Dancehall Music is Absurd, and We love It

The music genre that really shouldn't exist, might be useful for something

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Show notes

Nostalgia can be a powerful force. This is extremely evident in the musings of our discussion on Jamaican Dancehall. Join us for a tea-time chat on Reggae’s vulgar, and culturally rebellious cousin.

Dancehall is a rather vibrant and colorful subgenre of Reggae rooted deeply in Caribbean culture, but the similarities are surface-level at best. The genre is criticized for its overt vulgarity, hypersexualization, and at times, problematic lyrics which have exported varying levels of lawlessness from Jamaica to its neighbors and beyond.

Besides its lasting impact on language through the introduction of crude and derogatory terms like “Chi Chi Man” to the greater Caribbean, Dancehall has also been a potent vector for homophobia and other forms of discrimination throughout the region.

Are we bashing it? Yes. Will we stop singing it? No. Herein lies the great contradiction. Despite the criticisms leveled above, dancehall is recognized as an enduring and significant part of Caribbean identity and is firmly entrenched in contemporary depictions of “Caribbeana.” In this episode, we explore if it is possible to reconcile these attributes, and the genre’s ironic transition from a tool of oppression, to a tool of protest against itself.

This episode features strong sexual themes. Listener discretion is advised.

Recommended

• Why is the Caribbean so Homphobic? - Alice Evans

• Imported Stupidity - Disgruntled Musings with Shem Best

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.

Rasheed: I want it to be known that I didn't want to do this episode.

Shem: I want it to be placed on the record that despite what we are about to do, What we are about to say I love dance hall. I mean, it's one of my guilty pleasures, you know? Um, I, for one, will be licking up the side of the van whenever, you know, Dutty Wine comes on. Did you ever hear about the girl who injured herself dancing to this song?

Rasheed: Neck, right?

Shem: The neck, when she just fainted because the neck spin was a bit too much.

That is my relationship with dancehall. You know, it's brain rot. You know, it's not good for you. But you just can't, you know? Like we have all been shouting "World Boss!" That man's a murderer.

Rasheed: Yes, he's a murderer. Saint Kartel and...

Shem: We canonized him.

Rasheed: Sometimes in the Philippines or Spain or somewhere else, I go sometimes I just play some Popcaan because I guess have Stockholm syndrome, perhaps.

Shem: We had a discussion on this earlier this year about intellectuals descending now and then to tell the public, "Hey guys, I listen to this too." Ladies and gentlemen, Rashid Griffith listens to Popcaan.

Rasheed: Busy Signal, Movado Kartel, Lady Saw.

Shem: When you're standing on the subway, and people think that you have a pensive look on your face, you're standing, you're well dressed and everything, and you got your AirPods in. What you're listening to...

Rasheed: It's not that often. It's not that often. No, let’s not get carried away. I am surprised we're even gonna say this, but we should give a trigger warning for the episode.

Shem: It speaks for itself. We are about to do a music episode on Dancehall. Viewer discretion is advised.

Rasheed: Highly, highly advised.

Shem: If hearing very vulgar language is not your thing, just put this... If you have kids nearby, put the headphones further onto their ears. I'm just kidding. Just no no kids. This episode is fully mature so you have been warned.

Rasheed: And We're gonna have to repeat a lot of the lyrics because many people are not gonna understand.

Shem: It's in Jamaican patois and we'll try our best to bring the concepts up. We can't bring them down. They are in the basement. There will be times when we're going to be reaching because we are not sure where this metaphor is going. We'll be reaching. We'll be trying to give context.

Rasheed: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We know where it's going. It's going nowhere. There's no metaphor.

There's no lyricism.

Shem: We are spoiling it right here, right now, guys.

Dancehall, I love it. But at the same time, this is cultural ash at its finest. Something has burned here. This is the remnant and there's nothing to be gained from the existence of this genre per se.

Rasheed: And on that point, our first song.

Rasheed: Shem, do you wish to explain?

Shem: Siddung pon it (English: sit down on it), siddung pon it, siddung pon it. Sorry.

Rasheed: Do you wish to explain what this song's about, Shem?

Shem: This song is about the struggle, I'm kidding. This song is just sex.

Rasheed: It's just sex.

Shem: It's not just sex, you are expected to do this in the club, mind you. When this plays in the dance hall, people will be basically dry-humping each other to this song.

