Vybz Kartel is reclaiming his throne

Taken from the spring ​’25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

On a breezy Friday evening in the Uptown section of Kingston, Jamaica, the AC Hotel’s lobby has transitioned into a grown-and-sexy lounge party. As an in-house DJ plays mainstream dancehall, couples sip rum punch near the pool and groups of women relax on the couches. European businessmen in button-down shirts wave down the waiting staff, while South Asian families with teenage children hurry towards the hotel’s elevators, allowing the adults to have their space. Having arrived on the island an hour earlier, I meet a Kingston-based friend for a drink to tell him all about my big assignment tomorrow.

​“Worl’ Boss here, enuh,” my buddy says. ​“For real?” I reply, sceptically. ​“Where?” I look around in anticipation.

He can’t pinpoint the exact location, but he’d just seen someone’s Instagram Stories alluding to a sighting in the area. After a couple of drinks, I discover the AC’s kitchen is closed, so I pursue a recommendation for the all-hours café inside the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, just a short drive away. As my Uber eases out of the hotel grounds, the driver, a young man in his late twenties, notices something that jolts him out of his relaxed mood. He rolls down his window and starts yelling. ​“Worl’ Boss!! Big up mi fadda. Spanish Town mi ah come from!” I look to the left and, standing by a black Range Rover in dark shades, saluting my driver with one hand and taking a phone call with the other is, in fact, the Worl’ Boss himself: the dancehall deity better known as Vybz Kartel.

In 2011, at the height of his stardom, the artist born Adidja Palmer was found guilty of murdering an associate. He was sentenced to life, with the possibility of parole after 35 years — until early last year, when his verdict was overturned by London’s Privy Council due to the attempted bribery of one of the jurors. When the court of appeal in Jamaica decided not to retry the case, Kartel was released after a 13-year stint in a maximum security Jamaican prison.

Six months on from his August liberation, the most influential Jamaican musician since Robert Nesta Marley is back, his focus firmly set on reclaiming the throne he was forced to vacate almost a decade-and-a-half ago.

The morning after my sighting, back in the AC Hotel lobby, I meet with Kartel’s manager and long- time producer, TJ: a burly guy dressed all in black with a Louis Vuitton cross-body bag. He daps me up. ​“He was partying last night, so just give him a little more time. I don’t wanna bother him so early after he was out.” I wait.

A couple of hours later, I’m called to the hotel’s conference room, where I’m met with the sight of Kartel shuffling his way out of the lift. His movement is either a sign of after-party sluggishness, or the inevitable wear and tear of being a 49-year-old who’s still readjusting to the demands of his job – not to mention life outside prison. Then there’s his other battle, with the autoimmune disorder Graves’ disease. Physically, Kartel’s changed a lot since he disappeared behind bars in 2011 at the age of 35, still suspended in the euphoria of heaping up dancefloors and hoods across the globe.

The Vybz Kartel who was handcuffed and taken to jail was thin but wiry, rocking shoulder-length dreads, his many tattoos made more visible due to him lightening his dark skin with bleaching cream. Today, his face is much fuller and grey hairs protrude from his beard. He’s traded the locs for braids, his skin has returned to its factory settings and he’s adorned in jewellery: iced-out watches on both wrists, diamond rings on almost every finger, a diamond chain around his neck.

As he readjusts to a busy schedule as a working artist, Kartel has recently been holed up at the AC. ​“I’ve been living here since December because my house is too far in the hills and everything is five minutes away from here,” says the musician, born and raised in Portmore, a coastal town around eight miles from Kingston. ​“Since I came out, I’ve got some heavier crutches. You know, I smoke more. I drink more. I don’t know, something just got triggered. I’m not unconsciously doing it, but that’s the fucked up part. It’s like: ​‘Bro, you don’t need it.’ But, then again it’s like: ​‘Bro, you do need it,’ because of stress.”

As one might assume, only six months free of a sentence that would have kept him in prison until at least his mid-sixties, Kartel is dealing with mental and emotional challenges stemming from his incarceration (a situation not helped by the threat, for a while pre-release, of a retrial). He recently posted a video on Instagram advocating for Black people to take mental health more seriously as a community. What triggered that moment of sharing?

