But there were other factors, too. Growing dancehall’s reach beyond the diasporic strongholds where it has a natural presence often means losing the cultural context that nurtures it. Max Glazer, a Caribbean music DJ of the Federation Sound crew and a longtime industry insider, says the attempts are often met with failure. “Historically, I’ve watched a lot of things stall when you have songs and records that get big to a point and then you’re trying to push them in the Midwest or certain places in the South. When they get to urban radio stations where there’s not naturally a Caribbean population, there seems to be a lot of times that there’s a disconnect,” Glazer said. “Dancehall and Caribbean music is so strong and has—not such a strong record-buying base—but has such a strong base culturally that it’s never going away, but it’s not always easy to break.”

A 1991 New York Times story, which attempted to introduce dancehall to the paper’s audience a decade before its global rise, made a similar case. “Reggae reached out to the world in the 1970's and 1980's, while dancehall, with its limited melodic vocabulary and thick accent, seems determined to exclude outsiders,” wrote Jon Pareles, in an explanation of why songs with broadly identifiable Caribbean features—steel pans or sticky melodies—would grab non-Jamaican audiences more readily than the denser, brasher strokes of dancehall. Though the genre has changed a lot since then, often creating its own aesthetic trends and sometimes borrowing from EDM, US hip-hop and R&B, Afrobeat, and other sounds, it still requires a certain cultural literacy that people outside of those aforementioned diasporic cities simply might not grasp. Patois presents a language barrier for a lot of people. So, too, does not being a natural dancer, given that the music rests largely on the art of winding one’s waist to a driving dancehall riddim.

In many ways, those are hurdles that the likes of Rihanna and Universal signee DiPasquale get to bypass, by presenting more accessible, poppy iterations of dancehall. At best, they can act as translators of dancehall culture for broader audiences; at worst, DiPasquale, despite having deep industry co-signs, has the potential to make a larger fortune off of the culture than its originators will. As someone who is young, white, and has the conventional good looks of a teeny-bopping pop star, there is a significantly simpler path to marketing him via Top 40 radio. The sum of DiPasquale’s new single, “Do It Like,” which features two Jamaican-born artists and a Jamaican-Canadian—Stylo G, Konshens, and Kardinall Offishall—lends him the credibility of the island while his identity insulates him from many of the hindrances that affect the dancehall artists he’s mimicking.

While the genre’s footprints have persisted in the form of subtle influences on pop music, that doesn’t necessarily mean the mainstream is ready or willing to accept another wave of Jamaican artists. “There’s generally more back-and-forth and dialogue between [dancehall] and urban music, pop music,” said Glazer, “but it’s been awhile since there has been any major, major Caribbean crossover records. My thought process is never, like, ‘Cool, the floodgates are open!’ I think that’s too optimistic. It’s just this kind of like slow build, and baby steps continue to happen.”

For traditional dancehall artists, the reality will likely settle somewhere in the middle ground, closer to the slow build Glazer speaks of than the sweeping success Atlantic hopes to have with Kranium. Take recent viral star Gully Bop, for example: his career was entirely jumpstarted by a rogue freestyle initially spread through social media. He has since purveyed that into merch sales and sold-out club dates in Europe and North America. Bop is unlikely to crossover with a major international radio hit, but he gets to have some sort of career nonetheless, buoyed by the internet’s piqued interested.

Similarly, fans interested in dancehall can turn to Soundcloud, YouTube, and, in more and more cases, services like Spotify to listen to hits or scour for obscure recordings—no longer do you have to rely on someone’s cousin to bring the latest heat back from Jamaica in the form of mix CDs. In the same way that the internet agitated entertainment infrastructures over here, so too did it leave once-dominant Jamaican artists flailing. The emergence of digital platforms stunted CD sales and required artists to excavate for new avenues for distribution, promotion, and income. But though those technical factors may have once stalled the genre, if harnessed they will incubate dancehall’s consistent growth and the possibility of yet more internet-facilitated culture-bending. In other words, we may never get another Dutty Rock-level smash, but dance will never die.