Forty years of music is a lot to meaningfully assess, even before you consider that, for most of those years, Jamaica has possibly released more music per capita than any other place on earth. Clashes have a clear winner and loser-which should make it easy to tell who is objectively, quantifiably the best, surely? All you have to do is follow the stats, add up the forwards that certain songs and artists get time after time to figure out who are the MVPs.just like any other sport, right?įerocious competition and constant upsets are, in fact, only two of several factors that make dancehall even harder to represent with a top 50 than other styles. Beenie Man’s 1993 face-off with Bounty Killer at Jamaica’s long-running Sting festival may be the single most infamous onstage clash, but the history books will also forever record epic match-ups like Super Cat versus Ninja Man and Vybz Kartel versus, well, everybody.Ī global phenomenon that stretches from New York to Tokyo, clashes are planned as meticulously as any heavyweight bout or Olympic heat. Occasionally, notorious artists go head-to-head.
Some soundsystems are also record labels, and may bring affiliated singers or deejays to represent them. Song selections are delivered with taunting microphone commentary in a war of words-something like a cross between a hip-hop DJ battle and a playground game. Each attempts to fortify their position with higher walls of custom-built speaker boxes. Soundclashes are gladiatorial face-offs between rival soundsystems, or mobile DJ crews who vie for the biggest crowd reactions (or “forwards”).
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In turn, the singers began adopting the call-and-response hooks and improvised couplets of deejays, creating a whole new hybrid style of singing they called “sing-jay.” Those vocals became a defining feature of dancehall, along with harder, sparer rhythm sections and an emphasis on “slackness” (raunch or decadence).Īnother major driver of dancehall’s development, as a culture and artform, has been the competitive sport of soundclash. But in celebrating the best of the best, separating the tangled ingredients that make dancehall so consistently brilliant-a fearless approach to sexuality, an experimental approach to sound technology, a military approach to lyrical wordplay, a joyful approach to resistance-is like cutting open the drum to see what makes it go bang.ĭancehall became a subgenre distinct from other styles of reggae around 1977, a time in Jamaica when deejays (equivalent to stateside MCs) were becoming as prominent as singers. That’s not to mention related terms like “highly rated,” “strictly the best,” and “tougher than tough.” It is doubtful, in fact, whether there has ever been another musical genre or subculture so uniquely focused on rankings, ratings, and constantly updated scorekeeping of who is king, queen, or even “don of all dons.”Ĭompetition may accelerate innovation in dancehall it’s what makes the culture such a bottomless wellspring of new rhythms, choreography, fashion, and slang. “Top ranking” is a phrase so common in the lexicon of dancehall reggae, it could almost be punctuation.
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