Everything You Know About Dancehall Is A Lie ...

[00:00:03][music] >> So, because it's my month right now, it's February, um and it's coincidentally Black History Month, I feel like it's our duty and also a privilege, you know, because of where we are in the space and time as a people and as a collective right now and what we're experiencing to speak about something right now which has been a topic that has been hidden for many generations.

[00:00:57]Going to bring light to something, this experience that we all share, you know? All right. So, yeah, before Jamaica was even named, the Atlantic and the whole Caribbean had its own nations.

[00:01:12]In the late 1400s, Central Africa was governed by the Kingdom of Kongo, ruled by Nkuwu a Ntinu. Ntinu in Kikongo means king or sovereign, a title, not a name.

[00:01:26]In 1483, Portuguese explorers reached the Kongo River and encountered a structured African state.

[00:01:36]In 1491, Nkuwu a Ntinu was baptized named João I, the First, marking the start of European influence not African history.

[00:01:48]In 1492, Europeans reached the Caribbean. They recorded the word Taíno, often translated by the Spanish as good or noble people. This was a European interpretation, not a indigenous dictionary.

[00:02:07]As colonization expanded, Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic. A major portion came from the West Central Africa, including Congo and Angola regions.

[00:02:22]In Jamaica, escaped Africans formed maroon societies, creating autonomous communities in the mountains. Early leaders, including Juan de Bolas, active in the 1660s.

[00:02:36]African cosmology survived through ceremony, especially Kumina, a Congo derived spiritual tradition that preserved the drum language, the call and response, and ancestral memory.

[00:02:50]Jamaica before 1900 was not culturally empty. It was governed spiritually and self-organizing.

[00:02:59]To make note, even in the 1800s, during the time of indentured slavery, was where we had even the expansion of people from different parts of Africa and the world coming in to our island, which making it so diverse as we have the people from Ghana, Nigeria, through the ports of Lagos and the Gold Coast, the Akan, the Igbo, and such, and even up to the Indians, the Chinese, the Jews, and the Germans coming in to the country during the 1800s as indentured slaves. So, this had a whole impact on how we're going to have to govern the island and goes about as a community and people. As now, it is not just only people from this specific region, but no, it's people from all over far even more further parts of the world coming all together in the island mixing up as we have now the English, the Portuguese, the Spanish, we have the Dutch, the Jews, Moors, Muslims. We have all types of people mixing in the island during the 1800s. And during the 1800s was where we had some of the most chaotic times during the Maroon rebellions So, by the 1800s, Jamaica was no longer just Africans versus colonizers. It became multi-layered. You had the original rooted population, Maroons, free Africans, spiritual custodians already organized and already governing themselves in the mountains and the rural zones. Then came indentureship or apprenticeship. After emancipation, Britain deliberately imported new laborers to break African unity.

[00:04:56]Indians from specific caste systems, Chinese merchants, >> [music] >> Portuguese and Sephardic Jews, Germans, Dutch, and English overseers, later the Syrians and Lebanese traders each brought skills, trade works, religion, and capitals, yes, but also new hierarchies and new loyalties and a distance away from African cosmology.

[00:05:19]This wasn't multiculturalism by accident. It was economic strategy. The rebellion was still on the core.

[00:05:27]Despite that, the 1800s were not as quiet as people wanted to see. This was the age of open resistance. Tacky led the largest 18th century African uprising. Cudjoe helped secure the Maroon sovereignty through the warfare and negotiations. Samuel Sharpe sparked the Baptist War of 1831 with the final blow to slavery along with Paul Bogle who led the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865.

[00:05:57]These were not just rioters or protesters.

[00:06:01]These were African political leaders rooted in spiritual authority. And most importantly, they were all homegrown.

[00:06:09]Near the 1900s, there were two parts that basically somewhat split on the isle in ideologies. One was underground and one was overseas. The root, Alexander Bedward, operated inside Jamaica. He worked with African spirituality, the Kumina and the revivalist and the Baptist Church as a cover, not as the replacement of the core [music] fundamentals of our people. Bedward spoke directly to the poor, the rural and the dispossessed. He emphasized spiritual authority, African dignity and resistance. This is where the true foundation of Rastafari begins, not as a religion, but as African self-recognition.

[00:06:54]Marcus Garvey.

[00:06:56]Now, the Marcus Garvey archetype, now that contrast Bedward, is like the same contrast as what we said with the the uptown or let's say the biracial part of the island, which were the people who are now closer to the overseers, going through the British education system, the American racial politics and the European frameworks of empires and how that is established.