​“I was upstairs asleep in my room and, I don’t know why, but my fiancée was shaking [her] keys and I jumped up,” he explains. ​“In prison, when you’re asleep, you’re still listening for keys because guards will sneak in at three, four in the morning to search you. That PTSD is still in my body. So I jumped up, I went into the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth, took up the phone and just mek the video. It’s tough, man. I got money, I got fame, but it’s deeper.”

This isn’t the Vybz Kartel people are used to hearing from. Before he went away, this was a musician who channelled his tough beginnings and the intensity of Jamaica’s dancehall scene into a cascade of fiery, lyrically provocative releases that forged his reputation as the king of dancehall. Born in 1976 and raised in Portmore’s Waterford section, he was never a stranger to the ills that plague financially-stressed communities: violence, petty crime, gangsterism, drug activity and mental health complications. Though he grew up idolising and learning the ropes from uncles who made music, the immediate surroundings he experienced inspired the kind of lyrics that would be instantly relatable to the folks around him.

So, as with many griots from ghettos across the African diaspora, Kartel became something of a megaphone for his area. From the start of his career in the late ​’90s, which began with ​“Vibes Cartel” being the name of a three-man group, his music chronicled life in the garrison with wit, imaginative lyricism and skilful flows.

In 2002, a freshly solo 26-year-old Vybz Kartel hit his stride, merging hip-hop and dancehall sensibilities on scorching mixtapes, dubplates and singles, drawing support from the Jamaican underground as well as the wider Caribbean diaspora. There was the thumping Gun Clown, on which he outlined the dos and don’ts of how to conduct yourself while toting firearms, an unrelenting outpouring of metaphors in nearly every line. There was Most High, from the Mexican Riddim mixtape, where he claimed to have been warring before ​“Adam and Eve parents fuck and get dem”. Then, on Boxing Day that year, Kartel performed at Sting, Jamaica’s longest-running concert series, where the take-no-prisoners audience’s response to the performances of the deejay (the Jamaican equivalent to an MC) can turn someone into an overnight star – or a vessel for widespread scorn. Vybz Kartel masterfully achieved the former.

The following year, dancehall titan Bounty Killer recruited him to join The Alliance, his collective that also featured Busy Signal, Bling Dawg and Kiprich. Also in 2003, Def Jam featured Kartel twice on the label’s rap/​dancehall fusion project Def Jamaica. The album closed with Kartel adding a verse to Jay‑Z and Pharrell’s hit Frontin’. It was already a far cry from the underground status he’d occupied barely 12 months prior.

The Waterford section of Portmore is nicknamed ​“Gaza”, and Kartel would adopt the monikers ​“The Gaza Don” and ​“The Gaza Boss”. ​“For us as Jamaicans – Rastafarian culture comes from Jamaica – we’ve always been aware of world issues,” he explains of the nickname’s origins. ​“We grow up with elders, so we know about the Gaza, Yasser Arafat, the PLO, the Reagans, Gorbachev, the USSR. So we been grow up knowing about those affairs. We like to read, we like knowledge. So I was watching the news in ​’07 and it was something about Israel and Gaza. The kids in my area came up and said: ​‘Teacha! A Gaza the ends fi name!’ And mi a seh, ​‘Alright.’” Kartel holds up his hands to show me the tattoo spelling ​“Gaza Thug” across his knuckles.

“[The local kids] saw people [like me] fighting against that type of authority – [although] oppression is a better word. That’s how I got the name, but it true to form; it’s ghetto.” Palestinian fans have been reaching out to him ever since. ​“Even when I was in prison they would message me: ​‘Free The Gaza Boss! Free Palestine!’ They start to see the parallel because [of] Vybz Kartel’s incarceration and they recognise it as unfair. It resonated with them.”

In terms of musical output, global impact and cultural influence, from 2003 until his arrest in 2011, Vybz Kartel accomplished what no other dancehall artist has come close to since. He released a staggering amount of albums, mixtapes and singles, the vast majority achieving a type of ubiquity that could never be quantified by mere chart performance. He broke away from The Alliance and created his own camp, Portmore Empire, and later, Gaza Nation, launching the careers of Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Vanessa Bling and more. He engaged in one of the most notorious feuds in dancehall history, warring with one-time associate Mavado on wax and in real life. During their clash at Sting 2008, Kartel went as far as to bring out a casket on stage and assured Mavado that he’d be going inside it. Things got to a place where local government and alleged crime bosses had to step in and facilitate a peace treaty.