But I do want to give just the only positive we're going to take from this. The notes that he's hitting.

Rasheed: It's called Auto-Tune.

Shem: I was trying to give him some credit. And you just took it away, they're gonna burn you at the stake for this.

Rasheed: So yeah, so this song, 'Pon Di Cocky', by Aidonia, is what you get on the tin.

Shem: It's what you see. There's nothing deeper to this.

Rasheed: Nothing. Before we dive into the lyrics and the song, I do want to emphasize, listeners. This is not some small, element of English Caribbean music. I heard these songs when I was going to school, on the bus, on the van, on the radio, on the TV, on everything.

Shem: This is pretty universally known.

Rasheed: This is fundamental Caribbean cultural music. Again, English Caribbean, of our childhoods, our teens, our early adult years. This is not some side thing. So, we aren't talking about this merely to be crude. Although it's kind of funny, it really is very important to understand a very vibrant but not necessarily great aspect of Caribbean culture and a window into an awkward element of current Caribbean sociology.

So do keep this in mind as we go forward in this episode. This is weird. I have never been so trigger warning on anything I've ever done before.

Shem: We're not apologizing because it's not us. It's not us.

Rasheed: Yeah, I didn't do this.

Shem: Let's take a peek behind the curtain for a moment here.

Rasheed and I recorded this directly after a reggae-themed episode. So we sat there and we researched the history, the historical context, and whatnot. There's none of that here. We are going from one of our most insightful discussions and now we're just listening to a man sing about "Sit down pon di cocky".

So-

Rasheed: Exactly.

Shem: -When I say we are tired... But we must do this. This has to be done.

Rasheed: It's important.

Shem: It is important. This genre of music has proliferated throughout the entire Caribbean. Well, the English-speaking Caribbean, to our knowledge. And it is the first time that, at least in Barbados, the government has gone, "This might be bad for you", and I didn't go, "You sure about that? What are you trying to keep away from me?" This is the first time I went, "They may have had a point." Because Dancehall is blamed, and rightfully so, for a lot of the degeneration of certain facets of Barbadian society. Specifically, we have something now called 'Van Culture'. Context listeners, Barbados’ transportation system is separated into two parts.

You have the public service, which is the government-operated buses, big blue ones. And then you have the private service vehicles, which are basically taxis that ply the same routes. And these taxis, even though it technically is against regulation, play music and the music they choose is not necessarily the radio.

A lot of the time it has been dancehall.

It's primarily dancehall. And to add insult to injury here, school children take the PSVs, the private service vehicles.

Rasheed: We took them.

Shem: We took them as children. So our ears were young. We had green behind the ears and we were going to school with this playing at maximum volume.

So we're deaf. Not only are we deaf, but the last thing we just heard was Idonia telling us that premarital sex is perfectly fine. Let's do this. I don't know.

Rasheed: I mean, I wish that was all he said.

Shem: That's all I'm going to talk about. That's all I'm going to say. What I am flabbergasted about here is how there seems to have been nothing that we could have done to stop this, that wouldn't have been just plain old censorship. This is now an important cornerstone of Caribbean media. It's actually made it out of the Caribbean. Now we have sanitized versions of this in the United States through artists like, Stefflon Don. And I, for one, I don't know. We're not ashamed of this.

We know we are not ashamed of this. The feeling we have is that we don't know how to explain why this is. Because as I've told Rasheed earlier, in its early stages, Dancehall did have some sort of message. It was hot off the heels of reggae. It did take influence from reggae. It could be considered a subgenre of reggae.

So the themes of violence and fighting and whatnot, violence as a way of pushing back against oppression in a very drastic situation. They were there, they were right there for the picking. But Dancehall seems to have just gone, "Okay, what I'm going to take here is the violence." And it didn't take anything else.

It just took the raw vitriol.

Rasheed: Oh, violence, sex, and violent sex.

Violence, sex, drugs.

Shem: It took the, the, the primordial pieces of reggae and did nothing with it except lay it bare.

Rasheed: But what does it say about us that we like it? That's a different... we'll get to that later. Before we go on, I need to play a song. But I also want to point out that this song, is not a male-only genre.

The women have their equal share of perversion and perverted lyrics as well. I will play this song by Lady Saw.

Rasheed: Growing up hearing lady saw it desensitizes you from anything Americans call vulgar.

