It’s been a while, whew. But I’m backkkkkk and I thought I’d return paying homage to my homeland 🇯🇲.

So I’m here to give you guys a quick history lesson on my favourite genre – dancehall.

What is Dancehall?

Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall (or “ragga”) becoming increasingly characterised by faster rhythms. Key elements of dancehall music include its extensive use of Jamaican Patois rather than Jamaican standard English and a focus on the track instrumentals (or “riddims”).

Dancehall is named after Jamaican dance halls in which popular Jamaican recordings were played by local sound systems. The development of sound systems and other music technology can be said to be the cause of the success of dancehall, sound systems allowed people to listen to music without having to buy a radio. Therefore, the dancehall culture grew as the use of technology and sound systems got better. Dancehall greatly differed from its parent genre reggae in that the success of the music was no longer the responsibility of just one person. It now factored in the DJ, speaking poetic words to the audience, the Selector, harmonizing beats in an aesthetically pleasing way, and the Sound Engineer, wiring the sound systems to handle deeper and louder bass tones.Music was now a jigsaw puzzle that required multiple pieces to make up the bigger picture.

Dancehall as we know it

It was in the early 2000s that dancehall really started to blow, in both Jamaica and abroad. Artists such as Sean Paul and Shaggy helped to bring the genre into the mainstream, Sean Paul’s Get Busy (2003) was the first dancehall song to reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.  During this time there was also an emergence of ‘dancing tunes’, with artists such as Beenie Man, Elephant Man and Bogle/Mr Wacky shutting down the dancefloors with their songs that also featured a dance routine. Any dance you went to would be sure to have groups of people signalling planes, gully creeping and  doing the frog back.

Nowadays, dancehall has changed once again. It has become much more popular in the West, artists such as Spice and Popcaan have seen much success touring the world taking the sounds of Jamaica to the masses. We have also seen many mainstream artists (Drake, Justin Bieber, Beyonce) take inspiration from dancehall music in their songs.

Dancehall is ever-evolving and can only grow stronger. Soon we’ll be seeing dancehall artists charting and winning mainstream awards (not just best reggae/international act).

Well that’s me done for now, I hope this has been informative. Here’s a playlist of some of my favourite dancehall songs

Enjoy

HD x