What is Dancehall?

Dancehall is a type of Jamaican popular music which developed around 1979, with exponents such as Yellowman, Super Cat, Barrington Levy and others who went on to become the Roots Radics. It is also known by some as "Bashment" and in the early 1990s the term Raggamuffin was established. The style is characterized by a DJ singing and rapping or toasting over raw and danceable music riddims. The rhythm in dancehall is much faster than in reggae, with drum machines replacing acoustic sets. In the early years of dancehall, some found its lyrics crude and bawdy ("slack"), though it became very popular among the youths of Jamaica. Like its reggae predecessor it eventually made inroads onto the world music scene.

Dancehall developed in Jamaica as a result of varying political and socio-economic factors. Reggae as a style of music was heavily influenced by the ideologies of Rastafari and was also spirited by the socialist movements in the island at the time. Dancehall, the scion of reggae, was birthed in the late seventies and early eighties