Videos : Ini Kamoze : Here Comes The Hotstepper
Videos : Ini Kamoze : Here Comes The Hotstepper
Who Is Ini Kamoze?
"Out in the street, they call it murder.... when riddim spacing out ya head..." echoes iNi Kamoze. One of the most admired things about Jamaican reggae artistes has been their ability to suddenly emerge from the depths of oblivion to considerable attention and success. There is no better example of this than iNi Kamoze. Only a few Jamaican artistes have paid the kind of dues he has paid. Kamoze recounts hanging out at Duke Reid's Treasure Isle studio, watching Mikey "Dread At The Control" Campbell working the boards. Often, the much feared Duke would chase him out of the studio as an idler, gun in hand.
Kamoze is the son of a tough police superintendent dubbed "The Scorpion", and a factory worker mother. He was born in a seaside shack in Oracabessa, Jamaica. His mother, in a fit of anger over not hearing from his father, placed the infant in a cardboard box and left him at the gate of another female acquaintance (of his dad) in a Kingston ghetto called Jones Town. The woman, Miss Ette, still claims him as her little son. As a young boy, Kamoze was sent to live with his grandfather, where he showed great promise and was touted to become the doctor of the family. However, this was not to be, as he copped out of high school and hitchhiked his way to Kingston and turned to hustling in the Bond street area.
Kamoze's friend, Tallis, recounts one Sunday evening; "Nika" (as they nicknamed Kamoze) and two other yout' stand up on the corner at Charles and Bond street, when all of a sudden some police jump out of them jeep. One a them say, "where ya live?" Nika point up the street and say up there sah, but that time him never live nowhere. Him used to sleep on top of that shop there (pointing to a flat roofed structure on the corner). The cop say, "run"! Till this day I don't know why they tell him to run, but as soon as he turned, gunshots bark and the two other man them dead. They were armed." Tallis continues, "Nika is the luckiest yout' I know."
Kamoze moved to the politically charged Spanish Town area and took to the Rastafarian way of life. Years later he would point to this as what saved him, after asking an acquaintance from his old neighborhood for seven youths he ran with and learned that six of them had met violent deaths. Encouraged by a newscaster, the late Leo Ferguson - who always took him to Radio Jamaica - Kamoze pushed himself as a playwright (his hit comedy "The Runnings" was talked about for a long time). He wrote a picture history book; "Port Royal: the Richest and Wickedest City on Earth", and crafted his singer/songwriter skills. Many would later tout him as one of the best songwriters out of Jamaica.
Every Friday evening Kamoze would visit the home of reggae icon Jimmy Cliff to eat ital food and talk about music. On one of these occasions Kamoze was telling his friend Newton Merritt (Cliff's nephew) that he was giving up this music thing because "it nah work fi I". Kamoze by this time had done three moderately successful singles on the Mogho Naba label. Only one radio personality would give him any air-play, Dermott Hussey. Says Merritt, "He had six of the toughest tracks I ever heard on this demo tape, so I called Sly (of Sly and Robbie fame) and gave him the tape. Sly forgot about the tape for some time, but stumbled on it one day and popped it in his deck. Recalls Sly, "I couldn't believe it, it was the wickedest thing since Bob Marley. I called Robbie and said we have to record this now, right now!". (Read More)
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