I mean, not only in this song, of course, but now that you have, like, "Wet Ass Pussy", and all these others, I'm like, "you need some Lady Saw. That's nothing. That is tame."

Shem: Yeah, 'WAP' ain't got nothing on this.

Rasheed: Nothing. Compared to the song Lady Saw goes into, or not even her but Spice, for example. We will get to Spice later.

But, you have such a desensitized view of lyrics and sexual content from a very early age in the Caribbean.

Shem: What I can, again, this is me reaching here, I'm reaching for some positive aspect to give you Rasheed. Please don't shoot this one down like the Hindenburg. The guys in Dancehall objectify the women just out there, flat out, just right there.

But now we have equality here because the women, the women have decided I can do it and I could do it far more raw than you.

Rasheed: Yes, that's right. That's right.

Shem: The female place, women's place in media in the Caribbean just cannot be understated. The power that women hold in the music industry in the Caribbean cannot be understated.

Lady Saw and Spice are prime examples that anything you can do, I can do twice as X-rated. And I, I, I have nothing. My hands are in the air here. I don't know.

Rasheed: So, it's interesting to- (Madrid police sirens in the distance) What did you say, Shem?

Shem: What did Lady Saw say?

Rasheed: So it's, I think, worth it to reflect on the hypersexualization of Caribbean culture and not only via dancehall, although dancehall is by far the most explicit, obvious way that this has happened. But it's not only from Jamaica. Barbados, Trinidad, Via Calypso, via Soca, and Carnival have the same thing.

Shem: You would think we're one of the most sexually repressed people on earth.

Rasheed: Given the extreme homophobia that's normally from some kind of like super puritan Christianity, but we don't live like that.

Shem: Okay, so context gain. Almost every island has a carnival. And I've watched over the years. In the short space of time that I have been on this earth, I have watched the costumes at carnival devolve,

Rasheed: shrink.

Shem: Devolve.

They've gone from a bikini to a thong, a thong-piece swimsuit. One year in Barbados' Crop OverKadooment festival, there was an uproar because one lady wore paint. She took a cue from the Brazilian side of things and she just came in in paint. Everything was laid there to bear.

So in terms of hyper-sexualization, the Caribbean is no stranger. We have sex. We have sex. We're going to put it there. We probably shouldn't bring your kids. But the irony in the people here are worried about kids at a pride parade.

Rasheed: That is a worthwhile thing to bring up. Because if you go to Kadooment, again, some elements of Pride are even more vulgar than this.

But if you do go to a Kadooment parade, Jamaica, well, Jamaica not so much. But like Barbados and Trinidad, and you see what their people are doing on the street, in their roads, publicly, it's not substantially different from a pride parade in New York. Except for literal, actual, full-on sex, you see sometimes at a pride parade.

But, it, it's very similar.

Shem: We've got scantily dressed men, scantily dressed women, scantily dressed men dancing on women. Lots and lots of alcohol use. We promote it. The festival is sponsored by sponsored by rum.

Rasheed: It is and most calypso songs have lyrics about drinking rum. You know, I had I have so many ideas for essays. I feel like in every episode I mention some essay I have an idea for, that I haven't written as yet.

I have an essay titled "Drinking Rum and Caribbean Nationalism". Because sometimes it's so intertwined with it. Your cultural products are rum and calypso and soca, and they intertwine to a point where it's like, "If I start drinking Amethyst from the Caribbean?" It's a complex issue.

But yes, go ahead.

Shem: Now that you bring that up, it is absolutely wild that there was a National Council on Substance Abuse. They were guaranteed a job because one of Barbados' primary exports is just rum. To the point where. I, for one, will be looking out, sorry, for this essay you're going to write.

And if you write anything bad about the rum, it's going to be me and you.

Rasheed: I want to say though, the first time I saw someone throw up from being drunk, I was in London. It's an underlying point to how early we started drinking and developing tolerances.

Shem: Just means that Londoners are a bit weak now.

Rasheed: That's what I think too.

But you know, going back to this dance hall thing here. So we do have this bare metal vulgarity about many elements of Caribbean culture to a point where it kind of complicates the issue of the gay aversion element. We aren't a Puritan-type society.

We are very vulgar, but yet this particular vulgarity, the vulgarity of the body, and the gay aspect of homosexuality are seen as so far away from what could be palatable in the Caribbean. And I think that's just, you know, poor imagination at some points.