[00:07:27]Even documentedly, Garvey openly insulted Jamaicans calling them backward and uneducated, needing discipline because they did not fit into the European organizational models of uniform ranks and hierarchy. He aligned publicly with white supremacists including meeting members of the KKK believing that separation not liberation was the solution. His back to Africa vision did not mean reconnecting back with the land through African cosmology.

[00:07:59]It really meant recolonizing Africa using European ideologies and black labor. This was not Africa's return.

[00:08:07]This was colonial replication. Ethiopia versus Ethiopia. Garvey pointed to Ethiopia symbolically but not Ethiopia historically. Ethiopia was the ancient name for upper chemist central Africa the Congo basin. The same spiritual world that birthed the Palenque system, maroon states, Kumina, Voudou, Obeah, Ifa, and Congo cosmology. This was the Africa Jamaica already carried. Garvey ignored that and many followed him anyway. During the early 1900s, media, war, and music emerged together as the revolutions and the catalyst to push the modern world to where we see today. Governments around the world learned that music motivates war and influences people spending patterns and the economic status [music] even amongst the members of the different hierarchical class. Entertainment shapes morality.

[00:09:08]Songs normalize sacrifice. Even in World War I and II, these types of mass media accelerated.

[00:09:16]Jamaica's churches, schools, and music were solely reprogrammed. African rhythms survived but were reinterpreted, sanitized, and extracted. Kumina became just old folk music and Jonkonnu just became a festival. Work music that the slaves used to sing with codes that even give them power on way to freedom just became gospel music. Hence, even in the early 1900s, by the time Harry Belafonte appeared into the 1950s, he wasn't just neutral. He was mixed-race, uptown educated outside of the core structure of the people on the island that were there for generations, and then signed to the foreign labels RCA Victor.

[00:10:04]He performed pain he did not necessarily live and sold it to the world as a Jamaican identity. This became an industry template that shaped the music to become forever. Jamaica, even after independence, didn't get independence in the way that we see it. It just changed management. The PNP and the JLP were built on labor movements >> [music] >> and African resistance language, basically the vibration of the revolt and the rebel spirit that we used to carry as a people. The European political frameworks came from men like even Edward Seaga who understood culture [music] as infrastructure. Music, gangs, and guns, and votes merged. Garrisons were formed. Dancers were installed, not chosen by the people, but tolerated by the state. Music splits again. Reggae that once carried truth and reflected the ideals and the [music] imagery of the oppressed people of the ghetto, even Peter Tosh warned that it has become too soft, too comfortable, and too polite.

[00:11:11]So, the ghetto youth again go outside of the system that was to create dancehall [music] without any studios, without any permission, without any filters.

[00:11:21]Dancehall was a refusal to go into the hierarchy that was at the time.

[00:11:28]The final fracture towards the whole music system and the socioeconomical system of the island came through now the cocaine [music] roots, the CIA interference, the guns for influence, drugs for control, foreign capital, and labels with no cultural loyalty. The Don era collapsed into the badman era. The power got fragmented and meaning disappeared.

[00:11:53]>> [music] >> Now everyone wants dominance but doesn't know why. This is not because dancehall failed. It's because the center was cut out.

[00:12:02]Where we stand now, we are further from African philosophy now more than we have ever been and not because of ignorance but just because of interruption. The story is not about blame but it's about remembering where the lines broke. Yes, so now we're at part four, the industry, the streets, [music] and who owns the voice.

[00:12:24]Yes, so from culture to commodity. [music] By the late 1960s, Jamaican music has already been noticed but not necessarily yet owned [music] by Jamaicans. The foundations were African, the rhythm was African, the stories were African, [music] but the means of recording, pressing, and distributing were not. This is where the real struggle begins.

[00:12:53]The first gates, the record label power in the early 1950s to '60s.

[00:13:00]Earliest Jamaican record labels didn't just record music. They decided who mattered. [music] Federal Records founded by Ken Khouri controlled the Jamaica's first major pressing plant. If you couldn't access Federal, your voice stayed local. Studio One run by Clement Dodd shaped ska, rocksteady, and early reggae but under strict discipline.

[00:13:25]Lyrics, [music] image, and even behavior were managed. This was not evil, it was just gatekeeping.

[00:13:32]>> [music] >> And anyway, and a poor black youth, he felt it first.

[00:13:39]You know which black youth felt it?

[00:13:41]This is a story about Jimmy Cliff.

[00:13:45]This is the >> [music] >> the epic story of the poor black youth seeing the music and wanting to be one of those artists, seeing it as a way and a means to escape the ghetto. This is where Jimmy Cliff enters the story, and The Harder They Come story.

[00:14:01]Jimmy Cliff was not uptown. He was not protected. [music] He was not connected.