Kartel consistently created controversy that added to his lore, making him a name recognisable internationally, even to people who likely had never meaningfully engaged with his art. In 2004, his MOBO nomination for Best Reggae Single was revoked, along with Elephant Man’s, due to homophobic lyrics. ​“The internet and social media has changed the way a lot of people think in Jamaica,” he says now of his past transgressions. ​“We still have intolerances. But people are more tolerant [of] taboo subjects because the world is opening and they get a better understanding.”

At the turn of the 2010s, he significantly lightened his skin with bleaching cream and made songs such as Cake Soap to boast the apparent social benefits, suggesting that skin lightening for Black people is ​“tantamount to white people getting a sun tan”. He also helped further the popularity of daggering – a song and dance style that instructed people to simulate sexual acts – which Jamaican authorities and socially conservative citizens considered to be lewd. In 2009, daggering songs were banned on Jamaican radio.

Then came 2011 and Kartel’s arrest for the murder of 27-year-old Clive ​“Lizard” Williams. According to charges, he and three co- defendants lured Williams to the artist’s house to ask about a pair of missing guns. They were then alleged to have beaten Williams to death, with police subsequently claiming to have seen a message from Kartel suggesting Williams’s body had been chopped up. In 2014, three years after his arrest and after a highly-publicised 65-day trial – the longest in Jamaican history – Kartel was sentenced to life. He’s maintained his innocence from day one.

Talking to me now, Kartel – who, after his earlier grogginess, has livened up the more we’ve spoken – claims he was always confident that he’d be released. ​“I tell everybody: ​‘From the first day mi go in, mi know mi affi come out.’ Never knew it was gonna take so long,” he admits, his index pressing against the table as he speaks. ​“Never felt like it wasn’t going to work out. Don’t know why, but I never felt that.”

​“The 238 you see on my face,” he continues, referring to the number that’s tattooed under his right eye, ​“it’s the paragraph from my case transcript. I put this on my face in prison because I knew this was the paragraph that was gonna free me, which was the technicality. Understand? So it said, so it done. I always knew because I was in the trial, and I saw everything they were doing, and I saw they were fucking up. So I knew I was gonna come out.”

During his incarceration, Kartel worked hard to try to keep his name relevant. He regularly released new material recorded on an iPad in his cell, a process that sometimes involved pulling the mattress over his head to prevent sound from bouncing while doing vocal takes. In 2016, the contagiously catchy track Fever became his biggest commercial hit, going gold in the US and silver in the UK.

That same year, he helped boost the trajectory of rising Jamaican star Shenseea with their collaboration Loodi. He also made appearances on tracks by Busta Rhymes, Bounty Killer and Squash. Now that he’s a free man, Kartel’s dogged efforts to maintain relevance while inside have paid dividends. For the last six months, he’s been on a non-stop welcome-back tour that, on social media, looks like a long-anticipated, all-smiles victory lap. We’ve seen him hang out with two of his sons, Likkle Addi and Likkle Vybz, both now young adults he can share spliffs with. He’s reunited with Popcaan, who gifted Kartel one of the diamond-encrusted watches he’s wearing when we meet.

He’s always accompanied by his fiancée, Sidem Öztürk. She’s a 32-year-old former social worker from London who he started seeing while still incarcerated, after she began regularly interacting with him on Instagram. Their relationship has provoked both fanfare and disapproval from longtime Kartel fans, some of whom are displeased by his decision to date a non-Black woman (Öztürk is of Kurdish descent) – criticism Kartel shrugged off with his 2022 track Interracial.

Yet, despite being a husband-to-be, Kartel is still going viral, on what feels like a weekly basis, for accepting intimate dances from women in Jamaica’s nightclubs. ​“The girls these days are wilder than their predecessors – not that I know! Just that I see,” he jokes, nudging me from across the table. But this is also inarguably good PR. Kartel knows how to play the gossip and meme-hungry internet, regularly sending comment sections on salacious pages like The Shade Room into hysteria.

