PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Amid calls from Grena­di­ans to bar him from per­form­ing in their coun­try, Trini­bad artiste Kashif “Kman 6ixx” Sankar says he will at­tempt to be more pos­i­tive with his mu­sic in 2024.

He made the com­ment in an in­ter­view on Grena­di­an show The Nar­ra­tive host­ed by Cal­is­tra Far­ri­er, where the T&T dance­hall singer ex­pressed con­fu­sion over calls to ban him from per­form­ing in that coun­try next month.

Sankar al­so de­nied in the in­ter­view that he was part of a gang, adding he al­so does not have a rep­u­ta­tion of pro­mot­ing vi­o­lence in his per­for­mances abroad.

How­ev­er, he said giv­en the pres­sure around him, he feels his should change his mu­sic’s fo­cus this year.

“Right now. Every­body on me and I re­al­ly fed-up of it. Every­body on me, the po­lice, every­body on me for lyrics. I say­ing I just fine, it’s just too much,” Sankar told the jour­nal­ist.

“So I could re­al­ly tone that back and di­al down and I can as­sure you that 2024 will be a pos­i­tive year.”

He al­so not­ed that while his most pop­u­lar mu­sic have had gang­ster themes, the vast ma­jor­i­ty of his of­fer­ings are not the­mat­i­cal­ly vi­o­lent.

“I drop on EP sev­en songs. Two gun­man tune, a gyal (girl) song and the rest is con­scious. Guess what? Guess which one makes the most views? That’s the ones mak­ing most mon­ey on my YouTube right now, run­ning up the most views,” said Sankar, re­fer­ring to his re­lease No Lethal, which ref­er­ences gang war­fare be­tween the Six and Sev­en fac­tions in East Port-of-Spain.

As of yes­ter­day, the mu­sic video for No Lethal tal­lied 3.9 mil­lion views on YouTube.

Sankar was billed to per­form in con­cert on the eve of Grena­da’s 50th In­de­pen­dence cel­e­bra­tions next month. How­ev­er, this was crit­i­cised in the coun­try, as many peo­ple not­ed that the artiste was tar­get­ed in an brazen gun at­tack on the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way in St Au­gus­tine last month, which saw four peo­ple, in­clud­ing an on­look­er, be­ing killed. It was the sec­ond at­tempt on his life.

Sankar could not state ex­act­ly why he was be­ing tar­get­ed in the in­ter­view, as he not­ed oth­er artistes had per­formed sim­i­lar lyrics with­out fac­ing threats against their lives.

“I would say that it is more than just mu­sic. Be­cause it has to be that the source is the area I’m from and is jeal­ousy be­cause all the time that mu­sic was go­ing on be­fore me. In in­dus­try right now, we’re see­ing more dis­re­spect­ful tunes than me and noth­ing does be hap­pen­ing to them,” Sankar said.