I spent some time last week listening again to this blog’s Festive Fifty for 1992. As always when you come to look over a cultural list that you made, I spent time picking it apart and asking myself the usual questions: why did I include that? Why did I rank that so high? etc etc. One track, though, which never loses its power or lustre is the hip-hop track, A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die by Scarface (Number 11) which provides a hard-hitting but lyrical tour through the pointless cycle of violence perpetuated by young black men drawn into gang lifestyles and how this leaves dead men being mourned by abused women, holding babies that their fathers will never see because they pissed off the wrong people.
Leave Out the Badness is the PG certificate, PIF, Dancehall equivalent. It tries to ape the documentary realism of Scarface’s tune by providing a case study of two, out of control brothers, Johnny and Charlie, whose propensity for gunplay and robbery leaves one of them dead and the other on the road towards it, but not before they’ve made other people’s lives a misery first. Yami Bolo’s concern is that these people will be seen as role models to be followed into lives of crime - albeit he recognises that many in the ghettos may see it as their only option due to the poverty that they live in, Where is shoots and rice… etc.
Leave Out the Badness is a poor relation in comparison to A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die. The whole badness/madness/sadness rhyming scheme is pretty anodyne and Bolo conjures a picture of such hopelessness that his imploring of young people to turn away from violence and crime seems unlikely to have much of an impact on the people it is trying to reach. But, its sincerity is genuine enough and acts as a reminder that if we regard goodness as the weaker of two impulses, then we are lost.
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