Shem: Give me a moment. I'm gathering what little thoughts you could possibly, you know, scrunch up on this. It's a form of hypocrisy on our part, by the way. Just keep in mind that most of these festivals happen on the weekend. You have carnival Monday in Trinidad, which is hot on the heels of Sunday, which is when most people go to church in Barbados.

One of the bands in the Kadoomin parade is the 'Walk Holy Band'.

Rasheed: Yes. I forgot about that.

Shem: A church is literally in the parade. Mind you, there've been, uh, there've been uproars over the years of people dancing on children in Barbados. And you know, that's seen as a taboo.

Rasheed: Van men.

Shem: Oh, boy. So we've doubled right back to van culture.

So continuing the van culture debate. There's a trend in Barbados of the conductors of the vans of the PSVs that collect the money, praying on younger girls, especially those in secondary school.

Rasheed: High school.

Shem: In high school. Believe it or not, conductors make good money.

Rasheed: Good?

Shem: Compared to the rest of the island, conductors make good money.

Rasheed: They make just above living standard.

Shem: They make enough to entice an unassuming and rather naive young person.

Rasheed: Like 14, 13, 15. Yeah, these are actual things.

Shem: To give it all up for a KFC snack box.

Rasheed: Not the best thing to joke about but we are from the Caribbean here.

It's not actually too much of a joke. It's also true.

Shem: We did touch on the desensitization of abuse, and sexual abuse in the context of the Caribbean in the Rihanna episode. Go ahead and check that out guys, one of our better episodes out there. You will love it. The hypersexualization and how we in the Caribbean are numb to it now. We come to expect a certain level of outrage from anyone outside.

I think now we pride ourselves on how people outside perceive Dancehall.

Rasheed: I don't know if we pride ourselves. I think it's more loose if we just don't have the shame. It's not the same thing. I think it's a bit different.

Shem: I'm gonna say we have a bit of pride on that because the first thing I've done sometimes when I meet someone from outside the Caribbean, I'm like, "You should listen to this."

Maybe pride is the wrong word. What I'm saying is we take an avid interest in the reaction of others when they encounter dancehall for the first time.

Rasheed: But they usually can't understand what they're saying though.

Shem: Sometimes.

Rasheed: Oftentimes.

Shem: Oftentimes they can't understand what they're saying but some of them have music videos is what I'm saying.

Rasheed: Ah, yes, the videos. I forgot that too.

Shem: Music videos. A lot of them have music videos. That's why. I don't know if we're gonna play, are we gonna play Ramping Shop?

Rasheed: Um, next.

Shem: You know what? Hit it.

Rasheed: So, yes...

Shem: Let me take a swing at this one. Let's go. Now I think the most telling thing about this song is you can tell the sort of person you're dealing with when you hear the introduction. How do I word this properly? There are two types of people, Rasheed, that will hear this tune and immediately start dancing.

One person will be expecting 'Miss Independent' by Ne-Yo.

Rasheed: Yes.

Shem: And that person will be most confused.

Rasheed: Yeah. Also American.

Shem: Usually American. The rest of us are like, oh, 'Romping Shop' and we are ready. This song features two of the most vulgar dancehall artists on the planet. They have cornered the market on sex.

Rasheed: One woman, one man. Yes.

Shem: And have decided, "You know, the best thing we could do is collide."

Rasheed: We need some lyrics because unfortunately, we need to use English not Creole, because people are not going to understand how extremely vulgar.

Shem: Now, here's the thing. Obviously we're not going to go through all the lyrics, right?

Rasheed: Yeah, for sure.

Shem: But I think we should go through our favorite lines.

Rasheed: Okay. Yes, please. Please.

Shem: And I'm sorry, I'm going to steal this from you out the gate.

"Cah me haffi wine pon di cocky like dis. Kartel spin me like a satellite dish."

Now, besides a listener graphic lyrics warning, I should also advise that, apparently we have athletes in the Caribbean, so you really shouldn't attempt some of these stunts that you're hearing. Spice and Kartel are having a sexual encounter.

Rasheed: So earlier up in the song, just to open it up properly.

Kartel said, and I found this strangely poetic. He said, translated to English proper. "My penis is longer than a knight."

Shem: A nine?

Rasheed: Longer than the night.

