Ms Thing is just 17, but she has already lost her father and made it as a raunchy dancehall queen. Will pregnancy slow her down?
Natesha Brown sings about sex with the confidence of a 30-year-old. One song on her debut album, Muscle Tight, warns women to keep their "zum-zum" taut while recent single Bedroom Bully is similarly salacious. "Oh God, that one is very off the hook. That's about sex and ... whatever," she giggles, embarrassed. Her modesty makes it the more disturbing to think that she was just 15 when she began recording her album, Miss Jamaica. She's now 17 - and her first child is due next month.
As a dancehall deejay (the Jamaican word for MC), Brown - who performs under the name Ms Thing - is following in the footsteps of artists such as Marion "Lady Saw" Hall. "You know her lyrics are raunchy," the teenager exclaims gleefully. "I look up to she." Lady Saw is one of Jamaica's leading deejays, renowned for her scandalous banter.
Lewd lyrics litter dancehall songs. But so does homophobia, to the distress of dancehall stars such as Sean Paul. He feels that the lyrics of controversial artists such as Beenie Man and Vybz Kartel have been "hurting the music on a monumental level". Brown, who has recorded with both Beenie Man and Kartel, shares similar sentiments. "As a big entertainer people look up to Moses [Beenie Man] especially," she says in thick patois. "I think he should just res' it a bit."
But while Brown renounces homophobia, she revels in the sexually explicit. She agrees wordplay she contributed to Beenie Man's Jamaican number one Dude - "I want a dude who will do me in his van/ A thug that can handle his biz like a man" - was perhaps inappropriate for a girl her age. So why did she sing them? "Ah," she sighs. "You know to keep up with them here in Jamaica, you have to. And in Jamaica age don't mean anything about music. You just do music," she shrugs.
Questionable lyrics aside, Miss Jamaica is an accomplished effort. Malleable middle-eastern instrumentation, electro-tinged steel pan and determined drum patterns are punctuated by Ms Thing's forcible vocals. It's not all about sex, either; she takes care to promote the woman who prefers to be independent rather than rinsing a man for "Bimmers" and jewellery. "I'm a regular girl. I'm not like, 'I want this and that,'" she insists.
Brown still lives in the area where she was born. Cooreville Gardens, Kingston, is much like any working-class neighbourhood found in the capital. The baking sun and scorched earth cover everything with dust while young men play basketball in a make-do court. It's far from the notoriously violent slums of Downtown, but it's certainly worlds apart from the hushed hillside-set Uptown, favoured by the likes of Sean Paul. "We have a lot of teachers and police live here," Brown says, stopping to sign an autograph for a soldier who wanders nonchalantly into the house. A machete hangs on the wall, an uncooked chicken swelters in the kitchen sink, while knick-knacks and plastic flowers cover every available surface. It's modest, maybe, and a little crowded but, Brown points out, she has much to be thankful for. "My community is very different from Tivoli - those places are the warzone. But this is residential here, so I don't really experience much of the war. I'm comfortable with where I'm living. It's crime free, violence free here."
Brown's father, a policeman, was murdered in a drive-by shooting when she was just two years old. "He was living in America then and he decided to stop off at this club in New York after work," she says. "He and his babymother die together 'cause they shot up the car." Her mother, Charmaine Brown, lives round the corner with her younger sister, Pretania, six. Charmaine remembers her eldest daughter singing "since she was little", but even she was surprised by Natasha's rapid success.
Brown got her big break in 2002 after impersonating another dancehall artist, Baby Cham, at a party for his album launch. The very next day Cham's producer, Dave Kelly, Jamaica's ubiquitous go-to hit man, called Brown and requested her presence at his studio. The two immediately set about making music. "I have to say thank God for that 'cause artists out here are dying to work with Dave Kelly. He's a legend; anything he hits go gold or platinum."
Beenie Man got wind of this up-and-coming attitude-fuelled deejay and asked her to perform on Dude, also produced by Kelly. Whisked away from Cooreville and school, Brown toured the world with Beenie, promoting the single that has since sold well internationally. Until that point she had never left Jamaica, taken a holiday, or even picnicked in the nearby mountains. She did occasionally visit the local attraction park, Coney Island, but that shut down long ago. "It's crazy," she says. "The yout' need something to do, you know? To get away."
Still, for Brown, escaping her surroundings has had its down sides. "How I wanted things to end up, they didn't," she says. "I didn't get to finish out my childhood. I just wanted to take things more slowly but things took off so quick."
One casualty of overnight celebrity was the schoolwork. Some have claimed she was expelled from Tivoli Gardens Comprehensive, but Brown refutes these rumours. "No, no. I was the one that decided to leave. I started messing up on my grades because I have to be going everywhere. So where's the time? But," she says proudly, "what I did as a smart young girl was go to evening classes - computers, English and maths. Rumours in Jamaica are real rumours, trust me," she adds. "But I live here so I'm used to them. If I focus on them it's going to get friction and war and trouble and violence. So I just try and stay focus' no matter what them say."
Just as she was really establishing herself as a solo artist rather than Beenie Man's hook-for-hire, Brown fell pregnant. Again, contrary to tittle-tattle, it is not Beenie Man's child but her manager/fiance's, Andre Green, a quiet young man who today hovers by her side, providing soup and pineapple juice. They both agree that she was perhaps a little young to become a mother, but are eagerly anticipating their son's arrival. "Behind backs you have people talking," Brown admits. "Mostly they say, 'We happy for you', but sometimes they faceguard you in Jamaica - they're not straight up with you. Some people think I messed up my career."
While she won't directly admit she may have made a mistake, Brown has decided things will be different once Andre Junior arrives in the world. There's a US and UK tour scheduled for next April and while she happily trots out the PR-correct talk of "the sky's the limit and I'm going to reach for it", she also admits what she really wants in life is far simpler than fame and fortune. "I don't ever want to be far from my son. What I really want. No ..." she stops herself. "What I will be is a good mom," she decides. "A young, good mom."
Miss Jamaica is out now on Sequence.
A version of this article appeared in The Guardian
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