DANCEHALL

A brief history of dancehall

This genre germinated in Jamaica during the 1970s, as a sign of the need to adapt the reggae genre to dance spaces, hence its name (literally meaning dance hall). Reggae itself was already primarily an adaptation of ska to slower rhythms, which is due to the influence of cannabis use and the Jah religion in Jamaica. Dancehall retains facets of the faith in Selassie I and the whole Rastafarian religion in the more original lyrics, but nowadays the themes of the more popular dancehall have shifted towards more trivial and lighthearted aspects, as I will discuss below.