"Beat Down Babylon" Bonus Episode
"Beat Down Babylon" is a touching tribute to singer Junior Byles, whose recent passing on May 15, has deeply touched the Rootsland Family. This unscheduled episode unfolds with an emotional recollection of a moment in the mid-1990s, where Host Henry K, alongside veteran reggae artist Eddie Fitzroy, encountered Junior Byles, who had once been a titan in the reggae scene but was now a mere shadow of his former self. The stark transformation from celebrated artist to a figure grappling with the harsh realities of life is a testament to the indifference of an industry that often discards its heroes. The discussion traces the roots of Junior’s artistry and the societal challenges faced by Rastafarians in Jamaica during the 1970s. His song 'Curly Locks' emerges as a powerful metaphor for the broader societal rejection experienced by those who embrace the Rastafarian faith, encapsulating themes of love, acceptance, and resistance against prejudice. As we journey through Junior's life, we are compelled to confront the dichotomy between artistic success and personal struggle, underscoring the emotional weight carried by those who create art that transcends the superficial metrics of commercial success.
Produced by Henry K in association with Voice Boxx Studios Kingston, Jamaica
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Transcript
Because righteousness govern the world.
Speaker B:Broadcasting live and direct from the rolling red hills on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, from a magical place at the intersection of words, sound and power.
Speaker B:The red light is on, your dial is set, the frequency in tune to the Roots Land Podcast stories that are music to your ears.
Speaker C:There are moments in life when you witness something so profound, so heartbreaking, that it fundamentally changes how you see your profession, how you see your future.
Speaker C: ty Kingston street in the mid-: Speaker C:Junior Biles was shuffling down Halfway Tree Road, his once commanding presence reduced to a shadow.
Speaker C:The man who had given reggae some of its most spiritually powerful anthems beat Down Babylon, Curly Locks Fade Away was now just another face in Kingston's endless parade of the forgotten.
Speaker C:Eddie always wanted to greet a fellow artist with warmth and respect called out to him.
Speaker C:But Junior Biles walked past us like we were invisible, lost in a world that only he could see.
Speaker C:I watched Eddie's face crumble.
Speaker C:That could be any one of us, he said quietly as we continued walking.
Speaker C:This music doesn't pay the bills.
Speaker C:And when things get tough, who's really there for you?
Speaker C:He asked.
Speaker C:That encounter crystallized something I had been feeling but couldn't articulate the brutal mathematics of an industry that consumes genius and discards the human vessel that carries it.
Speaker C:Junior Bile's story isn't just a cautionary tale.
Speaker C:He is a mirror that reflects the soul of reggae music itself.
Speaker C: from Kingston's Jonestown in: Speaker C:His story reads like so many others from that mechanic father, school teacher, mother, church choir training and the grinding realization that music might be the only escape from a life predetermined by circumstance.
Speaker C:But Junior possessed something that set him apart, a voice that could channel both pain and hope of an entire generation.
Speaker C: n he formed the Versatiles in: Speaker C:The industry's exploitation began immediately.
Speaker C:Despite recording tracks for producer Joe Gibbs, the Versatiles saw little compensation for their work.
Speaker C:This wasn't unusual it was standard operating procedure in an industry built on the premise that creativity was its own reward.
Speaker C: began their collaboration in: Speaker C:Something magical happened.
Speaker C:Perry, fresh from his work with Bob Marley, recognized in Junior a voice that could carry the spiritual weight of this emerging roots movement.
Speaker C:Their partnership produced songs that would outlive them both.
Speaker C:Tracks that still move crowds decades later still generate revenue for labels, still inspire new generation.
Speaker A:Your daddy say you shouldn't play with me.
Speaker A:So red curly love, know that I'm a driller.
Speaker A:Your daddy say you shouldn't play with me.
Speaker C:The song Curlie Locks Stance is one of Junior Biles most deceptively simple yet profound compositions.
Speaker C: hat Rastafarians faced in the: Speaker C:In Jamaica, it's the eternal story of forbidden love, a young man singing to his sweetheart whose father disapproves of their relationship.
Speaker C:But on closer look, you discover a powerful allegory for an entire spiritual movement struggling for acceptance in a society that viewed them as dangerous outcasts.
Speaker C:The recurring line about the father's disapproval cuts deeper than romantic disappointment.
Speaker C:In Jamaica in the early 70s, having dreadlocks wasn't just a hairstyle choice.
Speaker C:It was a revolutionary statement that could cost you employment, housing and social standing.
Speaker C:Hotels and restaurants refused to serve Rastafarians.
Speaker C:Police harassment and beatings were routine.
Speaker C:And families often disown children who embrace the faith.
Speaker C:When Junior sings your daddy says you shouldn't play with me, that becomes the voice of an entire society telling its children to stay away from these dangerous, dirty, ungodly Rastas.
