No Rock And Roll Fun

COUNTERPOINT: To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, so it was that the Black Music Council turned up to protest at the MOBOs that the nominations for the homophobic acts had been withdrawn.



It turns out the Black Music Council is an organisation which has formed itself mainly to complain about Outrage's campaign. Council leader Blacker Dread insists that songs like Buju Banton's Boom Bye Bye don't really call for the murder of gay men at all, and it's all a terrible misunderstanding:

These words are metaphors, and whoever translated those lyrics and the Metropolitan Police needs to look into what they're actually saying and doing," Blacker Dread said. "I think they’ve been misled in the terminology of these words.

"There's no way in Jamaican culture that says Boom Bye Bye means 'shoot the queer in the head'," he said. "I don’t know where you get that from."

It's odd that, if his ostracism from the music venues of London and the States is based on a huge error of translation, Buju Banton hasn't himself said so - and it's hard to see quite what else the line "Shoot dem no come if we shot dem" could mean.