Karbon honors Heroes and Calls for Reset

At a packed wake for Alan “Skill” Cole last September, Karbon rocked the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre in Kingston with a culture-driven performance. His heartfelt homage to Cole, Bob Marley’s former manager and arguably Jamaica’s greatest footballer, was one of the event’s highlights.

On ‘Jamaica’, his latest song, Karbon also pays homage to Marley and other reggae greats such as Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, as well as Paul Bogle, Nanny and Marcus Garvey, three of the country’s National Heroes.

The Rastafarian chanter believes Jamaica needs the righteous message of those patriots to help steer its wayward youth on the right path.

“It’s very fundamental to collect a baton in humility to protect, serve the mission of that baton with dignity and patriotism by carrying through the works in its rightful order and even enhancing the accuracy and acceleration of how you have received the baton,” Karbon reasoned. “It must be passed on even in a more advanced manner to the coming generation so they can keep advancing. It’s not just the music, it’s the ‘livity’ of Rastafari, so it all has to encompass one head and heart balance,” he added.

Released in January, ‘Jamaica’ is co-produced by Mek Cent$ Entertainment and State of Art Records and Ras Vanni of Fifth Element Music Group. It is also inspired by Hurricane Melissa which destroyed a large part of rural Jamaica last October, including St. Elizabeth parish, long considered the country’s agricultural hub.

While many Jamaican artistes have written and recorded songs empathising with the grief resulting from the Category 5 hurricane, Karbon has different thoughts about Melissa’s passage.

“After what I saw Hurricane Melissa did to our food basket parish, I knew that Mother Nature wasn’t pleased with Jamaica and the direction it’s heading with all that western toxicity, so she was detoxing Jamaica because Mother Nature knows the power of the Jamaican people, and that power which they inherited through their ancestors some of which I mention in the song,” he said.

It has been a strong start to 2026 for Karbon, who is from Manchester, another farm-rich parish that borders St. Elizabeth. In March, he gave a solid performance at Protoje’s Lost In Time Festival in Kingston alongside singer Dahvid Slur with whom he collaborated on ‘Jah Works’, a song released in 2025.

(Photo contributed)