Speaker C:Yet listen to how Junior responds to this rejection.
Speaker C:There's no anger, no bitterness, no call for revolution.
Speaker C:He offers gentleness as he sings.
Speaker C:The sun is shining, the breeze is blowing too and all I've got inside of me is lots of love for you.
Speaker C:This becomes the Rastafarian response to persecution.
Speaker C:Not violence, but love.
Speaker C:Not hatred, but understanding.
Speaker C:Not retaliation, but faith that truth will eventually prevail.
Speaker C:What makes this song even more poignant is its historical accuracy.
Speaker C: he time Junior recorded it in: Speaker C:In Jamaica, Bob Marley was on the verge of international stardom.
Speaker C:The movement that was once dismissed as a cult of outcasts was starting to be recognized as a legitimate spiritual and cultural force.
Speaker C:And Junior created more than a love song in Curly Locks, he created an anthem for anyone who has ever been told they do not belong, who has ever had their worth questioned because of how they look or what they believe.
Speaker C:Yet for Junior, success felt Hollow from the beginning, he was creating anthems of liberation while remaining trapped in a system designed to exploit the very artists who gave it meaning.
Speaker C:And for him, there was no separation between art and life.
Speaker C:He wasn't just singing about Rastafari and revolution.
Speaker C:Junior was living it, breathing it, carrying the spiritual burden of a movement that demanded everything from its prophets.
Speaker C:His songs were more than entertainment.
Speaker C:They were transmissions from a higher consciousness, warnings and promises delivered through a voice that trembled with divine intensity.
Speaker C:But carrying that kind of spiritual weight, it comes with a cost.
Speaker C: mperor Haile selassie died in: Speaker C:The foundation of his faith cracked, and with it, his grip on reality.
Speaker C:Unable to reconcile his belief in Selassie's divinity or with the reality of his death, Junior attempted suicide and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital psychiatric ward.
Speaker C:I don't have to tell you about the conditions in Jamaica's only public psychiatric hospital.
Speaker C:And one wonders whether his stay there caused more good than harm.
Speaker C:What followed was 50 years of mental illness, a journey through the darkness that would have broken lesser spirits entirely.
Speaker C:Yet even in his madness, there was a terrible clarity to Junior's condition.
Speaker C:The man who sang about Babylon's oppression was living proof of its reach, how it could invade not just political systems, but the human mind itself, turning genius into burden, vision into curse.
Speaker C:While Junya battled demons both internal and external, the music industry committed its greatest in it forgot him.
Speaker C:The songs that helped define reggae continued to generate profits.
Speaker C:But the man who created them saw little of that money.
Speaker C:Copyright ownership, that golden ticket to long term financial security, had slipped through his fingers like so much else.
Speaker C:This wasn't accident or oversight.
Speaker C:It was systematic.
Speaker C:The reggae industry, like most music industries, was built on the colonial model, where labels, producers and studios took advantage of young, naive, hungry talent from the tenements and had them sign away rights to songs that would go on and earn millions for sometimes as little as a hot meal.
Speaker C:Junior's tragedy was that he created music too powerful for his own good.
Speaker C:His songs became bigger than he was, took on lives of their own, generated income streams that flowed to everyone except the source.
Speaker C:By the time I encountered Junior on that Kingston street, he had been homeless for years.
Speaker C:The man who once commanded studios and stages now spent his days begging for change, sleeping in gullies, existing in the margins of a city that had once celebrated it.
Speaker C:Videos from that period and later on show a broken figure, his revolutionary dreadlocks now unkempt his eyes, carrying decades of Accumulated pain.
Speaker C:Those images haunted Jamaica's collective conscience.
Speaker C:Here was visual proof of what happened when the music stopped and the industry moved on.
Speaker C:Junior became a living reminder of reggae's original sin, the willingness to consume its profits and discard their humanity.
Speaker C:Yet something else happened in those street encounters.
Speaker C:Something that cameras couldn't capture.
Speaker C:Even in his madness, Junior retained an otherworldly dignity.
Speaker C:People who met him during his homeless years often spoke of moments when his eyes would clear, when the fog would lift and you could see a glimpse of that brilliant mind still flickering within.
Speaker C:He was broken, yes, but he wasn't defeated.
Speaker C:Something essential remained intact.
Speaker C:The real revelation of Junior Bile's story isn't found in the industry failures, though those failures demand acknowledgment.
Speaker C:It's found in the stubborn persistence of love in a family that refused to give up on a man that the world had written off.
Speaker C:His father, Kenneth Sr.
Speaker C:Worked as a mechanic his entire life.
Speaker C:Never wealthy, never famous, but always present.
Speaker C:When Junior could accept help, his father provided a home.
Speaker C:When he couldn't, his father waited.
