The Dancehall: When Kingston Got Electric and the World Started Dancing (1979–2010)

The young people of the garrison communities — the neighborhoods controlled militarily by the political parties — needed music that spoke of their real world: not of Zion nor of repatriation to Africa, but of concrete life in Trenchtown, in Arnett Gardens, in Tivoli Gardens. More raw. More urban. More immediate. More sexual. More violent when necessary.

That music already existed in the dance halls of Kingston: the dancehall — the neighborhood party organized around the sound systems, where the deejays toast (sing, improvise, shout) over the instrumental reggae tracks with a style that was half singing, half rap, half theatrical — had been developing for years on the margins of official reggae. What happened towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s was that that margin became the center.

Toastin' and the Deejay Culture

The toasting — the practice of improvising or singing lyrics over an instrumental track (the riddim) — has roots that go back at least to U-Roy (Ewart Beckford), the deejay who in 1969 began to speak over the songs of the sound systems with a fluency and charisma that made him the first major Jamaican deejay. What U-Roy was doing was essentially the same thing that American rappers would do a decade later — but he was doing it in Jamaica, with a patois accent, over reggae riddims, for neighborhood audiences who identified with every word.

Count Machuki, King Stitt, Dennis Alcapone: all of them preceded U-Roy in the practice of toasting. But it was U-Roy who took it to the record — his first recordings in 1970 had an immediate impact — and who established that the deejay could be as big a star as the singer.

The next generationYellowman, Eek-A-Mouse, Josey Wales, Tenor Saw — elevated toasting to a full art form: with their own stage personas, their own flow styles, their own thematic approaches. Yellowman — Winston Foster, an albino in a society that historically marginalized albinos — turned his appearance into an artistic weapon: his humor, his explicit sexuality, his unapologetic bravado were a declaration that he didn't need anyone's approval to be the most interesting person in any room. He was the first great superstar of dancehall: in the early eighties he filled stadiums and sold more records than any other Jamaican artist.

1985: The Year Everything Changed

On January 26, 1985, at the annual Sting festival in Kingston — the biggest dancehall event of the year, where the best sound systems and deejays competed before audiences of tens of thousands of people — something that had never been heard before was played.

The producer Lloyd "King Jammy" James played a track on his system that had not been touched by a human musician at all. It was a rhythm generated entirely by an electronic keyboard — specifically a Casio MT-40, a low-cost instrument with pre-programmed rhythm patterns — that the musician Noel Davey had modified by selecting the "rock" preset and tweaking it until it sounded completely new. Over top of that rhythm, the deejay Wayne Smith sang "Under Mi Sleng Teng".

The crowd went wild. In the days that followed, producers from all over Kingston began to look for Casio keyboards. Session musicians who had played in studios for decades were out of work overnight. The digital riddim had arrived and there was no going back.

The impact of "Under Mi Sleng Teng" was not just aesthetic but economic: producing a digital riddim cost a fraction of what it took to hire musicians, which democratized Jamaican music production in a way that analog dub had not. Any producer with a keyboard and a cassette machine could make a riddim. The entry barrier collapsed. Dancehall production exploded.

More than 500 songs were recorded over the riddim of "Under Mi Sleng Teng" in the years that followed. The riddim — the rhythmic track without vocals — became the basic unit of the Jamaican music industry: a producer would create a riddim and dozens of deejays and singers would record their versions on top of it, creating a unique musical ecosystem in the world where the same rhythmic base supported love songs, political songs, comedic songs, explicit songs — all at the same time.

The Greats of Classic Dancehall

Shabba Ranks — Rexton Rawlston Fernando Gordon — was the first dancehall artist to achieve sustained international success. His voice — deep, powerful, with a vocal authority that left no doubt about who was in charge of the riddim — and his stage charisma made him the king of the genre by the end of the 1980s. He signed with Epic Records in the United States, won the first dancehall Grammys in 1993 and 1994, and brought the genre to audiences who had never set foot in Jamaica.

Buju Banton — Mark Anthony Myrie — started in the hardest and most street-oriented dancehall in the early 1990s and evolved toward deeper spiritual reggae roots with albums like 'Til Shiloh (1995): one of the most complete artistic arcs of Jamaican music of the 20th century.

Beenie Man y Bounty Killer were the big rivals of the 1990s: two visions of dancehall in constant tension. Beenie Man — with his melodic versatility, his humor and his ability to adapt to the most varied riddims — was the king of the party. Bounty Killer — with his raspy voice, his social militancy and his reputation as a deadly MC in any clash — was the hard conscience of the genre. Their confrontations in the sound clashes and on the tracks were the spectacle that defined the scene.

Lady Saw — Marion Hall — was the first woman to dominate dancehall on equal terms with the men: explicit, challenging, with lyrics that spoke of female sexuality from the perspective of the woman rather than from the perspective of the man who describes her. She broke barriers in a genre historically dominated by men with a conviction that didn't need to apologize to anyone.

Vybz Kartel and 21st Century Dancehall

Adidja Azim PalmerVybz Kartel — was the artist who took Jamaican dancehall to the next level of lyrical and cultural complexity in the 2000s. His mastery of Jamaican patois as a poetic instrument, his ability to capture the psychology of Kingston's ghetto with a precision that other artists could not achieve, and his extraordinary productivity made him the most influential artist in dancehall of his generation.

He was convicted of murder in 2014 and imprisoned, from where he continued producing music that dominated Jamaican charts — an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of Jamaican popular music and perhaps in the history of popular music in general.

Sean Paul: El Puente Global

Sean Paul — Sean Paul Henriques — fue el artista que en 2003, con el single "Get Busy", llevó el dancehall jamaicano al número uno del Billboard Hot 100 americano por primera vez en la historia del género. Era una combinación perfectamente calculada: el flow del dancehall jamaicano envuelto en una producción que podía sonar en la radio pop americana sin sonar extranjera. Su álbum Dutty Rock (2002) es el disco de dancehall más vendido de la historia.

Ese crossover — ese momento en que el dancehall de Kingston llegó al centro del pop global — fue también el momento en que el género empezó a transformarse en algo que influiría en todo lo que vino después: el reggaeton, el afrobeats, el pop de Rihanna, de Drake, de Justin Bieber.

Editor's note: The riddim of "Under Mi Sleng Teng" was generated by the "rock" preset of an $80 Casio keyboard. It was not designed to sound Jamaican — it was a generic rhythmic pattern that Casio had included for children to practice with. Noel Davey and Wayne Smith found it and heard in it something that Casio engineers had never imagined. That's exactly what Jamaica has done with all the music it has found: American R&B became ska, ska became rocksteady, rocksteady became reggae, reggae became dub, dub became dancehall, and dancehall became reggaeton. Jamaica does not imitate: it transforms. And that transformation always begins with someone hearing something familiar and hearing in it something completely new.

Next and final chapter — Series Jamaica: Reggaetón and Global Influence — how the sound of Kingston changed music around the world.