Apparently I’m on my dancehall bullshit right now. Usually every summer I’ll go down some musical rabbit hole and also work on perfecting some sort of cocktail. Last summer it was afrobeats and Corpse Reviver No. 2. I’m open to summertime cocktail recommendations, but it seems like dancehall might be my new summertime obsession.
A Who Seh Me Dun (Wait De Man) - Cutty Ranks1
Legendary dancehall from the early 90s when the genre was getting more aggressive and taking inspiration and cues from the boom-bap East Coast rap scene that was exploding out of New York at the time. While dancehall up to that point was built off of riddims that were mostly beats or backing tracks that were written by producers, by the late 80s those producers were experimenting with sampling, drum machines and other techniques favored by rap and hip hop producers in the states. The riddim for “A Who Seh Me Dun” is actually a mashup of the Bam Bam riddim (most well known as the riddim behind Chaka Demus & Pliers’ biggest hit, “Murder She Wrote” and an interpolation of one of the most famous OG dancehall tunes, Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam”) and Jimmy Cliff’s sunshiny roots reggae classic, “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”. Cutty also did a version of Who Seh over a more straightforward hip hop beat toward the end of the record that really showcases his interest in connecting dancehall to rap.
Jim Screechie - Spice
Not to be confused with the Ceremony offshoot post-punk band, SPICE, the sentence-case Spice has been probably one of the biggest names in Jamaican dancehall over the last decade. This track is a relative deep-cut of hers (for reference, Jim Screechie has about a million and a half streams on Spotify, and her collab with Sean Paul and Shaggy as 150 million) but the riddim by my favorite dancehall DJ pranksters Equiknoxx is an absolute banger.
That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.
The song is strangely mis-titled on Spotify, which seems like a pretty big oversight for a song that is pushing 14 million plays.