Fri | Mar 29, 2024

‘The Unfiltered Truth’ - Jamaican men speak their minds on weekly podcast series

Published:Tuesday | August 4, 2020 | 12:00 AMKhanique McDaniel /Gleaner Writer
From left: Melbourne ‘D Burnz’ Douglas, Dr Douglas Fletcher, Rayon McLean and Kingsley Morgan.
The group is all about sharing real- life experiences.
1
2

Some women can attest to waking their partner in the middle of the night or going through their phones, all in the quest to find out what’s on their man’s mind.

Shop Talk: The Unfiltered Truth takes the conversations a man would have with his brethren and brings them to the airwaves in the form of a podcast.

Jamaican artiste D Burnz, orthopaedic resident Dr Douglas Fletcher, communications specialist Kingsley Morgan and artistic director Rayon McLean shed their masks every Sunday at noon to share their views on current issues as well as their experiences growing up in Jamaica.

“A space of healing and reasoning,” is how Rayon describes their deep conversations, where the men, from different social-economic backgrounds, don’t always agree, but they are respectful and entertaining.

With their 10th episode on the horizon, the men agree that they have grown as a group, and individuals, as they ‘learn, unlearn and relearn’, a motto coined by the calm to their chaos, Kingsley Morgan.

NOT JUST FOR MEN

But it isn’t just for them. With a slowly growing fan base and dreams of expanding across the Caribbean, the men say that both women and men have reached out to thank them for sharing their truth – most recently in episode nine, aptly titled ‘Jus A Reasoning,’ where sans Fletcher, the men delved into attending school in rural Jamaica and growing up a ‘barrel pickney’.

It was also in this episode that Kingsley developed the phrase, ‘Love needs to be demonstrated for it to be replicated.’ It remains the most emotional and all-round favourite episode of the team.

“If a even one person we can impact, that’s good enough for me,” said D Burnz, the entertainer of the bunch, who generally shares the word or thoughts of the street.

The more soft-spoken member of the team, Dr Fletcher, said he was reluctant to join, following a controversial exit to the social media platform Twitter earlier this year. The self-proclaimed ‘forever bachelor’ has since found his footing among the crew, which he credits to his fellow hosts and producers Tazhna Williams, Andrica Rigg, Colleen Campbell, Taj Wilson and Andrew Campbell.

Resident philosopher Rayon McLean says he believes that “for us as black men, to foster positive thoughts and ideologies about ourselves, we need a physical space to bounce things from, and this is our projection wall. I want people to know it’s okay to talk.”

You can listen to Shop Talk every Sunday at shoptalkja.buzzsprout.com or where you listen to podcasts.