“For the Culture” is the title of the album just released by Alborosie, a world star of reggae music who has lived in Kingston for years, married to a Jamaican but Italian, even if – we verified it in a reportage a few years ago – Jamaicans ignore his origins and consider him one of their own (white Jamaicans are few, but there are). We say a world star because he won a MOBO Award (Music Of Black Origin), the prize that is awarded every year in New York and which he received in 2011 in the reggae category, the only white man to have ever succeeded.
The prize, intended as an object, is next to a guitar, in the studio with the mixer where we begin the interview: it is a simple block of glass engraved with the initials MOBO, but for Alborosie it has a special meaning, it shows that the choices (risky ) that he did were right. “I am of Sicilian and Calabrian origins – he specifies -, emigrated as a child to Milan and then to Bergamo”, and now a naturalized Jamaican.
He didn’t come to Kingston with the ambition of becoming a star. He tells himself this way: «I discovered reggae when I was 15, in Italy, hearing Bob Marley on TV. I didn’t even know who he was, but I immediately understood that this was my path. Then I founded the Reggae National Tickets group. We did concerts, made records. We were doing well, but after a while I realized that Italy was a small thing. So I wanted to leave ».
For six years he spent three months a year in Jamaica. “I didn’t do anything. I watched, I listened to music. I learned the art and put it aside. Then I moved full time to Jamaica, to work in a Port Antonio record company, for another six years. Six years without ever singing and without ever playing ».
A crossing in the desert. Alborosie felt no match for Jamaicans. «One day I said to myself: I now know their music. I know the place and the people. I can also speak patwa (the language of Jamaicans and reggae songs, ed). I’m ready. That’s the time I started singing and playing reggae here in Jamaica. Two or three songs. Many liked them: the phone started ringing. A short time later, with great fear, I approached a stage. They gave me a kick and I got on it ». He has never gone down.
He is now a Jamaican with a controlled designation of origin, including ankle-length dreadlock hair, twisted into thick braids like hawsers. Kilos and kilos of stuff, usually collected in the kind of multicolored bonnet in vogue on this island.
Challenging question: is there a relationship between ethnicity and music? You had to become Jamaican. What if I stayed in Italy instead? «It would not have been the same – he replies -. You can’t do certain things if you don’t live them. Living here you do not do a thing, you become it ». But how do you change your identity? “It’s a dangerous thing, because you risk losing yourself. You must first destroy yourself and then rebuild yourself. Separate the molecules and then put them back together. Like in the teleportation of Star Trek ». And when Alborosie talks about getting lost, he doesn’t say so to speak, in a philosophical sense: Jamaica is beautiful but it’s also full of temptations, and you really risk losing yourself. It didn’t happen to him.
The name Alborosie was originally broken down into “Al Borosie”: Al because at the registry office in Italy he was registered as Alberto D’Ascola, and Borosie because the word “borosie” in the “patwa” language, that is Jamaican Creole, means arrogant, arrogant, and that’s how his first Jamaican friends had labeled him, half serious and joking, when they met him.
Alborosie also reveals to me that the Italians, while not paying a pledge, carry a triple stigma with them in Jamaica: “They accuse us of three serious historical crimes. They say that the Romans, that is, the ancient Italians, crucified Jesus Christ. Then they accuse the Italian Christopher Columbus of having discovered America and started the extermination of the natives and the trafficking of blacks. And then they are angry with Mussolini because he invaded Ethiopia and chased away the Negus Haile Selassié, a myth of the Rastas ».
His home in Kingston also serves as a recording studio and is therefore filled with musical instruments and equipment, as well as Bob Marley posters and reggae memorabilia. But above all it is striking that at the entrance the image of a typical ghost of the local santeria looms, a sinister figure that is encountered everywhere in Jamaica, but is never seen inside the houses. What’s he doing here? «Oh I don’t know – laughs Alborosie – my wife hung it. She is Jamaican, yet Jamaicans immediately run out of a house if they find that stuff there … ». Here, maybe it will be some kind of anti-theft device.
Alborosie, a naturalized Jamaican Italian, is the only white man to ever win a MOBO award for reggae music