There is a grief that does not have a name yet. It is the grief of watching something beloved change in real time and not being able to stop it. Not being able to call it and have it come back. It is the grief of a Jamaican man living in New York, checking his phone, seeing what is happening back home, and feeling a slow ache that has no clean word for it. The island is still there. The sun still rises over the Blue Mountains in a way that makes you believe in God without needing an argument. But something else is leaving. Something that took generations to build and is taking years to lose.
What the Music Used to Say
Jamaica gave the world reggae. Not just the sound but the spirit behind it. Music that carried consciousness. Music that spoke truth to power with such gentleness and such force at the same time that it crossed every border, every language, every cultural divide and landed in the hearts of people who had never set foot on the island. Bob Marley did not just sing songs. He transmitted a frequency. And that frequency said: we are more than what they tried to make us. We are free. We are whole. We are loved.
I play reggae every morning at 6am. Not because it is nostalgic. Because it is necessary. Because in a city that will tell you your worth by your zip code and your bank balance, I need a daily reminder of a different value system. One that measures a man by how he loves, not by how much he accumulates.
What I hear coming out of Jamaica now breaks my heart a little. I will not pretend otherwise. The music has turned toward darkness in ways that feel less like creative evolution and more like a mirror of something going wrong at the root. When the art of a people stops celebrating their humanity and starts celebrating their brutality, that is not a music trend. That is a cultural emergency.
The Village Left the Building
There is a Jamaican proverb, it takes a village to raise a child. That proverb did not start as a proverb. It started as a practice. As a lived reality in which every adult in a community felt personal responsibility for every child in that community. You did not need to know the child's name. You did not need to be invited. If you saw a child going wrong you stepped in. You corrected. You loved. Because that child belonged to all of you.
That village is leaving Jamaica. Slowly, quietly, and with devastating consequence.
The individualism that is the signature of American culture, everyone for themselves, mind your business, do not interfere, has been imported along with everything else. And in a society that was built on collectivism, on mutual responsibility, on the understanding that your neighbor's children are your concern, the arrival of that individualism is not progress. It is erosion.
The elders are not being looked after the way they were. The children are not being watched over the way they were. The social fabric that held communities together through poverty and hurricane and colonial history is fraying in ways that no economic development can fix because it was never an economic problem to begin with. It was always a values problem. And values do not heal with money.
The Phone in the Hand and the Culture in the Feed
I know exactly when the acceleration happened. It was not cable television, though cable television started the conversation. It was the smartphone. The moment every person in Jamaica could access the entire internet through the phone in their pocket, the floodgates opened.
Social media did not offer Jamaicans an alternative culture. It offered them thousands of alternative cultures simultaneously, all competing for attention, all optimized for engagement, most of them built on values that have nothing to do with Jamaican identity. And human beings, especially young ones, are not equipped by default to consume that volume of cultural input without being shaped by it. You have to be intentional to resist it. And that kind of intentionality requires awareness that most people were never given.
Our leaders are selling the land. Our people are migrating and not returning. The intellectual and creative class that every society needs to define and defend its culture is dispersing across the globe. I am part of that dispersal. I sit with that.
The Jamaica I carry in me, in my music and my food and my language and my values, was built by generations of people who had far less and protected far more. I owe them the respect of not treating that inheritance as optional.
The One Thing That Cannot Be Exported
I want to end this with something true and something hopeful because I am, by nature, a deeply optimistic person. I believe in the resilience of people who have already survived everything that has been thrown at them.
Everything about Jamaica is changing. The language. The values. The music. The social structures. The leadership. All of it is in motion and most of that motion is not in a direction that makes me proud.
But the sun still rises over that island in a way that stops your breath. The warmth of the Jamaican people, when it is not buried under the weight of everything going wrong, is still one of the most extraordinary things I have ever felt. There is a kindness native to that island that predates every external influence and that I genuinely believe is too deep to be fully erased.
That warmth is what I carry. That is what I give Avi at 6am when the reggae comes on and she hears a world she did not grow up in but still belongs to. That warmth is the inheritance. And it is the one thing I refuse to let go of, no matter how many borders I cross or how many years pass between visits.
Jamaica raised me. I will not let her down by forgetting what she taught me.
"If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from."
Bob Marley