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If you grew up in Jamaica in the 90s you were possibly one of the teenagers who would bravely bellow the lyrics of these erotic Dancehall songs when no adult was in sight. By the close of the period 1990 – 1999, Dancehall was clearly defined as the unfiltered genre of Jamaican music that mirrors the realities of low income Jamaicans. Dancehall lyrics were not sanitized. They were real, raw, and for many young Jamaicans, aurally-gratifying.

Here are the best erotic Dancehall songs released in the decade, 1990 – 1999. Viewer discretion advised. 

Shabba Ranks – Caan Dun, 1991

Little Lenny – Bum Flick, 1992

Beenie Man – Wickedest Slam, 1995

Lady Saw – Stab Out Mi Meat, 1998

Spragga Benz – Jack It Up, 1995

Screechy Dan – Skin Out, 1999

Bounty Killa – Long Donkey Cod, 1993

Photo – Shabba Ranks

The post Dancehall Songs You Hid & Listened | Best Erotic Dancehall Songs Released 1990 – 1999 appeared first on Jamaicans.com.

The Recording Academy, which presents the prestigious Grammy music awards, has named some of the women who were instrumental in shaping the sounds of reggae and dancehall music. Most people think of Bob Marley when they think of reggae, but women have had an integral role in building much of the music scene in Jamaica from its beginnings in the 1960s. In honor of Women’s History Month, the Academy highlighted four of the women it identified as foundational to the development of reggae and dancehall.

Sonia Pottinger

Sonia Eloise Pottinger, the first woman Jamaican record producer and OD recipient, created her own role in the early days of the island’s music industry. She is considered one of the greatest of Jamaica’s record producers, working with ska and rocksteady musicians who preceded reggae, as well as gospel artists from the mid 1960s to mid 1980s through her record labels Gay Feet, Excel, Pep, High Note, and Glory. She and her husband Lindon Pottinger founded several labels, a shop, and studio that recorded seminal artists. She was the first woman to be the co-owner of the first music facility in Jamaica that was owned and operated by a Black individual. After her friend producer Arthur “Duke” Reid died, she inherited the catalog of his Treasure Isle Records and its recording studio, bringing in notable performers like Marcia Griffiths and Beres Hammond and licensing Treasure Isle tracks to companies overseas, including Trojan Records. Her business skills, vision, and ear for music contributed to the worldwide influence of reggae music. Pottinger died in 2010, but her legacy lives on.

Patricia Chin

Patricia Chin, 83, has run VP Records for more than 40 years. The legendary distributor, shop, and record label is dedicated to dancehall and reggae. Chin and her husband Vincent “Randy” Chin left the political violence of Kingston behind and moved to Queens, New York, where they founded VP Records in 1979. VP Records is the largest independent recording label, distributor, and publisher of reggae and dancehall music in the world. It has over 25,000 song titles, and the company is woman-owned and operated. In 2015, Chin became the first woman to be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Association of Independent Music. The label has helped to launch the careers of artists like Lady Saw, Maxi Priest, Bounty Killer, and Beenie Man. In Kingston, the Chins operated Randy’s Records, a distribution and recording studio that began in the late 1950s and produced sessions with Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and others working at the intersection of ska, rocksteady, and reggae. She pioneered the compilation album format at a time when the market favored singles. DJ Kool Herc, the founder of hip-hop, said that “What “What Berry Gordy was to Motown, Patricia Chin is to VP Records and the reggae industry.”

The legendary Marcia Griffiths has one of the longest careers in reggae, performing since 1964. Her vocals are featured on ska, reggae, rocksteady, and dancehall records. She began singing with Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, and then went on to record duets with artists like Bob Marley for Studio One, the label owned by Coxsone Dodd. She released her first single “Feel Like Jumping” in 1968, and in 1970, came to global fame with her duet with Bob Andy in the reggae cover of “Young, Gifted and Black.” With Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt, Griffiths formed the I-Threes in 1974, backup singers for Bob Marley. The group continued to release music after the death of Marley, and Griffiths continued to produce records as a solo performer. In 1983, her “Electric Boogie” single inspired the dance still popular today. She has more than 15 albums to her name, and in 2014, received he Jamaican Order of Distinction for her contributions to reggae music.

Sister Nancy’s 1982 dancehall recording “Bam Bam” is the most-sampled reggae song in history, but Sister Nancy, born Ophlin Russell, broke through as the first woman dancehall deejay when she was still in her teen years and dominated the previously all-male sound system culture of Kingston. Her debut record “One Two” was recorded in 1982. While its other songs were not popular in Jamaica, “Bam Bam” was a massive hit. Sister Nancy moved to the US in 1996 and worked as an accountant. Despite the popularity of her song, she never received any compensation for it. “Bam Bam” was credited instead to producer Winston Riley. When she heard the song used in a Reebok commercial in 2014, she sued and won, receiving a decade’s worth of royalties, as well as 50-percent rights to the original album and publishing credits. After winning the lawsuit, Sister Nancy left her accounting job and began to perform again around the world.

In honor of International Reggae Day 2023, we place the spotlight on Jamaican music stalwarts who are instrumental to the shaping of Reggae and Dancehall music legacy. 

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In honor of International Reggae Day 2023, we share an informative commentary on the foundation of Reggae music, written by our esteemed entertainment and sports contributor, Richard Blackford…over to you Richard!