Shem: Are you sure?

Rasheed: I'm sure. I am sure.

Shem: No, that's not the official lyrics.

Rasheed: Uh, well, who made the official lyrics? Kartel definitely ain't put out lyrics for this song.

Shem: No, he's not a lyrical genius. He might be. Maybe we just don't understand it. I'm not just saying this because I have the lyrics in front of me.

This was my understanding of this song. The song says, "Me cocky longer than me, nine", and nine is a gun.

Rasheed: I understand that too, but there are some other lyrics that I saw that say else as well. That's why I said more quotes as well. I prefer mine.

Shem: Fine, but no matter what he's humble bragging about the size of his penis.

Rasheed: Yes. In the opening lines of his song.

Shem: We should probably speak about the homophobia immediately in the opening of the song. So "And every gal grab a man. Man to man, gal to gal. That's wrong." That's self-explanatory.

Rasheed: Yes.

Shem: They're setting the stage off the bat, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve guys.

This song is being played in the club and immediately he's like, "Okay, you know what? Find somewhat of the opposite sex".

Rasheed: It's funny he says "scorn them." Yes, that was also said as well.

Shem: So every time we just reinforce.

Rasheed: Yeah, even in this song. Why would this be even brought in?

These songs are already particularly super hyper-heterosexual but even here, even in this song they said "No, scorn them, batty (gay) men".

Shem: It's like we had to refresh the homophobia. It was getting a little low. So we had to top it up.

So they're having sex. Spice is enjoying it a lot. You know she's saying she's never had any like this. She's enjoying the positions, but the one that goes spin me like a satellite dish? Please don't attempt this, listeners.

Don't do that.

Rasheed: And they said it over and over. There's a part of the song that I can't figure out what they're trying to say. Cause what I can hear them saying feels hilarious. It is "Deal with your breasts like me crushing Irish." I can never figure out what he's trying to say at that particular point in time.

That particular element, I thought was hilarious.

Shem: He's out of prison now, we can ask him.

Rasheed: Oh yeah Kartel, also Movado, different guy. Kartel went to jail for murder. Murder! And while in jail, was still making music, and people were still, supporting is an understatement.

They were like, yo Kartel, "World Boss", Saint Kartel, essentially.

Shem: He's been canonized as Saint Kartel.

Rasheed: Yeah by far the most important dancehall singer ever.

Shem: Yeah. Keep in mind that we've been laughing this whole time. I can relate to this lyric "Til me belly cramp up"

But also it should be noted that the line "man for man", is repeated.

Rasheed: Yes.

Shem: It's at the beginning and the end. So they're like don't be gay and then at the end, it's like, “Okay, we've just done all that. So guys, remember, please don't be gay.” I think this might be one of the most iconic dancehall songs.

Rasheed: Oh, easily every person, our age, and younger and also older, but every person, our age in the Caribbean, that speaks English.

Shem: I'm going to have to take a shower after this.

Rasheed: So I'm going to head to the next song.

Rasheed: So Shem, This is probably the most infamous dance hall song. You meant to say.

Shem: Problematic.

Rasheed: I said what I said.

Shem: You meant to say problematic. And we are part of the problem as well.

Rasheed: Yes, we are.

Shem: I know if this plays in the club, we will be singing it.

Rasheed: And this is the absurd thing about Caribbean culture that it's hard to enunciate sometimes because this song, has to be the most homophobic ever, right? Has to be.

Shem: Literally calls for the killing of the gays.

Rasheed: Yeah, burn them. Burn the gays. This has to be the most homophobic song ever. And yet, I remember very vividly, the very first time I went to a gay party in Barbados. This song started playing, and people started dancing. That says a lot about Caribbean culture.

I mean that scene alone says a lot. But also, I play this song sometimes in my house and unironically enjoy it.

Shem: Same. Same. If you see me making gunshot gestures towards the sky at a bus stop, it's most likely this, that's the only thing that can make me break character as an NPC (video game reference: non-playable character).

Rasheed: To be clear, we're both gay, from the Caribbean, and we are making these comments about this song.

Shem: Don't come for us. Don't come. Oh, my God. I cannot. And this played in Panama.

Rasheed: Oh yes.

Shem: I was at a club. I was at a gay club in Panama. And this played and there was a brief moment when I was like, "Oh, the DJ made a mistake" and I was looking around everybody was going down and I was like, "well, you know when in Rome."