[00:14:06]He had talent, undeniable, but talent alone did not unlock studio doors, radio, [music] or money. Even after early work with Island Records, the reality was clear. A poor black Jamaican artist still had to fund their own survival. The Harder They Come, a warning, not a movie. In 1972, Jimmy Cliff starred in The Harder They Come. This film was not just fiction, it was coded autobiography. The main character, Ivan, represents the talented youth, blocked by producers, ignored [music] by radio, exploited by distributors, and pushed towards street economics just to survive. The badness in that story is not glorified.

[00:14:51]When legal systems close, illegal [music] systems open. This is the psychological blueprint for dancehall culture. Internationalization of reggae [music] when it leaves home in the 1970s.

[00:15:05]As reggae gained global attention, foreign structures tightened their grip.

[00:15:10]Island Records, led by Chris Blackwell, refined reggae for the international market.

[00:15:16]>> [music] >> Artists were selected not only for message, but for market compatibility.

[00:15:21]Reggae became an export [music] product.

[00:15:23]The roots remain, but the control and direction it slowly shifted outwards.

[00:15:30]Politics entered [music] the sound in the 1970s and '80s. At the same time, Jamaican politics were weaponizing [music] culture. Figures like Edward Seaga understood something [music] critical.

[00:15:44]Control music, control community, and control votes. Studio sound system and neighborhoods became political territories. This is the birth of garrison communities, politically aligned dance, and music tied to area loyalty. The gun did not replace the microphone. They worked together.

[00:16:04][music] In the early days of dancehall, the street takes back the sound.

[00:16:08]>> [music] >> Dancehall did not come from record labels. It came from sound systems, yards, and dance spaces. Live crowd response. Artists did not need studio [music] approval anymore. They needed a microphone, a selector, and a crowd.

[00:16:23][music] This is why early dancehall terrified the elites because it bypassed moral control, classism control, and the political scripting. This archetype of this figure that we know comes Donovan Germain, known as Skeng Don, the founder of Penthouse Records. Penthouse Records dominated 1980s to the early 1990s.

[00:16:46]Skeng Don brought discipline, structure, professionalism, and mostly money.

[00:16:52]Artists like Buju Banton rose through this system, but structure came with control. Lyrics were filtered, images were managed, street energy was contained. That vital vibration of the rebel force of our people [music] that made us pursue to even still existing today.

[00:17:12]Dancehall was reabsorbed not by guns, but by capital.

[00:17:17]Drugs, gangs, and artists casualties.

[00:17:20][music] This era overlapped with Caribbean cocaine roots, the Cold War interference, US regional interests, political arming of communities. Artists were exposed to fast money, no protection, and constant [music] surveillance. Many did not survive.

[00:17:37]Examples include Tenor Saw, Nitty Gritty, and Pan Head. These deaths were not caused by music. They were caused by the environment itself.

[00:17:47]Who owns Jamaica's culture now?

[00:17:49]By the 1990s onward, Jamaican culture became globally profitable, but ownership shifted again. Many stakeholders now include foreign-owned record labels, overseas distributors, and international streaming platforms.

[00:18:04]Festival circuits run by non-initiate.

[00:18:07]Examples like VP Records, New York base, global DSPs controlling the reach and the revenue of many of today's cultural gatekeepers that live in Jamaica, profit from Jamaica, but are not initiated into Kumina, Maroon, any African cosmology, or any ancestral aesthetics [music] of any sort. Culture has just been consumed, and it has not been protected at this point. The core of the truth [music] is that in Jimmy Cliff's era, it showed us that no structure equals survival through risk. But in skinhead's era, it showed that too much structure equals the loss of the voice. Dancehall lives between those two extremes. The issue was never just the badness.

[00:18:55][music] The issue was always the access.

[00:18:59]When people say Jamaican music lost its soul, they must ask, "Who closed the doors? And who sets the rules? And who profits now?" Yeah, say yes you know, we're stepping out of darkness. That as they call it.

[00:19:12]We're stepping to the darkness.

[00:19:14]Which the darkness really when the youth them I say them I step in at the darkness, they're just searching for center.

[00:19:22]Yeah.

[00:19:23]Searching for the truth. [music] So, when order collapse but meaning did not, by the late '90s something shifted.

[00:19:33]The old dance structure for better or for worse collapsed. The garrisons lost their commanders, the rulers and the rules disappeared. But what people called chaos was not madness. It was absence of inheritance.

[00:19:49]Power did not return to the elders. It didn't return to [music] spiritual custodians.

[00:19:56]It didn't return to the people. It was shattered and got [music] scattered.

[00:20:01]So, what followed wasn't organization.

[00:20:04]It was [music] just purely experimentation.

