the dance halls is slackness, a pejorative term for overt sexual content. Even some artists hold this view: Sister Nancy, the original queen of dancehall, tells me that she feels most modern music lacks substance. “I don’t see it as music,” she says over the phone. “I classify music with good body, good energy, good lyrics. But people do whatever come out them mouth, and most times it’s slackness. Nastiness. Profanity. And I don’t go for that.”
Yet Kartel is adamant that his music contains much more than slackness. “A large amount of my catalog is also ghetto commentary,” he tells me, citing songs like “Time,” “Any Weather,” and “Unstoppable.”
Agent Sasco, who put on a live show in the pouring rain in Kingston the same week as Freedom Street, insists that dancehall songs have depth when I speak with him later. “There’s no real appreciation for the actual content,” he tells me. We’re sitting outside of his selector’s studio, and a mongoose scurries into the bushes. Under his former stage name of Assassin, he was featured on albums by Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar; over time, his style has taken on a more conscious slant. He points to a song called “Hand to Mouth,” in which he tells the story of honest working people. “What do you call it? Bars. We can have bars as well.”
Carolyn Cooper, a retired literature professor at the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus, in Kingston, argues that dancehall’s lyrical content should be respected, rather than weaponized. “The censorship is around the sexually explicit lyrics and body language,” she says when we speak on a veranda at her home near UWI. “We see the same body language in folk religious rituals such as kumina dances, and the words are symbolic, I feel, of African-derived culture in Jamaica. All of it is tied into the faux respectability of fundamentalist Christianity.”
Cooper has invited several dancehall entertainers to speak on campus, creating space for an exchange between her students and their idols. In 2011, she asked Kartel to deliver a lecture. Five thousand people showed up, she says. “I wrote the speech, did the PowerPoint, everything. That’s my job,” he tells me.
Months after that campus appearance, Kartel started to film a reality-dating show called Teacha’s Pet. During production, in September 2011, authorities found a small amount of herb in his hotel room, and he was arrested. Soon after, he faced more serious charges, as authorities accused him of being involved in the killing of Barrington “Bossie” Burton, a 27-year-old businessman and, separately, of murdering Clive “Lizard” Williams. (Kartel was acquitted of Burton’s murder in 2013.)
Destinee Condison for Rolling Stone
In the summer of 2011, according to court documents, Kartel loaned two guns to Williams, giving him a deadline to return them. Kartel later summoned Williams to a meeting at his home, where he, Shawn Campbell, Kahira Jones, and Andre St John were waiting. When Williams arrived empty-handed, prosecutors alleged, he was beaten to death. His body was never found. Kartel, Campbell, Jones, and St John were all charged with murder, and they pleaded not guilty, sparking one of the most complicated trials in Jamaica’s history.
The prosecution’s case relied on evidence lifted from copied SIM-card data. “If dem want dem friends fi live, dem better get my shoes,” Kartel is heard saying on audio messages. “Shoes” was interpreted as code for his two missing weapons. Investigators found texts on a phone that they felt amounted to a confession. “Wi chop up di bwoy Lizard fine, fine and dash him weh,” a message from Kartel said. The defense attorneys claimed that the duplicate data files had been tampered with and breached local privacy laws.
Issues with the case snowballed at the beginning of 2014. One of the 12 jurors learned that her son was incarcerated at the same prison as the defendants. She feared that he might be unsafe, and the judge dismissed her. The trial was winding down when another juror was accused of bribing the others. The prosecution argued that “one bad juror” should not upset the entire trial. In the end, the judge did not dismiss the problematic member — who was later convicted of bribery — because, among other reasons, a local law prevents a murder case from being heard by less than 11 jurors. (Alternate jurors were not part of Jamaican civil procedure.) On March 13, the jury convicted Kartel and his three co-defendants with a verdict of 10 to one. Weeks later, all four were sentenced to life in prison.
Kartel appealed the decision within a month of the sentencing, yet the hearings didn’t begin until 2018. By that time, he had been incarcerated for seven years. His legal team argued several different reasons to overturn the original verdict — chiefly that the judge and prosecution had violated the Fundamental Rights and Freedoms Charter, a 2011 constitutional amendment that guarantees a fair trial. But a panel of three judges confirmed the four men’s guilt in 2020. As a last resort, a new legal team that included a human rights attorney, Isat Buchanan, brought the matter to the U.K.’s Privy Council, which is the highest court of appeal in Jamaica and other Commonwealth nations.
