A Tribute to Donna Summer / Kingston “Soul Boys” and Exploring the High Risk Lifestyles of Those Who Party Hard.

A Tribute to Donna Summer / Kingston “Soul Boys” and Exploring the High Risk Lifestyles of Those Who Party Hard.

Donna Summer, "the Queen of Disco Music," died on Thursday after a prolonged battle with cancer she tried to keep away from the public. Reports say that Donna confided in her friends that she believed her illness was caused by 9/11 dust she inhaled. However, her doctors believed she contracted the lung cancer from her smoking habit which she maintained for many years. But Donna insisted that her illness was the direct result of inhaling dust from the debris of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. People who suffer from terminal illness because of the stress accompanying the illness often have delusional thoughts .A good friend of mine had AIDS and before his death he swore on his mother’s grave that it was his ex-female partner who placed a voodoo spell on him.

Donna Summer’s death comes on the heel of a string of recent high profile deaths in the American Music industry Such as James Brown, Teddy Prendergast, Isaac Hales, Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson and Whitney Huston. I can’t help but to mischievously suggest that they should have traded place with lowlights such as Rick James, DMX, Ninja Man and “Vybes Cartel”. On a serious note though people in the Global entertainment industry are more at risk to die from lifestyle illness such as accidents, drug overdose and cancer due to the demands made on them by their fans and the pressure to remain on top of their profession. We seem mistakenly to think that famous musician’s recent death in The USA is a new phenomenon. Let’s not forget that Otis Redding Soul singer of the 60s fame died Plane crash in 1967 and famous Rock guitarist/singer Jimi Hendrix died of asphyxiation from sleeping pill overdose in1970.

The death of mega stars such as Donna Summer always refocuses our attention to the catastrophic consequences of the dreaded illness of cancer. According to the World Health organization cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide it accounted for about 7.6 million deaths globally in 2008. Cancer, known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a broad group of various diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumours, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the body through the lymphatic system or bloodstream.

Not all tumours are cancerous. Benign tumours do not grow uncontrollably, do not invade neighbouring tissues, and do not spread throughout the body. There are over 200 different known cancers that afflict humans. Determining what causes cancer is complex. Many things are known to increase the risk of cancer, including tobacco use, certain infections, radiation, and a lack of physical activity, obesity, and environmental pollutants. These can directly damage genes or combine with existing genetic faults within cells to cause the disease.

 Approximately five to ten percent of cancers are entirely hereditary. There numerous studies published in Psychiatric Journals confirm the fact that some patients in the advance stages of cancer like Donna Summer may sometimes experience delusional thoughts, visual and auditory hallucinations. Some of these psychotic episodes are also as a result of the side effects from the prescribed medication that cancer patients in treatment are taking.

A group of us Calabar old boys got together on face book this week had a moan over Donna Summer’s death and reminiscent about our Kingston teen age Soul Boy years when we dressed up as John Travolta and Michael Jackson look alike and dance to the music of these great American Music icons. For the benefit of my younger readers during the mid-seventies and early 1980s a group of young middle class rebellious teenagers from the prominent high schools across Kingston Jamaica- spurred on by the emergence of Disco Music in North America and a Programme called “Where It’s At on JBC” television started a cultural Movement call “Soul Boys “.If someone urinated on a Zinc fence and we thought that it was Disco Music we would dance to it.

The cultural craze that took traction among Teen agers and young adults at the time saw us dressing weirdly in black pants white shirts rolled up at the sleeves donning ballerina shoes and wearing a hairstyle called the Napoleon made famous by Soul crooner Lionel Ritchie. Our female teen counterparts from High Schools such as St Hughes’s Andrew High, Queens, Holy Childhood, Excelsior etc were called “Disco Girls”. Our Weird dress sense and dance craze in the 1980s was so frantic that even our parents rebelled against us. I got the first set of bags under my eyes from having to sleep in the garden for a few nights when my parents found out that I had sneaked off to a party in Meadowbrook Estate and passed around a bottle of Red Stripe among a dozen of us and danced all night until day light.

The Disco Music of that era was so powerful and alluring that we all were oblivious of the fact that about 800 persons died in the dreaded political election in 1980. It was either it blew over our heads or we skipped gunshots to gate crash parties in Meadowbrook Estates, Heaven dale or Elliston Flats. On weekends we went to day Disco parties held at Exodus, Phase2 or Tropics Club and several dance marathons and day fetes were held across the Girls High schools in Kingston. By the mid Eighties the soul boy movement waned and gave way to Jamaica’s real reggae pop star Pinchers who captured the attention of teen agers and shifted their focus to Reggae and dance hall music. Pinchers at that time was a self obsessed Young good looking reggae artist with a greasy Gerri curl and wore baggy clothes he once created a furore when he was spotted at Holy Childhood High School Gate one day and an entire group of tent and eleven graders got wind of his where about and mobbed him. This led to them being sent home and told not to return until they brought their parents. Pinches went on to self destruct and is an old shadow of himself due to his pre occupation of songs about his self but he was responsible in the main for popularizing reggae music among teenagers in Jamaica.

As for us Soul Boys and girls of the eighties we are scattered over the globe mainly in North America and Europe and we meet up in a fragmented way on Face book or at Waterfalls club in Kingston. We are an old shadow of ourselves we are in our late forties and early fifties. Our eyes are no longer on the Disco dance floor we are eying up our pension package. Some of us have a beer belly that makes us look like women in their early stage of pregnancy and the Disco Girls of that era are having regular breast screening for cancer or having an eye on their grand children. The one thing that we have in common is an enduring love for old school Disco music of the 1980s.

 When we grab our crotch nowadays its not to dance to a Michael Jackson Disco Music .It’s because like Donna Summers we are having delusional thoughts of having prostrate or testicular cancer from the nicotine habit that we contracted as Soul boys of the 1980s. The last time I went Disco dancing in London I almost toppled myself on the dance floor. Last year, while in Jamaica I went to Waterfalls Night club against the advice of my doctor and saw an old KC friend by the name of” Prendi” with a group of old 80s soul boys squaring off on the dance floor the almost put me off my supper-seriously they should give up the game. But the powerful allure of Disco music is a social drug that will be etched on our gravestones. As a mark of respect for our fallen music icons and the few remaining one we will be Retuning to Jamaica for the Jazz and Blue festival in 2013 to make a final stand before arthritis set in it gives me about a half a year to brush up on my “Break Dancing”. For now our thoughts are with the late great Donna Summer who was and still remain one of our greatest idols with her Whitney Huston and Michael Jackson heaven it’s no longer a quiet place.

Donovan Reynolds is a London based Social Worker Human Rights Campaigner. Readers of this blog are invited to post comments on the space provided at the end of this blog. Or alternatively, they may e-mail their comments @ dannygerm63@hotmail.co.uk.