[00:20:07]Young people weren't rebelling against order. They were searching for something to replace it. The dark era [music] was a position, not a fall. They call it the badman era. They call it the dark era. They call it the dunce era. But those names only make sense from [music] the system's point of view. Because historically, anything outside of the system is always labeled as dark, dangerous, evil, or backwards. The same way they labeled the Maroons, Paul Bogle, Sam Sharpe, Tacky, Obia, and Quamina. Every rebel was once called a criminal by [music] the system. So, when the youths chose darkness, it wasn't because they loved evil. It was because the light being offered was fake.

[00:20:52][music] The system, if the system says this is the light, follow this and survive, and that system [music] is built upon exploitation, hierarchy, and disconnection, [music] then choosing the dark becomes an act of refusal. Better to stand outside the line than to march inside a lie. The darkness can be seen as an initiation, not destruction.

[00:21:15]Here's the part most people miss.

[00:21:17]Darkness is not the opposite of light.

[00:21:20]Darkness [music] is what comes before understanding. You cannot see what you don't know. You cannot fix what you don't understand. You cannot grow without first admitting ignorance.

[00:21:31][music] That's why in the Dunce Hall space, the word dunce took on a new meaning. Not stupidity, but honesty and an acknowledgement that I don't know everything yet. Everybody is dunce to something, but everybody has awareness, intuition, potential, and the capacity to grow. And that's the original spirit.

[00:21:52]Not glorifying ignorance, but recognizing it as the first step towards self-realization. When you hear the youths them even say, "Dunce a code."

[00:22:01]That's just them saying they're searching for the patterns in a broken world. They're not just talking about scamming. They're talking about pattern recognition. Trying to figure out how life works, how systems work, how success repeats, and how to escape limitations. [music] The tragedy is this. They're searching for codes to survive instead of being given the codes to live. Because the colonial system never taught us mental development, spiritual literacy, critical self-awareness, and it instinctually chooses to train us into obedience, not wisdom. So, when the mind has no plan of its own, it becomes vulnerable to outside influence, sound, words, symbols, and algorithms. The entities that understand the vibration and influence [music] can hijack minds that were never taught how to guard themselves. And that's not a moral failure. That's a design flaw in the system.

[00:23:03]The spiritual return without initiation.

[00:23:06]Here's the contradiction in the modern moment. African spirituality is less taboo. People openly talk about Obeah, ancestors, energy, rituals, and power.

[00:23:18]The vibration is back.

[00:23:20]The rebel spirit is alive.

[00:23:22]But, the initiation [music] is missing.

[00:23:26]And initiation is not about aesthetics.

[00:23:28][music] It is about discipline, responsibility, and consequences. [music] Without elders transferring the knowledge properly, symbols become costumes, rituals become trends, and power gets misused. The broken bridge between the elders and the youths is another truth people try to avoid. Many elders are afraid to let go of power.

[00:23:54]They survived violence. They survived chaos. And they survived loss.

[00:23:59]And instead of passing on the torch, some chose to guard the flame.

[00:24:04]So, knowledge it stayed locked away, >> [music] >> skills stayed hidden, and wisdom stayed private.

[00:24:12]Meanwhile, the youths are forced to learn in the wild. And this created resentment, mistrust, and eventually confrontation. Not just in Jamaica, but worldwide. As you see it now, young generations with rejecting governments, rejecting systems, rejecting authority.

[00:24:31]Not because they hate structure, but because the structure refuses to evolve.

[00:24:36]Because power is meant to flow. When it doesn't flow, it explodes. Why does music feel empty today, but the energy is still real?

[00:24:45]Because people Some people say the music lacks substance now.

[00:24:50]But, listen carefully. The energy is still there. The rebellion is still there. The searching for meaning is still there. What's really missing is the grounding, [music] the mentorship, cosmology, and continuity. Music doesn't lead culture anymore. It just reflects confusion back onto itself. Not because the artists are shallow, but because they are speaking from within the fracture.

[00:25:17]Returning back to the center doesn't necessarily mean going back in time or going back to the old ways necessary.

[00:25:25]Returning to the center doesn't mean reverting to old sounds, copying elders, or romanticizing the past. It means reconnecting the broken chain.

[00:25:36]Elders teaching without fear, youths listening without having to go into submission, knowledge flowing both ways.

[00:25:44]African philosophy restored, not as a costume, [music] but as a operating system. Because once the center returns, the darkness no longer needs to perform rebellion. It can finally become understanding.

[00:25:58]Why I stand here is because I was a part of this era. I felt the darkness and I understand the refusal. Not because I wanted destruction, but because I rejected a system that never asked us what we needed. And the darkness era wasn't the end. It was the question and now the work is to answer it with wisdom and not punishment.