Dance Pon Di Corner
Cover Artwork
Nick Charney Kaye sat drawing in a sketchbook in Washington Square Park soon after moving to New York City in 2002. Melodic “Yoza” Vibe rolled up on a bike and said, “Yoza!” and hired him on the spot to do this album cover. Nick hopped on the back pegs and they rode to the Rastafari spot in the East Village and have been close collaborators ever since.
Side A — what’s in the picture
A sound-system truck rolls up to the corner with every genre it has conquered spray-painted down its side: REGGAE · R&B · BLUES · HIP HOP · SOUL · FUNK · ROCK · JAZZ. The MC leans out the window brandishing a REGGAE DIPS sign — check the license plate, it agrees — while a DJ spins a turntable right on the hood. Dancers take the foreground, palms and a yellow hydrant hold the street, and the title arcs over everything in green, gold, and red.
The whole illustration is a thesis about the music: the party doesn’t happen in a venue. The truck is the venue. The corner is the club.
Side B — the credits
- Artist: Mark Shine — the NYC-based Jamaican reggae artist whose “I’m a Butterfly” music video this studio directed in 2005.
- Featuring: Melodic — whose “Ride On (Natty)” video we shot in 2008. This cover sits squarely inside that collaboration era.
- Artwork: Outright Mental — digital illustration, full-bleed square, built to read at every size from vinyl sleeve to thumbnail.
- Official release: the track later landed as track 8 on Mark Shine & Rocsta Society’s 36-song retrospective Metamorphosis (Chillup Records, 2014) — hear it on Spotify.
Satire with teeth isn’t the only register — the manifesto also promises work where a real person made this, on purpose. Every genre name on that truck is hand-placed; every dancer has a pose. It’s a crowd scene with no copy-paste in it.