Still, away from the cameras, he has his work cut out, adjusting to what life looks like for a newly freed near-50-year-old with serious health issues. A couple of years ago, when Kartel shared photos from family visits in prison, fans noticed a change in his appearance. His face and upper body appeared to be bloated, and he always kept his eyes concealed by shades. It was later revealed that he was battling Graves’ disease. The autoimmune disorder affects the thyroid gland, which can make sufferers’ eyes appear to be bulging out of their sockets.

Even in the outside world, Graves’ can be a brutal disease, but Kartel believes the conditions he endured in prison accelerated the illness’s impact on his body. ​“I was in a Jamaican version of solitary confinement for my last two years. I was there with a lot of high-profile prisoners from Spanish Town, Montego Bay and Kingston. That was where they kept me in a little box,” Kartel says, his eyes still behind sunglasses. ​“In the middle of the prison, I was surrounded by four or five fences. It was giving claustrophobic. That’s where I lost a lot of power in my legs and where my sickness got worse. I wasn’t physically active. I wanted to go to the gym and they were like: ​‘No, you’re a high-profile prisoner, you can’t go to the gym.’

​“In his defence, the superintendent tried but it didn’t work. But that’s where I think I deteriorated most in those last two years. The journey was rough. I grew up in the ghetto, but I’ve never been through that kind of stress. But we’re men,” he adds, ​“so we gotta do what we gotta do.“

So, sickness and common sense be damned. On New Year’s Eve 2024 – just under five months after he was told there’d be no retrial – Kartel staged Freedom Street, a massive pay-per-view homecoming at Kingston’s 35,000 capacity National Stadium. There had been doubts about how well he could perform, considering his health, or if he’d just lost his sauce after so many years behind bars. That background chatter turned out to be the motivation he needed.

“Me being me, I felt like I had something to prove. People were saying: ​‘Nigga, you’re not coming out.” People were saying: ​“If he comes out, he can’t lock the place again.” Nigga, really?” He stares at me across the table, still visibly offended by the accusations. ​“If you want me to jump this table, tell me I can’t do it.”

What the sceptics overlooked was that the success of a gig of that magnitude didn’t just hinge on whether Kartel still had the physical strength to power through an hour-long set. With an epically long list of guests, the Freedom Street show triumphed by illustrating Kartel’s deep musical influence.

To open the show in suitably dramatic fashion, Kartel rose into view on an elevator from below the stage, Undertaker-style, greeting the hysterical crowd in a three-piece suit – an image that was endlessly memed in the following weeks. He proceeded to bring out protégés Popcaan, the biggest dancehall star since Kartel, and Tommy Lee, a pioneer in gothic-tinged dancehall. The latter brought out his own protégé, the wildly popular young Spanish Town deejay Skeng. Busta Rhymes, the American rap don who has Jamaican heritage and whose gruff, elastic vocal style takes inspiration from dancehall, showed his respect with a short, sweat-soaked set. Spice, the reigning ​“Queen of Dancehall”, jokingly urged Öztürk, who stood cheerfully smoking a spliff side stage, to look away so she could give Kartel a wine as they performed their 2009 classic Romping Shop. There was a full- circle moment when ​’90s dancehall icon Bounty Killer, who had once mentored Kartel, joined him onstage. Safe to say, the crown had been returned.

The dancehall landscape Kartel has returned to is wildly different to the one he left back in 2011. For sure, the generation that immediately followed him – acts whose teenage years were spent under Gaza Nation’s reign, such as Alkaline, Masicka and Squash – have a similar musical sensibility. They have gunman tunes, party songs, prayerful ballads that reflect on humble beginnings and songs that confess feelings of longing for love interests. But the only one of the bunch that’s had any considerable success making an impact outside of the Caribbean diaspora, and becoming a fixture in wider pop culture, is Popcaan. He’s released music under Drake’s OVO label, appeared on a Gorillaz album and fires off catchphrases that capture the public’s embrace on what feels like a monthly basis. It’s hardly a coincidence that, out of all those acts, he came up directly under Kartel. Like Worl’ Boss, Popcaan understands that projecting an entertaining personality is just as important as having formidable music.

