Mad Cobra

Ewart Everton Brown (born 31 March 1968, Kingston), who took his stage name from a G.I. Joe character while still in his teens, and became one of the defining voices of the early-1990s dancehall crossover.

He started at the bottom of the ladder: a first single, "Respect Woman", in 1989, then "Na Go Work" with Tricia McKay, which is what got him heard by Captain Sinbad and Carl Nelson. The turn came in 1990 when he joined Donovan Germain and Dave Kelly at Penthouse, the most consequential production house of the period, and cut a run of Jamaican hits — "Yush", "Gundelero", "Bad Boy Talk" — that made him a fixture rather than a prospect. Between 1991 and 1992 he took five number ones on the UK reggae chart.

Then "Flex" crossed over completely. Released in 1992 on Columbia, it topped the US rap singles chart, reached number 7 R&B and number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a dancehall record that did not have to be softened to get there, and one of the clearest proofs that a Jamaican deejay could be a pop artist without ceasing to be a dancehall artist. It is also the record that fixed his register: the smooth, close-mic'd delivery that made "Flex" work is the same instrument as the badman lyric on "Yush", which is what people mean when they call him versatile.

The rougher side of the era came with it. He carried public feuds with Ninjaman and Buju Banton through the mid-1990s, in the period when clash rivalry and real antagonism were hard to tell apart. He was arrested in Florence County, South Carolina in July 2023 after police said they found cocaine and a pistol in his vehicle; this archive holds the arrest but not the outcome.

His name outlasted the chart run in an unexpected way: "Yush" gave its name to the Jamaican party series founded in 2003, which has run for more than two decades.