Rasheed: But the thing about Panama is that we both have this experience.

Most people in Panama hear this song and have no idea what's being said. This played on the radio. We have a mutual friend, we were in his car, and we were driving somewhere. I forgot where we were going and this song came on on the radio in Panama. Panama does not have very good English and certainly no Jamaican dialect is very common.

And I was like, “Do you know what this song's about?” He said, “No, he thought it was some party song from the Caribbean.” It's just a whole other thing. And then I explained the song and he was horrified, horrified!

Shem: [redacted] was there?

Rasheed: I'm not calling names. I don't know why you're calling names.

Shem: Redacted, redacted, redacted!

So, you listeners, my Panamanian friend, when I went to that club, as I was dancing and going down, I told her these people in here have no clue what's being said. And then she goes, "But I do. I know what this is, I know."

Rasheed: How does she know? I told him, that's how it happens.

Shem: Those are the ones you gotta give a little side eye to. It's like, so you know what it means. I don't want to know what made it worse, the fact that she knew what it meant or the fact that she was straight.

Rasheed: Look, this song really does underlie a very peculiar thing about Dancehall. It is excessively homophobic.

Shem: It's contradictory.

We kind of just accepted it. We are vehemently push against the intrusion of certain cultures. We see the LGBTQ movement in the United States as an incursion of culture. Conservatives here see it as an incursion of culture, but there has been no successful and significant fight back against how dancehall has essentially spread across the entire Caribbean.

Because it's seen as Caribbean culture now. It is entrenched. It is universal across the Caribbean. And if you ask me, this should have been seen as foreign. This should have been seen as an invading cultural asset that definitely should have been shot down at the border.

It should not have been allowed to get as far as it has gotten. And yet here we are, you and I singing burn the gays in a club to this song.

Rasheed: In Barbados.

Shem: In Barbados of all places. So at the same time, we want to see rights but also burn the gays.

Rasheed: It's the strangest thing. I always say it's very hard to explain properly. Caribbean music is just so entrenched in how our worldviews are formed. Music is so part of our society, our body, essentially, that even when we have very concrete worldviews, we can't get the music out.

Even though we very clearly understand what the music is saying. Because it's almost like this background noise at a point in time. This is a Caribbean element that I am displaying, that I am performing in. But it doesn't actually mean that much to me lyrically. It's more of the actual sensation that I am getting from this song.

Because people don't really know or care what the lyrics of Dancehall mean. You bring up this conversation like, "Oh, that's a weird lyric." And that underlies something very peculiar about Caribbean musical genres.

Dancehall distills Caribbeana into just sensations and it's not really artistic at that point. It's almost just a mechanical thing to do and it's a very weird thing to become so prominent in a culture that really did prize artistic merit.

Shem: You know, I think the most lasting impact of this song is how the word Chi Chi Man is now a permanent part of Caribbean vernacular. It has joined the likes of ‘Fish’, ‘Bulla Man’, and now we have ‘Chi Chi Man’.

Rasheed: Batty Man.

Shem: Batty Boy. Uh, prickle, Barbados.

Rasheed: I forgot that one.

Shem: Prickle is unique for Barbados, cause it also means homeless.

Rasheed: Oh yeah, I haven't heard it in a long time.

Shem: It is the weirdest thing. Now we have this contribution. We have Jamaican slang that is now permanently enshrined. And it's not been modified at all.

Rasheed: We introduced this term to someone very recently in Dublin. Alice Evans, a very, very good gender researcher from the UK, and she wrote a blog post about homophobia in the Caribbean and she references this song. Because I think it was you who actually told her about this song, right?

Shem: Don't implicate me

Rasheed: We will link the blog post in the show notes as well about why the Caribbean is so homophobic. She has a very interesting hypothesis on this which links back to the number of men versus women in the Caribbean from slavery. But you know it's weird and not weird to talk about homophobia and dancehall in the same sentence.

They are explicitly linked because all Dancehall lyrics somehow lead back to anti-gayness. And you can't really separate the two ideas. We try to pretend we can, but we cannot.

Shem: Dancehall's culture is just, in a critical way, juxtaposed to homosexuality. It doesn't feel like they should be able to coexist, but lo and behold, I think this next song might just prove us wrong on that.

