Mr. Vegas ADD
Album Review: Mr. Vegas - Ghetto Reggae | Listening Session with Uncle Ronnie
08/29/2025 by Jessica Knight
‘That is a song that deaf people can dance to.’
This, the kind of comment I invited upon myself after listening to the first three tracks of the latest Mr. Vegas album, Ghetto Reggae, and instinctively picking up the phone. ‘Uncle? I’m writing an album review and something about this one telling me you need to hear it…’
‘Then that should definitely happen,’ Ronald ‘Uncle Ronnie’ Jarrett replies.
Happen, it did, only, due to our many segues into other songs that Ronnie was reminded of and wanted to hear, due to the pull-ups of Vegas tracks to catch an interesting opening, or to point out particularly pleasing harmonies, (thanks to Ed Robinson, Mark A. Brown, Jason Edmund), due simply to pausing to hear another gem in the Uncle Ronnie memory bank coaxed out by the nostalgic music, the night turned into a listening party. And this ‘review’ turned into… Well, let us start from the beginning…
I drive past Yeza’s poster mounted on the Star of the East signpost to her stomping ground on my way to Wickie Wackie, home of legendary box-builder Uncle Ronnie. A few months ago this beach was rammed with attendees of Kumar Fyah’s 2025 Beach Festival. Tonight we’re alone on this piece of 8 Mile, the place where Uncle Ronnie has built many a speaker, hence the ‘8’ on the boxes of Kingston Dub Club’s customised stack. After an exchange on the state of the world we get to it. I play Ghetto Reggae, the impressive offering from Mr. Vegas’s own label, MV Music, from my portable Bose speaker – Bosey-Bosey, she is named.
‘If King Tubby’s saw that, he’d think it was a powder puff. A compact. The thing you use to powder your nose,’ offers Uncle Ronnie in response to my remark about how odd it must feel not to have to truck boxes of records, giant speakers, and cables to dances.
We get digital as I tap > Play.
From song number one Ronnie’s famous smile grows all the more wide. Here, Kirk ‘Kirkledove’ Bennett begins his first of many rounds on drums (and will feature on other instruments throughout). Call Tyrone feat. U-Roy introduces the results of nearly three decades in music via Mr. Vegas’ timeless, humorous style. Rooted in the singjay’s ability to riff off of the Caribbean approach to social commentary, he provides stand-up comedy set to music. It’s an extension of his first hit releases, 1997’s Nike Air and Heads High – the song famous for its tongue-in-cheek advice to women that men’s tongues must remain firmly within facial cheeks, without exception.
Of song number two, Bye Bye Julie, Ronnie says, ‘I call that Country Reggae. That’s not a term. I mean, if you went deep country where people don’t hear music and you played this, they would like it.’ Dean Fraser, Okiel McKentyre and Randy Fletcher’s trilogy of horns makes the music stretch so deep.
The third song throws him a little. ‘What does the sax have to do with a ganja song?’ He likens this amalgamation of a ganja theme with a non-traditional ganja riddim to ‘a Rastaman wearing Bandana (a ‘gingham’ textile considered our National Costume) and a basket on his head: all Jamaican, but a Jamaican would see something wrong.’ He forgives Ganjah Lover’s straying from the original What Kind of World Are We Living In by The Cables, concluding that it’s ‘for contemporaries. It’s a nice song’ into which Andre Gillespie unleashes (to my ear at least) a smashing dash of sax.
The merged themes are possibly a response to the original, in which The Cables sing, I can’t be free. Everything I’ve tried there’s always someone who wanna hurt me.’ Considering the conflict between Rasta and police back when this song was released, today’s legal changes make Vegas’ modern version an ironic comment: police can no longer use a spliff as an excuse to abuse or lock up a Rasta (which isn’t to say that they might not find other reasons). Vegas has adapted his themes to our changed world.
‘Montenegro,’ Ronnie says within the first few bars of Parasites, reminding me to rewatch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly with Hugo Montenegro’s timeless score. ‘All the music have something,’ he nods as the track wraps up, ‘this one especially. Of course, if it was me it wouldn’t have no strings. It would have horns. Trombone.’
I personally love the strings, providing a dramatic flair to Mr. Vegas’s pro-nature lament. This ranger’s got range. How many singers can pull off both denouncing the consumption of a woman’s cho-cho and the mistreatment of Mother Nature in a nasal vocal quality that somehow invites you to sing along?
Ronnie’s saying he wants the album on vinyl by song number six, Grateful. Here plays another link with Nigerian Yung Alpha after 2022’s single All Of Me, which also featured Mz Vee. His Selecta ear detects a ‘lull’ within the track. I speculate it’s the Yung Alpha’s trap and ‘drop’ culture influence. ‘As a listener it could stay,’ says Uncle Ronnie, ‘but what is a DJ gonna do with that lull?’
‘It’s a big hit, enuh,’ he says when we move on to God Will Deliver Me, a nod to Vegas’s conversion to Christianity and the themes therewithin. It has us both dancing in our chairs. ‘Wicked song. He has got the tempo absolutely correct.’ By ‘he’, he means Kirk Bennett, who plays all the instruments, and Ed Robinson, who mixed the song and added background vocals. ‘The success of it will make it fail,’ Ronnie adds cryptically.
