WHO CAN MAKE THE DANCE RAM?

By Edwin “STATS” Houghton

“Top ranking” is a phrase so common in the lexicon of dancehall reggae, it could almost be punctuation. 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.”

Competition may accelerate innovation in dancehall; it’s what makes the culture such a bottomless wellspring of new rhythms, choreography, fashion, and slang. 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.

Dancehall 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. 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).

Another major driver of dancehall’s development, as a culture and artform, has been the competitive sport of soundclash. Soundclashes are gladiatorial face-offs between rival soundsystems, or mobile DJ crews who vie for the biggest crowd reactions (or “forwards”). Each attempts to fortify their position with higher walls of custom-built speaker boxes. 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. Some soundsystems are also record labels, and may bring affiliated singers or deejays to represent them.

Occasionally, notorious artists go head-to-head. 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.

A global phenomenon that stretches from New York to Tokyo, clashes are planned as meticulously as any heavyweight bout or Olympic heat. 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?

Wronger than wrong.

Ferocious 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. Sheer mass also plays a part. 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. Literally a hundred thousand vinyl 45s have to be sifted through to arrive at a list of the “top ranking.”

Then there’s the more opened-ended question of “best” in what context? Even judging the best song on a riddim—or individual beat, on which multiple artists voice their own songs—can be a near-impossible feat. Clashes may provide clarity in the moment, but they are not the only space where dancehall comes to life. Before soundsystems clashed, they existed to make people dance. (Mostly outdoors, ironically; despite the name, instances when Jamaicans dance in an actual hall are vanishingly rare.) The spontaneous headtop gyration of a dancehall queen is just as valid an affirmation as a forward in a clash. And the clashes and dances of downtown Kingston are just the heliocentric core of a whole universe of interlocking circles that make up dancehall culture across a pan-Caribbean audience, a West Indian diaspora, and a global touring circuit. To truly be rated as one of the best dancehall anthems of all time, a boom tune must echo through all these worlds—and in some cases, rearrange their orbit, shifting the center of gravity and starting a whole new wave of dancehall evolution. This evolution is constant and, even now, the tonality of dancehall is being transformed again as Auto-Tune replaces echo chamber and digital files replace vinyl as the unit of meaning.

This is why we went out of our way to assemble a panel of dancehall experts who represent not just Jamaica, but also New York, Toronto, and Miami—not just journalists and critics, but also selectors, producers, musicians, and scholars with fluency in all the various eras and movements of dancehall. These are not just judges (though they know their forwards from their rewinds, trust) but also, in their own way, participants in dancehall’s body politic. So this is our top of the top ranking: the 50 Best Dancehall Songs of All Time.

Edwin “STATS” Houghton is the former editor-in-chief of Questlove's music site Okayplayer and a noted music journalist, cultural commentator, and dancehall selector.