dancehall deconstructed
It all came together for me with “Club Aso” - the Palmistry track that came out at the brink of summer, holding the promise of an understated but potent summerhit, if not in the mainstream charts then among the musical omnivores of today’s internet music scenes. The lilting beat and style of singing so common in dancehall and reggaeton floats in a vaporous free space, that is both hyperemotional and detached. “Club Aso” was unlike anything I’d ever heard before, both familiar and exotic. With the release of his debut album PAGAN, it becomes clear that “Club Aso” wasn’t a one-off creation, stumbled upon by chance, but part of a carefully constructed new sound. PAGAN plays almost like a concept album, where Palmistry develops and explores the boundaries of a distinct new sound; deconstructed, minimal dancehall.
Dancehall, along with Caribbean music styles in general, has a special moment in pop right now. Some of the biggest hits recently are completely dancehall/reggaeton-infused: “Sorry” by Justin Bieber, “One Dance” by Drake and “Lean On” by Major Lazer all use the exact same rhythm, known as the Dembow. Found in much of Caribbean music, it's especially known as the beat of reggaeton, its name deriving from the founding track from 1990 by Shabba Ranks. Besides a brief stint in the early 2000s, thanks mainly to Sean Paul and his Billboard hit album Dutty Rock, Caribbean or specifically Jamaican music styles have mostly been confined to the summer season, where it seems we all expect sunny, island vibes in our summer hit (most recently “Rude” by Magic! in 2014 followed by “Cheerleader” by OMI in 2015). Dancehall, reggaeton, soca and moombahton have been genres mostly left out of Europe’s and the US’s mainstream charts for the rest of the year, as the New York Times Popcast has argued. But recently, we find Caribbean music styles in the off-season and in more than just one-hit wonders: Rihanna’s “Work”, Drake’s“Controlla” and “One Dance”, Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” and “Sorry”, Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”, “I’m In Control” by AlunaGeorge and last year’s “I know there’s gonna be (Good Times)” by Jamie XX. Whether this dancehall trend in pop music will continue to have an impact as more than just summer hits is hard to say, but last year’s breakout music genre tropical house (whose name actually started as a joke), is perhaps an indicator of a more general orientation towards non-western, particularly West-Indian music genres being integrated (and yes, perhaps even whitewashed) into mainstream Western genres of electronic and pop music.
In 2013, Popcaan, a young Jamaican deejay, singer and songwriter, broke out of the reggae scene with his major international hit “Everything is Nice”; a melancholic yet sugary sweet tune that incorporates electropop sounds into a gloriously understated dancehall gem.
The song surprises in its airy emptyness. It’s both simplistic and clean, while a sense of sincerity and soulfulness comes through in the bittersweet melody and Popcaan’s phrasing and cadence so typical of dancehall. Looking back, it seems like Palmistry’s project could not have existed without “Everything is Nice”. Popcaan dares to keep it simple, slowing down the pace and removing layers to let the different sounds float around, exposed, fragile and that much more effective. But what Palmistry does on PAGAN is even more extreme – he removes all superfluous elements so that only the essential building blocks remain, and injects a hyper-emotional tone with his supremely tender and at times very feminine and almost cloyingly sweet singing. This draws parallels to James Blake as well as the gender neutral Rhye, who also let a soulful, sensitive vocal stand in the center of a bare, airy production.
The combination of pure and exposed singing and a minimalist synth line and bass drum feels cool to the touch, but too emotional to be barren. However, this nonphysical purity does stand in stark contrast to the figuratively “dirtyness” of traditional dancehall culture, where hypersexual physicality, and explicit “dirty” language and dance moves dominate.
So how dancehall is Palmistry really? Not using any obvious dancehall riddims, Palmistry does variations and combinations of phrases and sounds from dancehall, reggaeton and soca, but deconstructed in such a way that the recognition almost works subconsciously and the sensation is one of refreshing newness. In “Club Aso”, he mixes something close to the “Fiesta” riddim, used in for instance “Dude” by Beenie Man, but on the snare instead of the kick drum, and inserts a kick-snare combination that is akin to the Dembow rhythm. It might not be dancehall in the strictest sense, and critics have used this as a point of contention, misunderstanding what Palmistry’s postmodern project is all about. They forget the basic premise of atemporality in our culture today, where digital media channels allow instant access to almost all of our culture’s past, leaving the notion of copy and imitation more and more meaningless. In the same sense that Burial evokes (and mourns) the ghost of the raves of late-20th century London, PAGAN does not copy dancehall as much as evoke the culture, traditions and feelings of dancehall, or dancehall in an imagined form. Presence is no longer a requisite of authenticity. Using certain recognizable elements and adding them to a ghostly vacuum, he ends up with an often haunted, indeterminate quality, not least supported by the indistinct lyrics. The hauntological feel is especially evident in the vacuous “Adeus”.
Discussing the local contexts of music might not seem to make sense anymore in the internet era, but the fact is that geographic location continues to be a deciding factor in the formation of people’s (musical) identity and tastes. However, the global, cultural flows are no longer as one-directional as old center-periphery models would claim (see Arjun Appadurai). In a world that, at least in some respects, seems to become smaller and more interconnected, cultural homogeneity is still not a reality. Rather, musicians like Palmistry are perfect examples that perhaps globalization can result in the heterogenization rather than homogenization of culture. He belongs to the breed of artists who, in an optimistic version of globalization, see exchange rather than appropriation, unashamedly grabbing the best of what human culture has produced and molding it in whatever way they please. With an experimental and open attitude, the building blocks of previously separate musical spheres are used to disassemble old frameworks in order to create something altogether new and distinct.
