Beenie Man's New Zealand "Big Day Out" performance cancelled

JAMAICAN singer Beenie Man has been dumped from next year's Big Day Out line-up after gay activist groups said his lyrics were homophobic and incited violence.

The singer's lyrics include lines such as: ''I'm dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays'' and ''Hang a lesbian by the longest rope, if you're gay you're going to take a bullet.''
The festival's organisers said they were aware of the controversy surrounding Beenie Man when they booked him earlier this year, but he had assured them that he had renounced those homophobic sentiments and no longer expressed those views.

They said he had signed the Reggae Compassionate Act in 2007, promising to adhere to peaceful and humanistic values, and told them his lyrics had been misunderstood because of slang, metaphors, jargon and dialect.

''In the entertainment industry we have people with different sexual preferences,'' he wrote in a letter seen by The Age.

''I would never seek to hurt or treat them differently.''

But Australian Coalition for Equality spokesman Rod Swift said: ''If Beenie Man's songs called for Aborigines, Jews or women to be murdered, he would not have been invited in the first place.''
Big Day Out organisers said the ''the depth of feeling and hurt amongst these groups'' had convinced them that Beenie Man's presence would be divisive and mar the enjoyment of the festival for many