The most recent generation’s biggest names, even if they’re not quite popping on a global scale like Kartel and Popcaan, are moving dancehall forward. The present-day take on the genre exemplified by acts such as Skillibeng, Skeng, Kraff Gad, Rajah Wild and Valiant – possibly because of the trickle-down influence of drill from the US and from London – is brazen in its darkness and bloodlust. But they’re also pushing out sounds that are genuinely fresh.

They regularly interact with the Trinibad movement out of Trinidad, with the soca-producing island’s new brand of dancehall beloved of teens and twentysomethings. Of this new cohort, the only one who’s been able to echo, on some level, the Kartel and Popcaan blueprint for global expansion has been Skillibeng. He’s worked with Nicki Minaj, South African singer Tyla and Nigerian Afrobeats star Wizkid. For everyone else in the Jamaican dancehall scene, though, expanding their reach has been a real challenge. And it’s not because the music isn’t good.

​“They gotta find themselves,” comes Kartel’s assessment as he leans back in his chair and sips a Red Stripe. By which he means: think bigger. Going by the conversations he’s been having with younger artists, many newer acts are resistant to altering their lyrics and cadence in order to reach audiences beyond the Caribbean diaspora. ​“Like, OK, come out in Jamaica, tear up Jamaica. But there’s a bigger market. And sometimes you gotta fine-tune your style to tap into the larger markets. The talent is there and I always talk to them. I say: once you strike a balance between art and commerce, take yourself a little less seriously. Humble yourself to the music. Because if you’re not a student of it, you can’t be a teacher.”

Kartel remembers the advice he received from Jamaican music legend Buju Banton during a conversation in Manhattan in 2004. ​“He told me: ​‘Once you slow it down and they hear you, you win.’ That’s when I started fine-tuning it. Then ​’05, the next year, I get my first Deejay of the Year,” he says of the trophy he won at the International Reggae & World Music Awards. ​“And it went uphill from there.”

Vybz Kartel’s own career is at an interesting crossroads. Can he revive the energy of his best material? So far, the evidence is mixed. In January, he released the 10^th anniversary edition of his Viking (Vybz Is King) album, with seven new tracks that felt dated and his voice, at times, strained. A quick look at Kartel’s Instagram account shows that even he (despite posting multiple times per day) hasn’t shared the album much.

On a more encouraging note, he was nominated for his first Grammy for Party With Me, an eight-track project that arrived in the spring last year. His American visa was reinstated for the first time in 20 years, just in time for him to attend February’s ceremony in Los Angeles. On the red carpet, Kartel sported a turquoise suit jacket and bow tie, while Öztürk wore an elegant black gown. American Twitch superstar Kai Cenat effectively lost his mind when he ran across the dancehall icon, bowing to him and touching him in disbelief. Looking ahead, it seems there’s a world tour in the offing, including a slot at this summer’s Wireless Festival in London’s Finsbury Park – according to Kartel, anyway, who leaked the news (now confirmed by organisers) in an interview.

Beyond all that, it seems like Vybz Kartel is reshaping himself as a cultural advocate for Jamaica and dancehall at large. He’s the elder statesman who escaped what appeared to be a final nail in his coffin, and he has wisdom to impart and flowers to receive. Arguably the quality or success of new music is incidental; the real heavy lifting was done long ago. The man’s contribution to Jamaican music secures him a spot until the end of time. And despite the unavoidable brutality of the case that put him in jail, his respect among dancehall fans stands strong.

​“When I was away in exile, nobody claimed my throne,” Kartel insists with no little justification. ​“And now I’m back and I’ve been getting bookings like crazy. In February, I’m in Trinidad, Costa Rica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts. Then we in Guyana, London, Germany, Amsterdam and France. I’ve been getting calls from a lot of record labels in America.”

He sips the Red Stripe and lets out a smile beneath the shades. ​“That’s what I like about myself. I can’t lose.”

GROOMER Melleisa Dawkins HEAD OF PRODUCTION Adam Lilley LOCAL PRODUCER Iset Sankofa LOCATION MANAGER Joel Thyme PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Benjamin Callot STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Ngozi Smith PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Ryan Russel