“Do you see a 238 on my face?” Kartel asks me while pointing to his cheekbone under his shades. “That’s the paragraph that freed me.” He got the tattoo months before the case was reviewed by the Privy Council. In the judgment document that cemented his conviction, paragraph 238 deals with the trial judge’s decision to proceed with the case despite the bribery allegation. “They justified, surprisingly, the whole idea of jury tampering,” Buchanan argues over a video call.
“We have the voice to say what people are saying.”
Last March, the council determined that the jury-management issues could not be ignored. “This was an infringement of the defendants’ fundamental right to a fair hearing” under the Jamaican Constitution, the justices wrote, overturning the convictions of all four men. The Jamaican Court of Appeals concluded that Kartel would not have to sit for a new trial. Enough state resources had been spent.
Kartel’s physical health played a role in the court’s decision not to retry the case. In the months before he was released, his doctor reported that his heart was operating at 37 percent capacity. Graves’ disease made him physically weak and communicating difficult. “My doctor explained to me that due to … solitary confinement my health has deteriorated and it is critical that I receive surgical intervention within 12 months time as I might suffer from life impacting consequences,” he wrote in an affidavit to the Privy Council.
Court documents shed new light on the longstanding human rights issues within Jamaican prisons that exacerbated his illnesses. In 1993, an Amnesty International delegation was deployed to Jamaica after four men on death row were shot in their cells by prison guards. The organization reported that there was “cause for concern” about the St. Catherine correctional center. “None of the cells [had] integral sanitation,” the assessment said. “The prison is in a chronic state of general disrepair with broken plumbing, piles of refuse and open sewers.”
Thirty years later, Kartel says he was subject to many of the same merciless conditions in Tower Street. “I had to urinate in a bottle … and pass my stool in a scandal bag … this contributed greatly to the deterioration of my health,” he testified. Buchanan, who is running for the opposition party in the parliamentary elections this coming fall, pressed the government for an injunction; although that effort was unsuccessful, the government went on to install a toilet and shower in Kartel’s cell nevertheless. “The rest of persons who are not him, who have to live in inhumane conditions — they still have to pass their feces and their urine in plastic bags or hold it until the cell is open,” Buchanan tells me. “We have to fix our prison system.”
Around the time of Kartel’s Freedom Street concert, radio ads in Jamaica advocated for total independence from the United Kingdom. The commercials were sponsored by the government’s own Ministry of Constitutional Affairs. “The irony is they have a track record of breaching constitutional rights and losing in the courts for doing so,” Buchanan says. “Jamaica is not ready. We need a little more education on what humanity looks like.”
Destinee Condison for Rolling Stone
Before prison, Kartel wrote that it was time for Jamaica to become a republic and break away from the Commonwealth, the fragile remains of the British Empire. But his experience with the criminal-justice system and the Privy Council’s role in freeing him changed his perspective. “I’m a man, and I can say this.” He pauses and adjusts his sunglasses. “I don’t share that sentiment [anymore]. At least not now,” he tells me. “It’s a pity I had to go to England.”
IN BOTH HIS BOOK and his music, Kartel has taken on Jamaica’s social divide. Working-class communities, he wrote, buzz with the “burning internal desire for better, kindled with the feeling of stagnation coming from the stink of gullies or dumps that some of us are forced to live beside.”
The other, more privileged demographic is what Kartel describes as “society people,” descendants of the politicians and wealthy citizens who led Jamaica’s two main political factions — the conservative-leaning Jamaica Labour Party and the democratic-socialist People’s National Party — in the 1960s and 1970s. The elections that followed Jamaica’s independence from the U.K., in 1962, were corrupted with violence. Politically affiliated gangs threatened or killed community members who didn’t vote and terrorized the opposition. At least 800 people were murdered during the general-election season in 1980.
