Dancehall Autopsy

john eden

male pale and stale
how innovative is it between sleng teng and say 1995? what are the major innovations?

Main one would be all the mad polyrhythmic stuff I think. Steely and Cleevie, that gear. Also more tunes about guns.

Also the mixed bag of the first hip hop crossovers.

And then the Jungle stuff towards 1995, if that actually counts.
 
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droid

Well-known member
how innovative is it between sleng teng and say 1995? what are the major innovations?

Sleng Teng => 95 (92 actually) saw the most radical shift in jamaican music since Ska => Rocksteady, or possibly ever. It was a genuinely revolutionary break with the past, unlike digital which mostly used the same structures, tropes and sonic elements except with electronic instruments instead of acoustic/electric. That's why so many people hate ragga.

Compare + contrast

 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
2003's important for giving the very song i was listening to as i made my dissensus account, which also provided me with my username.


though part 2 a couple of years later is better

 

luka

Well-known member
whats the critical consensus? youe read all that stuff. how is it different. in what speicifc ways etc
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I’m not great at musical descriptions or musicological structures but the rhythms got more complex basically, in a good way.

I read someone once who explained this as a return to more traditional (African) modes like Kumina, Pocomania and stuff like Nyabinghi drumming. I’m not best placed to comment on that but it was a good retort to reggae purists who thought ragga was soulless or venal.

Possibly also the bpm increased during this timeframe?
 

luka

Well-known member
barty knows hes promised to draw me up some charts with the felt tips i got him for hes birthday. eden you can just find some good examples to illustrate your points.
 

luka

Well-known member
i mean tbh i must have read about this countless times before it just never seems to stick. anything to do with numbers short circuits my brain. numeracy is symptomatic of autism. i cant get my head around it.
 

droid

Well-known member
Fuck it. May as well go all in.

Digital laid the ground for a break from the studio system that had been in place since the late 60's by stripping away barriers to entry. Once you could lay down a riddim on a $50 keyboard the jig was up. Its no coincidence that Jammy's was the last big studio to have an overarching dominance. So what happens then is that you have assistants, engineers & musicians who take the opportunity to set up on their own. Bobby Digital was one of Jammy's guys, Steelie & Cleevie were his house band, Collin 'Bulbie' York started at Roy Francis' Mixing Lab label, Tony Kelly was an assistant engineer at Tuff Gong, Dave Kelly was a producer at Penthouse for Germain before setting up madhouse. You even get deejays and singers producing tunes, Ninjaman & Tiger both broke through with self produced records, 'protection' and 'no wanga gut'. Low costs also led to a proliferation of new operations, Patrick Roberts' Shocking Vibes, Lloyd Dennis' Pickout, Crat Recordings (reportedly financed by the Gullyman Posse), and dozens, maybe hundreds more...

So, only a couple of years after Sleng Teng you suddenly have a ton of new studios & new producers who can put out tunes with just drum machines, synths and keyboards. You have people experimenting with different rhythms and styles; there's the pocomania craze of '89 based on the tresillo with Gregory Peck's pocoman jam leading to a mini trend, there's the bhangra influence, and then there's the son clave which (via mento) is more or less the basis for the riddim that led to ragga & the dancehall bum-bum-tisch - 88's Punaany. Punaany changed the game completely, it reduced the bass to individual pulses rather than full basslines & had a sparser, more predictable (and easily replicated) drum pattern which gave more space to the deejay. Even though this became the dominant rhythm in dancehall from the mid 90's on, perhaps the most important aspect of Punaany was its minimalism - strip out the marimba sound and you basically have just kick, bass and snare - and this sparseness was exploited brilliantly by Dave Kelly in the early 90s.

WRT deejays, I dont think you can overestimate the influence Shabba had, not lyrically, but in terms of success. Suddenly you could win Grammys and be a huge star by deejaying about guns & girls. Shabba was the template for almost everyone that came after and his achievements became the benchmark at a time when US labels were hoovering up Jamaican talent, Supercat, General trees, Patra, Tiger, Lieutenant Stitchie, Capleton, Mad Cobra - all got deals with US majors. This coincided with demographic, socio-economic and political factors. The birth rate in Jamaica peaked around '68-'69 and stayed high until the mid 70's, so by the late 80's there would have been a peak in the number of 18-25 year olds. In 1983 commonwealth immigration into Britain was basically stopped dead. Around the same time there was a crackdown on gangs in JA after a decade of political sponsored violence and CIA and World Bank interference. There was already high immigration to the US in the 60's and 70's but in the 80's about 210,000 Jamaicans travelled to the US (and presumably many more illegals), the vast majority to New york and the East Coast, and a significant number of these were political gunmen and gang members who become involved in the drug trade, using political and gangland contacts in Jamaica to establish new cocaine shipping routes into the US. With a new, ready made audience, the New York dancehall scene blossoms providing a new avenue to success for dancehall artists. NY based Addies, along with Jaro and Saxon become one of the most successful soundsystems of the late 80s and early-mid 90s, shifting away from the predominant mode of 80s soundclash (live deejays and singers over 45's) to international juggling and dubplate based clashes. The dubplate economy quickly becomes one of the most lucrative sources of income for deejays, who now have the prospect of making thousands of dollars in a single dub cutting session.

Dubplate money, stageshow bookings, access to the US, potential stardom, no real musical skill required... All in all, this makes for a very attractive proposition for young Jamaican men. Deejays flood the market, slackness becomes mainstream, every lyrical niche is filled and within three or four years the face of dancehall has changed dramatically...

Obv there's much more to all this, and one thing I would stress is that there were many overlapping and contradictory currents, in fact one of the best things about the period is the fact that Conroy Smith, Major Mackerel and Buju could all have hits at the same time, or that Dennis Brown and Sleepy Wonder could share a riddim (in fact that lack of diversity is the biggest hole in modern dancehall) but the trends are there and we all know where they led.
 
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