Cooling The Sizzla Controversy

German promoter Klaus Maack wants gay rights organisations to come clean over the methods he believes they’re using to stop shows by Jamaican dancehall reggae acts.

Maack, who has worked hard with activists to curb homophobic lyrics, doesn’t think they’re keeping their side of an agreement not to protest shows by acts who have pledged in writing to not use such lyrics.

He’ll come face to face with Green Party MP Volker Beck, who is gay, and Germany’s Lesbian And Gay Federation (LSVD) head Klaus Jetz at Berlin Kulturbauerei Feb. 23 to clarify their role in the cancellation of a Sizzla show in the same venue last November.

Maack and others promoting a similar genre of music worked in cahoots with UK gay rights activist Peter Tatchell and his Stop Murder Music campaign to draw up The Compassionate Act.

Artists who sign it commit to respecting and upholding “the rights of all individuals to live without violence due to their religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or gender.”

In return, the gay organisations agreed not to protest outside or in any way disrupt the shows of any artist who signs the act. Maack says they’re not sticking to it.

Sizzla’s show in the Kulturbauerei was canceled when media pressure allegedly became more than the venue could tolerate. The 500 protestors outside the building reportedly included members of Antifa, an anti-Fascist group not known for taking a benign approach.

Two years ago, Antifa made global news when one of its members decapitated a waxwork Adolf Hitler in Berlin’s Madame Tussauds gallery. Other examples of the group’s actions – particularly in the UK – have included real physical violence.

National daily Der Tagesspiegel reported the gay rights lobbyists in Berlin had tried to impose extra demands on Sizzla, including giving a written undertaking to fund a campaign against homophobia in his homeland and speaking in a public video message on the Internet to combat violence against homosexuals.

Maack said the last-minute demands came over as blackmail. He now wants to clear the air regarding how each side will abide by The Compassionate Act in the future.

He’s worried that the more times the gay groups ignore it and picket shows, the harder it will become for him and other promoters to persuade musicians to sign it.

At the Sizzla show at Wuppertal U-Club, a similar mob protested his appearance by putting Butyric acid through the venue’s ventilation system. The show was delayed until the acrid gas had been cleared but Maack says the venue stank the whole evening.

The U-Club issued a statement saying the industry needs to find an alternative to the protestors effectively banning reggae, dancehall and hip-hop from German stages.

Beck, who was photographed with Jetz in the crowd outside the Wuppertal show, also criticised Sizzla’s lyrics in the German state parliament. Maack brushes aside the criticism as being unfair for citing lyrics Sizzla had written two years before he signed The Compassionate Act.

The Contour Music chief is also unhappy that Beck’s home page compares the Jamaican dancehall acts with people who refuse to acknowledge the Holocaust. He thinks it’s an inflammatory comparison.

Two weeks after Wuppertal, the situation became worse for Sizzla. Having returned to Jamaica, he then failed to get into Spain to play a Madrid show because he was on the SIS list (Schengen Information System) as a “persona non gratis.”

He was thrown into prison and sent back to Jamaica the following day. The Jamaican Embassy wants to know why his name was on the SIS list.

Maack’s lawyer produced evidence that suggested the LSVD was behind it, information that has since been confirmed by the German home office and also by Beck himself.

“I’m a promoter and not a Jamaican ambassador, but I can understand it when the embassy wants to know why one of its citizens is being treated in such a way, particularly one who’s previously been of good character,” Maack told Pollstar.

The problem isn’t isolated to Germany. In January the UK’s Daily Mail claimed Live Nation promoter Steve Homer was in talks with Eminem about the artist agreeing to drop his anti-gay lyrics in return for gay rights groups promising not to picket the US rapper’s possible appearance at London Hyde Park’s Wireless Festival.

The show coincides with the UK’s Gay Pride weekend.