Pan Head

Deejay Pan Head at Black Scorpio Studio in Waterhouse. (1992)

As I said in some of my previous post I used to run into Pan Head at many the studios. He was a hard worker just starting to get his tunes onto the charts. Every time I would see him he would always asked me to take some photos of him, and he was always looked quite dapper. Sadly one night he was gunned down in his prime on his way home from a dance. This was also the height of the “Gun Tune”, which I was never into since these tunes were really just a glorification of killing. There were also several wicked anti-gun tunes that came out then as well.

During this period in Jamaica, Jamaica had one of the highest murder rates in the world, beating out Columbia for the number one spot. There was something like 1,800+ murders that year. I also lost several personal friends around that same time, gunned down for pure foolishness. People would often warn me “Bingi, u mus be careful who u hang with, u never know wha gwan”. It was interesting because I would hang with all sorts of different people, Rastas, bald heads, Dons, business owners and even some Politicians so you never really knew WHO they were talking about, could have been anyone of those groups. Also I would often be called crazy for going some of the places I did but in all my time in Jamaica I never felt myself in any danger (the most dangerous place was on the roads), despite being threatened at various times, by Police, guns, knives, ice pics, machete, once even threatened to be thrown into a raging bonfire. Turns out the guy who threatened death by fire, burned up himself that night by climbing into the fire, that was one of the strangest things so far I had encountered. I think I wrote about that incedent in another post.  Jamaica is strange like that sometimes, a place of great beauty but also senseless violence. But at the end of the day it’s still “Jamaica, the land we love”…..

(On another note, I’m not sure why now are my photos are posting so small. I’m trying to figure out how to fix the problem or figure out why it just started to happen. Hopefully within the next few posts the larger images will be back.)

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