‘Sell my gun’ is a single lifted from Chronixx’s Roots & Chalice mixtape made in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Federation Sound. The open letter to gun men opens with an observation: “Spanish Town mi born and grow / Whole heap of bad man me know / One thing they all have in common / The whole of them poor.”
The song’s inspiration came to Chronixx as he tried to overstand the obsession Jamaica had with Western movies in the ‘50s and ‘60s as the country was nearing independence. “People used to pilgrim to the theatre just to watch cowboy films with the gun and the gangster thing,” he says. As a result, he believes the glamorisation of cowboys killing Indians and vice versa has, in part, “lodged in the psyche of Jamaica”, especially the inner cities where badman culture is prevalent and “everybody [admires] the gun man”.
So why does he advise gun men sell their tool? “When I check how much a gun is worth - the actual price of a gun - it doesn’t make sense to me economically,” he says with understandable confusion. “It doesn’t make sense that there’s such a high demand for guns but nobody can afford it. We, as ghetto youths, can’t really develop ourselves is all we have is guns.
“I’m not against protecting your property but gun alone can’t do that - you need other skills. In order to develop those, we need resources that we don’t have so if we have to trade guns for those resources, then by all means.”
“You no fi bad and hungry” is one of the stand out statements repeated throughout the song, again, sparked by another observation. “We need food security but before we need security, we need food. We can’t use guns to plant food,” the Spanish Town native explains. While tools for farming and such are essentials for survival, he stresses literacy, especially computer literacy, are vital for progression of the next generation. “Youths need to be in their best shape to guarantee a good future for any country,” he states. “Youths must be educated and well fed, and we can’t do that with guns. We need libraries, books, computers, farming supplies, tractor and skilled people.”
School is out of reach for many underprivileged youngsters in Jamaica as parents aren’t always able to afford school fees, particularly at high school level. “In order to access some of those resources, we have to give up guns, yo! A man with a gun thinks he has an easy way out but he doesn’t. You live by it, you’ll surely die by it,” he says, using the oft-cited rhetoric.
Victims of gun violence are rarely seen as someone beyond a sad story or statistic by those whom they never met. Chronixx places importance on the greater potential they could have provided to their loved ones and contributed the wider community. “When a gun man dies, or when anybody dies by gun violence, that person dying is not the most horrific thing,” he reasons. “The most horrific thing is humanity as a whole has lost, maybe, one of its most valuable kids. They could’ve been the next Prime Minister, a doctor, a next Chronixx, Bob Marley, Mavado or Usain Bolt.”
Not only focused on just selling the gun, Chronixx proposes money-making alternatives in the song such as taxi driver and even illegally distributing his own music to make a better life for themselves, their family and community. “So many of these youths are dying everyday and the community becomes harder to build,” he observes. “What we need to do is create another alternative so the breadwinner doesn’t have to win his bread with a sub-machine rifle.”