In a recent interview with The Cable Lifestyle newspaper, Ghananian Reggae/Dancehall artist Stonebwoy declared that Reggae doesn’t belong to any Caribbean society from its core and that it belongs to Africans. It is not the first time that a “big-name” African artiste has made this claim. In 1992, the late South African Reggae artiste, Lucky Dube,  reportedly claimed that people would say reggae is Jamaican, but that is not true. It has only been popularized in Jamaica, but it is not Jamaican as such. Reggae is everywhere, but its roots are in Africa.

TAKING PRIDE IN OUR CULTURAL INFLUENCE
It is one thing that these privileged individuals would make such a claim, after all, it is their opinion. It is quite another matter when others, especially Jamaicans are prepared to give credence to such rubbish. Such uninformed views flies in the face of the fact that Jamaica sits proudly among the company of a handful of countries that are the most culturally influential in the world. Central to this is the fact Jamaica with a population of less than three million people has contributed at least seven genres of music to the world. This makes the island a global cultural powerhouse and provides every Jamaican with a reason to walk with our heads held high and our chests protruding with pride, especially when they hear a sliver of the island’s music.

SHAPING OUR MUSICAL CULTURAL INFLUENCE
It is generally accepted that music is a continuum moving across cultures. As it moves it absorbs elements from each of the spaces through which it passes. The practitioners in each of those spaces’ overlays that music with the experiences that are germane to that location. At its earliest, Jamaican music would have been that of the indigenous Arawaks who occupied the island before the Portuguese and the Spanish set foot in the 15th century. The Africans came in the late 16th century, as did the British who conquered the island in 1665. All these people brought with them, elements of their own cultures creating a melting-pot of influences that survived into the post slavery period. By the time recorded music came into existence around 1888, the seeds of Jamaica’s own music would have been germinating.

In Jamaica, the earliest recording of music started in 1951 and the music that was being recorded was a French/Spanish influenced Mento drawn from the Spanish occupation and tinged with the Haitian Creole stylings. While the instrumental accompaniments were primarily acoustic the instruments were largely handmade. The Banjo, Rhumba-box, Shakers, the Flute, or bamboo fife. Most of these instruments came with the colonists. The shipped Africans created their instruments in enslavement and yes, much of the African heritage that travelled to the island melded with the other influences that helped to shape Jamaica’s cultural identity, including the music.

THE BIRTHING OF REGGAE MUSIC
In the late 1940s the music that Jamaicans were listening to was imported via shortwave radio- American Jazz, Blues complemented homegrown Mento. What we know as Reggae music came into existence in and around 1968, drawn largely from the Ska beat which was influenced by the American Jazz and R&B, and the American R&B influenced Rock-Steady. Reggae itself is not simply a sound, but the stories of a struggling people who found solace in putting their stories to music. Therefore, Reggae grew on a global scale in the way it did because for the first time, underprivileged people in Jamaica had a voice, and that voice was Reggae. It was a voice that disregarded every attempt by the authorities to suppress it. It was the voice of our youth, and it would escape the confines of our shores, permeate the borders of the United Kingdom, The USA, and Europe where its power was recognized as it spoke to the dispossessed everywhere.

SALUTE TO THE EARLY CREATORS
Nobody told the likes of Jimmy Cliff, Slim Smith or Alton Ellis, Prince Buster, Delroy Wilson, Toots, Marley, Hopeton Lewis, Dobby Dobson, Horace Andy, Leroy Sibbles, or Peter Tosh how to sing and to build a chune. Their lives depended on their abilities to dig into themselves and to create a sound, to coin lyrics and to create what is now a global phenomenon that started in Greenwich Farm, Trench Town, Orange Street and Brentford Road. In their zest to give it an identity the creators called it Reggae, a play on the Jamaica adjective “streggae” which was the Jamaican vernacular for a loose woman/girl. Under the hands of the likes of Clement Sir Coxsone Dodd and his Sound Dimension Band with the great Jackie Mittoo, Bunny Lee, Lee Scratch Perry, Prince Buster, Leslie Kong at Beverleys Records, and Joseph Hoo Kim at Channel One Studio, this Reggae music was nurtured and through the legions of trying Jamaicans who crowded makeshift audition centers this Reggae music having tasted life in 1968 became our own.

REGGAE JOURNEYS TO AFRICA
Reggae music was introduced into Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, complements of Jamaican singers such as Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh as they toured the world apace. This Reggae music was well-received all around the world, but in Africa, it was spectacular and was well-received by the people. Since then, Reggae music has become a household genre and many artists started venturing into the genre. But the first-ever hit reggae song by an African was Sunny Okosun’s Fire in Soweto which was released in 1978. Many other bands followed suit, and in no time, reggae became one of Africa’s most popular musical genres in the late 1970s. It would suit not only the Ghanian Stoneboy, but also the legions of uninformed Jamaicans to learn this history before they buy into this uneducated talk of Reggae and African roots. It should not be so easy for a people to disown such an important element of their culture and in effect pander to views expressed by people who are similarly uninformed.

The fact is that Reggae and Dancehall music are two of Jamaica’s most precious gems, and the strength and value of these genres are such that they have now recolonized Africa. Smart thinkers should now be looking at how the country can mine the fullest benefits of these treasures from its cultural arsenal.

About the Author

Richard Hugh Blackford is the host of a 2-hour music-driven internet show Sunday Scoops on yaawdmedia.com each Sunday from 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm. The show focuses on Foundation Jamaican Music and takes its audience on a nostalgic but historical musical journey, peeling back the years of Jamaican musical development as the hosts explore the careers of Jamaican artistes. Sunday Scoops provides interviews with personalities, and discussions on Jamaican music and other topical issues.  The show is co-hosted by noted DJ Garth Hendricks.

Photo – Deposit Photos of depositphotos.com

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