Speaker C:No camera captured this daily act of devotion.
Speaker C:No headline celebrated this quiet heroism.
Speaker C:But it happened day after day, year after year.
Speaker C:His daughter Christine became his advocate and protector, organizing benefit concerts, fighting for recognition of his contributions, ensuring that his final years included moments of dignity and respect.
Speaker C:She gave what she could with her limited resources, proving that love doesn't require wealth, only commitment.
Speaker C:This family's love stands as reggae's greatest untold story.
Speaker C:While executives counted profits and journalists wrote their obituaries for roots reggae, the Biles family was writing a different narrative entirely.
Speaker C:One about the power of unconditional love to survive even the darkest circumstances.
Speaker C:In Junior's final years, something beautiful began to happen.
Speaker C:Fellow artists who had grown up listening to his music started to step forward.
Speaker C:Bounty Killers foundation provided financial assistance.
Speaker C:Reggae great Earl China Smith organized tribute concerts and recordings.
Speaker C: lifetime achievement award in: Speaker C:These gestures mattered not just for the practical help they provided, but for what they represented.
Speaker C:A recognition that artists have value beyond their ability to generate profits.
Speaker C:That genius deserves care and respect, even when it comes wrapped in mental illness and social marginalization.
Speaker C:You know, often those we dismiss as mentally impaired possess a clarity of vision that defies ordinary reason.
Speaker C:Seeing through the illusion that trapped the rest of us in cycles of spiritual emptiness.
Speaker C:Their so called madness actually is a form of divine insight that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human.
Speaker C:In his song Fade Away, Junior Biles delivered what may be his most prescient the rich is getting richer every day, and the little that the poor man got it shall be taken away.
Speaker C:Written almost 50 years ago, these words ring with an accuracy that's almost supernatural.
Speaker C:I get letters and comments from listeners across the globe who worry about this growing disparity between the rich and poor that politicians promise to address but seem powerless to close.
Speaker C:The numbers don't lie.
Speaker C:Wealth concentration has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, while working families find themselves one paycheck away from disaster.
Speaker C:Junior saw this coming when most of us were still believing in trickle down economics and the promise that rising tides lift all boats.
Speaker C:But here's where Junior's spiritual insight transcends his economic pressure prophecy.
Speaker C:While the material wealth gap widens in one direction, the spiritual wealth gap flows in the opposite.
Speaker C:Current study after study confirms what ancient wisdom has always Happiness and money, beyond meeting basic needs, simply don't correlate.
Speaker C:The richest among us often carry the heaviest burdens of emptiness, anxiety and existential despair.
Speaker C:I think about this when I walk through cities and see grand buildings dedicated to wealthy benefactors, libraries and theaters and museums bearing the names of robber barons and tech moguls unveiled with fanfare and ceremonial ribbons.
Speaker C:Yet give it time and those same buildings get torn down, rebuilt, renamed.
Speaker C:No one remembers the name of the theater as much as they remember the performance that moves them to tears.
Speaker C:The donor fades, but the art endures.
Speaker A:You seeks of only vanity and no love for humanity shall fade away, fade away.
Speaker A:He who checks for only wealth and not for his physical health shall fade away, fade away.
Speaker C:This is Junior's deepest teaching in the song Fade Away, that material accumulation is ultimately an exercise in vanity.
Speaker C:As he sings, the man who worships silver and gold shall surely lose his own soul, then fade away.
Speaker C:And it's not that money is evil, but that making it your God is spiritual suicide.
Speaker C:The wealthy who define themselves by their net worth discover that portfolios don't attend funerals, don't hold your hand in the dark night of the soul, don't answer when you cry out for meaning.
Speaker C:What remains eternal, as Junior Biles understood, are our deeds, our actions, our intentions, the love we give and receive.
Speaker C:There are two types of people in this those who remain true, honest, steadfast, who are forever written in the book of life, as the Bible teaches, and those who chase shadows, who build empires of sand, who ultimately just fade away.
Speaker C: r with a Reggae Gold Award in: Speaker C: ,: Speaker C:But his death wasn't an ending.
Speaker C:It was a transformation.
Speaker C:The broken man on Kingston streets dissolved back into the eternal voice that had first emerged in those early recordings with Lee Perry.
Speaker C:His songs endure not as museum pieces, but as living testaments, still singing truth to power, still offering hope to the hopeless, still channeling the divine energy that originally flowed through a young firefighter.
Speaker C:With a voice like liquid gold.
Speaker C:Every time someone plays Beatdown Babylon, Junior Biles returns not as a tragic figure from the viral videos, but as the shining star he always was.
Speaker A:I and I must whip.
Speaker A:Whoa, What a wicked situation.
Speaker A:I and I Stop.
Speaker A:This might cause a revolution and a dangerous pollution.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah.
Speaker B:Sam.