‘Fail? But it’s soca-esque!’ I protest.
‘Remember, DJs don’t have confidence,’ he explains. ‘They have to be doing something with their fingers. They’re going to mess with it.’
His solution? To anticipate anxious fingers speeding up the track, he offers that it ‘just needs to come out a bit slower.’ That, and that someone should invent a modulator with fake buttons ‘that don’t do nothing,’ so that DJs can twiddle nobs without undoing ‘excellent work’.
Whilst one of Ronnie’s ears is stationed locally, the other is internationally tuned. ‘If you’re not a Jamaican it might be confusing,’ he says of the One Praise chorus, Love it is the highest praise, suggesting that ‘it don’t need the “it”.’ Nevertheless, as a veteran DJ, he interprets the song’s application and ‘would play this after some young, hot Selecta. I would start with this.’
This collab with Greentone, written by Mr. Vegas who is credited as Clifford Smith, on which Egzon Sadiku plays all instruments, is an upbeat antidote to fundamentalists who insist that their God is so much mightier than yours that they’re left with no choice but to [insert appropriate punishment here].
Next up is Fade Away, Mr. Vegas’s take on an old song, the name of which Ronnie can’t recall. ‘Find out who made this,’ he instructs me, ‘and if Vegas is comfortable with it. I think he is being confused by the original riddim.’
I explain that the album is due out shortly, and we’re hearing the mastered version. Ronnie is distressed, but would like an answer regardless – as though I have connections to mixing engineer Ed Robinson or writer Clifford ‘Mr. Vegas’ Smith, or to the late Clement ‘Coxonne’ Dodd, who I’ll later read is credited.
‘It would be a Sound Dimension riddim,’ Ronnie says when provided with the Studio One clue. But we still can’t place the original.
Even though Ronnie believes that I Miss You should be released as a single, he’s disappointed that it doesn’t have a more pronounced snare, which is what would carry this tune on a proper system. ‘If he’s calling it Ghetto Reggae he has to think about Sound System.’
As if the Sound System Gods are listening, the penultimate Land of My Birth has us punching the air. Mr. Vegas produces alongside Marc Jouanneaux – the Animal behind Alberosie and Busy Signal’s Murderer – and The Kemist – son of Marcia Griffiths, father of the moombahton fusion born on this track. It gives the album a broader reach. If Gospel, Soca, Dancehall, Trap and updated versions of old-time riddims aren’t enough, check out where this song’s going after the earlier songs demonstrate where it came from.
‘Ah!’ You hear the snare?’ Ronnie asks, happy to hear a song for the Sound System.
‘I do! I do!’
… but they drop it. Too many drops, for our taste, but this is the emergent style and we’ve been provided with plenty to love within 14 sturdy tracks, so we won’t complain.
Due to giving the album the attention it deserves, it is well after midnight when Ronnie leans back and clasps his hands satisfactorily over his belly. Despite his calls to ‘draw fi a trombonist’ over some of Dean Fraser’s sax offerings or other instrumental choices, he is pleased. ‘This album is better than a lot of what is happening now,’ he says, repeating, ‘excellent work’, for the umpteenth time.
We agree that we can’t wait for it to be released so that we can upgrade from my likkle Bosey-Bosey and blast it on his speakers for the good patrons of the Wickie Wackie Beach Bar next door to hear.
‘This is real dancehall,’ says Ronnie and, with a final smile, he reminisces, ‘Dancehall was about clean living, healthy living, humility. Gospel.’
We’ve come a long way, I think as I whizz past a rum bar containing Jamaica’s finest Go-Go dancers with black lace triangles stretched (apologetically) across their lady lumps. I recall the story of song number five. It was song number five, My Enemies, featuring the ever dextrous Demelo on drums, keys, guits and bass as well as being the co-producer and mixing engineer, that provoked Uncle Ronnie to wave his hand, ‘Pause it, pause it, pause.’
He collected his thoughts. ‘A while back,’ he says, ‘a friend of mine came here to collect stones for a project. The man that she had brought in the car stayed there when she went to the beach. I was playing rocksteady music from 1967 in that back room. Her friend came in from the car. The man start dancing steadily for thirty, forty-five minutes. But when I put on RnB he left. My friend came in through the other door, now, and asks me if I’ve seen the man.’
‘“He was just here,” I said, “listening to the music.”
“Uncle Ronnie, stop messing around. Where is he?” she said.
“He was just here, dancing away.”
She put down the bucket and threw her hands in the air, “Ronnie, don’t be stupid. He’s deaf!”’
Not all music carries the capacity to form a beckoning finger out of vibrating air and seduce a deaf man in his seat. Where RnB failed, Mr. Vegas succeeded. This album is the product of a life lived within and across several histories of Jamaican music, from contributors who expertly combine old and new for young and old, offering something for the folks at home and our friends inna foreign. Ghetto Reggae packs a powerful punch, one so powerful that it contains a deaf man tune. The deaf man tune is what Mr. Vegas does best: all-inclusive hits that draw even the deaf onto the dancefloor, where Good Vibration is King.
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