Dancehall style has a controversial history in its native Jamaica. It began in the 1980s as an underground trend, not long after rap began growing in the United States. Then minibuses and other forms of public transport began blasting dancehall out of speakers while driving down the streets, trying to attract customers.
Today, you can find teens shaking their booties in their bedrooms on YouTube, practicing to be the next queen, while their parents fret as all parents have since Elvis -- with a big difference. Recently, dancehall lyrics have become more X-rated and violent. Two Jamaican writers and scholars shared their views on the subject.
"Bob Marley had died, and instead of spiritual rasta music, people wanted something more secular and escapist," said novelist Colin Channer, who was born in Kingston and is familiar with his homeland's music industry. "In Jamaica there is a war between dance-hall and rasta-inspired reggae. There's a sense that dancehall is for youth and traditional is for adults. The battle is between dancehall and the forces who define decency. Dancehall has moved reggae to the side with a more global-youth sound that both gives and takes from hip-hop and techno."
Carolyn Cooper, who heads the literary and cultural studies department at the University of the West Indies, has written several journal articles on dancehall culture, and has been a judge in a queen contest.
"In Jamaica, the competition is important to working-class women because it gives a sense of upward mobility," she said. "A lot of the moves are quite technical and require a lot of skill and athleticism. It's associated with a kind of raw sexuality that has come into disrepute with the politically correct, but it's really about having fun and showing how well you can dance."
A current dancehall craze called daggering involves at its mildest some serious pelvic thrusting and at its most extreme moves that are so violent they have landed dancers in the hospital with broken necks, limbs and even private parts. Channer sees daggering as disturbing, but understandable to anyone familiar with Jamaican culture.
"These dances come and go, and the dance floor has always been a place where young people explore and act out sexual impulses," he said. "My parents were freaked out by Bob Marley getting political instead of just the old 'I love you, girl, I miss you.' What frightens people about daggering is that the girls seem to be down with it. Boys out of control, that's nothing new. But girls? That sends them into a panic."
As for the dangerous moves, he pointed to the nearly three generations of Jamaicans who have grown up now seeing violence as normal, and a language riddled with violent metaphors.
