Dancehall

Dancehall is a type of Jamaican reggae which developed around 1979, with artists such as Yellow Man, Super Cat, Barrington Levy and others who went on to become the Roots Radics. The style is characterized by a DJ singing and rapping or toasting over raw and danceable reggae music (riddims). The rhythm in dancehall is much faster than in reggae, with drum machines helping to speed this up. In the early years of dancehall, some found its lyrics as crude and "slack", though it became very popular among the youths of Jamaica and then eventually, like its reggae predecessor, made inroads onto the world music scene. In the early 1990s the term Raggamuffin became established too.

Bibliography

White, G. (1984). ?The Development of Jamaican Popular Music, Part 2. Urbanization of the Folk, the merger of traditional and the popular in Jamaican Music, ACIJ Research Review, No. 1., The African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica

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Stanley Niaah, S. (2004). ?Kingston?s Dancehall: A Story of Space and Celebration?, in Space and Culture, 7:1, pp. 102-118

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Stewart, K. (2002). ?`So wha, mi nuh fi live to?: Interpreting violence in Jamaica through the Dancehall Culture? in Ideaz, 1 : 1, pp. 17-28

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Stolzoff, Norman C.: Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica. Durham, London: Duke University Press 2000. ISBN 0-8223-2478-4 (hardcover), ISBN 0-8232-2514-4 (paperback)

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• Sunday Observer: Vol. 10, No. 49: Sunday November 21, 2004. ( http://www.jamaicaobserver.com )
• X-news: November
• Dancehall Documentary ( http://dancehalldocumentary.blogspot.com )