In 2020, Prime Minister Andrew Holness, representing the JLP, and Peter Phillips, the leader of the PNP at the time, signed a pact to enshrine their commitment to a peaceful election season. (Full disclosure: Phillips is a distant relative of mine; I met him for the first time last year.) There was no room for political violence; too many Jamaican lives had been lost during the pandemic. Instead, Holness enlisted musicians like Shenseea and Skillibeng to record dubplates, or audio clips, to promote his campaign. Other candidates made similar moves.
Bounty Killer, known as the “Poor People’s Governor,” was dismayed: “This is how these ppl planning on winning election today by presenting a hit dub instead of a hot debate?” he posted on social media. The prime minister, on the other hand, welcomed the support from the entertainment industry. “Artists should be free to express their political opinions without fear,” Holness said. “The music needs to do that because it is the most powerful tool of communication we have.”
“Dancehall represents what? The biggest demographic — poor people, ghetto people.”
Even though Jamaica closed 2024 with its lowest unemployment rate in history, many young people, especially in rural areas, remain disenfranchised, with limited educational and professional opportunities. Some clean windshields in Kingston or engage in lottery scams; others sell provisions in Coronation Market. Dancehall is an alluring option for many. They can create music, control their own time, and if they’re savvy, earn a living. Kartel implores young artists to advocate for themselves. Dancehall music is “not just something for us to be in a lane somewhere around the sound system,” he tells me. “This thing we have of ours can take us to the world.”
Kartel compares himself to other groundbreaking Jamaican artists whose music challenged political norms, like his former mentor, Bounty Killer. “A lot of his catalog is gangster lyrics. A lot of my catalog is X-rated. All of Bob Marley’s catalog is conscious,” he says between sips of tonic water. “We all had one thing in common — the influence. That’s why we got the pressure,” he says. All three “have the ability to influence the minds of the man in the street,” he tells me. “Therein lies the problem. We have the voice to say what people are saying.”
KARTEL’S SURPRISE PARTY is held at a restaurant with a white marble interior and black furniture. Leaning on one wall is a poster of his recent Billboard magazine cover; guests line up to write their birthday wishes for Kartel. Outside, a cigar bar is set up near a huge balloon installation promoting Str8 Vybz. I recognize familiar faces from the week or so I’ve spent in Kingston. His manager and business partner T.J. and Moonie, his stylist, are there; so are Sheba and Lisa Hyper, two of his day-ones who were part of his entourage during our interview.
Kartel arrives after 11 p.m., wearing a designer button-down and sunglasses. “I hate surprises,” he whispers. “I don’t like people planning things around me and I don’t know about it.” Producers RedBoom Supamix and NotNice stand nearby as Kartel cuts into a cake decorated like a turntable. After his mother leads everyone in singing a birthday song, he walks through some drapes to a more private section where his family is seated.
“Ah, who yuh a look fuh? Motha?” a relative says, pointing me in her direction. Theresa Wilson Palmer has a protective energy about her. She sits surrounded by relatives while she stirs her drink with a cocktail straw. She peers at me through her red eyeglasses and tells me that she was very glad — relieved, even — to see Adidja reunited with their family. She shares the recipe for the fish she had cooked for him when he came home: “Jus’ a likkle scallion, pimento leaf, butter, salt, pepper. Steam it down.”
The following night, Kartel hosts his official birthday party at MECA, the venue owned by Michael Dawson, his Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto co-author. By 1 a.m., the place is crammed with people. Massive orange neon signs that read “GAZA” and “WORL BOSS” hang from the banisters.
Eventually, Kartel arrives wearing a suit with his locs braided back. Some of the biggest dancehall artists are in his section, including Popcaan, who made a surprise appearance at Freedom Street. Several bottles of prosecco decorated with sparklers walk by. Kartel hops on the mic and expresses gratitude for everyone who believed in him.
Later on, there’s a small scuffle, but it’s unclear who or what instigated the altercation. Things simmer down, but Kartel leaves with a security escort. Everyone seems to follow him out as if they were his disciples.
As the party goes on without him, I think back to our conversation in the lounge outside, when he talked about the role he plays in Jamaican culture, and why his music remains so controversial. “Dancehall represents what? The biggest demographic — poor people, ghetto people,” he told me. “And not only represents ghetto people, but it also represents ghetto people becoming successful, ghetto people moving up on that social echelon. A lot of people don’t like that.”