Rasheed: So, you introduced this song to me after I was sending you gay reggaeton-themed music from Madrid, because, of course. I think I made a point of, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if there was a gay-themed dancehall song?" And you were like, I got you.

Shem: Why do you keep implicating me?

Yeah, I was like, "Hold on, let me check my shelf." Somehow we've come full circle.

Rasheed: This is the absolute absolute. Yes.

Shem: This is the epitome of everything, reggae, dancehall. So we've somehow we've come right around. Now dancehall is being used as a tool to fight the oppression of dancehall.

Rasheed: Yes!

Shem: You heard the snippet, "Fire bun, this fire on that, but my man is essentially going to get me wet enough to quench all those fires."

Rasheed: Exactly.

Shem: I mean, being homosexual aside, bars, bars. You have turned the oppressive nature of dancehall on its head by using that very tool of oppression.

Rasheed: It's clearly oppressive in very clear ways. But also, it feels like this is the absolute conclusion, not in a bad way, of Caribbean culture.

Given that we actually enjoy dancehall, of course at some point in time, the thing that you are ridiculing, you're going to use that thing to actually say, "No, we can do this too." It's not like it's like a counter dancehall song.

It's a pure dancehall song.

Shem: And on his merits, it is good, it is good. It's good. If you're homophobic, I'm so sorry. Maybe find the instrumental?

Rasheed: Wouldn't it be hilarious if a Jamaican dancehall singer takes this rhythm and sings something else? Oh, that would be just the best.

Shem: With the batty man rhythm. I for one would, because you know, you still have a lot of spin-offs of the same.

Is there a gay reggae?

Rasheed: There's gay reggae? Not that I know of. Reggae is a fairly neutered genre these days, but it's not a problem in that sense.

It was not super sexual. Yeah.

Shem: But the thing about you either live long enough to die, the hero or live long enough to become the villain. Dancehall became its own villain. With that one song to me. Let's be very honest.

It is oppressive. As I said, it is attacking homosexuality, but at the same time, you'd be remiss to find one homosexual that explicitly lists dancehall as an element that makes them feel uncomfortable in the Caribbean.

It's kind of just accepted as that is the Caribbean in much the same way that we've somehow accepted the church and all of its homophobia as a mainstay feature of Caribbean life. It's like, that's a whole different topic. The church gonna church. Dancehall gonna dance hall.

Rasheed: This might, this might start a whole thing because I can see more of this being produced for sure.

Shem: Mind you, they produced this from the safety of the United States.

Rasheed: This is Canada or something like that.

Shem: Yeah. But,

Rasheed: Diaspora music is still Caribbean music Shem.

Shem: You're absolutely right. I, for one, do have a sense of pride.

Rasheed: Yeah.

Shem: Behind this song. It exists. It will join my playlist.

Rasheed: Oh, I did want to reference just that gay reggaeton theme song. It's not a reggaeton episode, but reggaeton comes from dancehall.

So I'll just like, play a little thing here and we'll come back.

Rasheed: Yeah, so gay reggaeton and gay dancehall, kind of come at around the same time. I'm very excited by it in many ways, because, again, reggaeton stems from dancehall rhythms. So, having La Cruz, who's singing this song called Easy Boy, he's from Madrid. He really pushes the gay themes in the music.

And it's a very innovative use of these genres. I don't want to push that word too hard because I have my thoughts on the artistry of the genre itself.

But having these themes that are usually attacking and reggaeton is also being hyper-sexualized, just not as vulgar as Dancehall, but these two super hyper-sexualized genres being then used by gay themes. That's the kind of evolution one would theoretically expect, but not practically receive. But now we're getting it.

And I find that a very interesting thing. We would have never imagined gay reggaeton or gay dancehall when we were in high school.

Shem: At least on the dancehall side. Dancehall traces its roots back to reggae, which is a tool of protest, and it's only fitting. Now Dancehall itself is being used as a tool of protest in a region that is known, and renowned for using music as a method of voicing pressing issues.

You couldn't have done it better. I say, well done.

Rasheed: I am here for the batty man party.

Shem: Here.

Rasheed: On that note, we will end this shorter episode because I thought it was very important to discuss that song in the Caribbean and I'm sure we'll be revisiting these themes going forward in the next few Caribbean culture episodes.

Shem: God, I'm gonna need a stiff drink.

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