TO DI WORLD

Colbie Caillat

BY STARAPPLE
Any publicity is good publicity, or at least so they say; I don’t think Kanye would be agreeing with that right now or the NBA Baller whose matey blasted their romping on the internet; lest not even mention our own local celebrities whose prowess and form would make the VMA’s seem as boring as our parliamentary debates.

It is debatable that dancehall is viable. In this article we are going to overlook production quality, lyrical content, music videos, artistes who collect for show and fail to show, badmanism and payola; that will be for another article. Publicity is a critical element to any artiste development. Previously, you had a few dominant publicists in the industry or avenues for publicity; now the avenues are many.

There are about ten dominant social networking websites with Facebook being the number 1, followed by My Space, and Hi 5 is now number 5, the rest are negligible. Twitter has raced around MSN, Yahoo and Gmail. So if you are talking about getting out there, that is minor nowadays (publicists still have a role, but now you have these auxiliaries).

What is rather befuddling is that you have some smart artistes who have put up good biographies on their site, even put up players so that fans can preview their songs and even post blogs; kudos to them. Then there are others who obviously seemed more concerned with Farmville and at all hours of the night letting you know ‘they are going to bed’, ‘they have a headache’, ‘they are watching this and that show’, ‘they are eating this and that candy bar’ and all sorts of utter irrelevant rubbish.

It begs one to wonder if that is why we have so much ‘lyrically wanting’ songs perpetuating the airwaves and dancehall. Seems most of these artistes spend substantive time all hours of night and day twittering and facebooking that their brainwaves go flat when it comes to being lyrically creative. We are not living like the Kardashians, we are still producing a stepchild of reggae which has sales that are like a morsel of candy instead of a nice big slice of bread pudding.

Colbie Caillat used it to her advantage by posting her music and going around and promoting her songs and now she is bubbly with constant shows. Instead what are we busy doing - blaming the government, sleeping around with other artistes man and woman, not showing up for overseas and local engagements because we have ‘gallis’ artistes busy watching the several ‘pums’ that them ‘own’, cussing out deejays for not playing their substandard songs and twitting rubbish.

Use the new media wisely, post videos of your interviews, clippings of your performances, tour dates, and upcoming projects. Spread seeds of usefulness.