ABSTRACT
Dancehall is a highly influential genre that arose as a more hedonistic style of reggae that echoed Jamaica’s economic decline and increasing violence as it moved into the 1980s. This chapter seeks to understand how gender, class, and race have worked together to condition the reception of bachata and dancehall and, often, to marginalize those who listen and dance to these styles. It shows how local ideas about blackness and policies regarding race have affected the reception and production of arts associated with African-origin belief systems. The chapter describes how different performances of gender are conditioned or enabled by different musical sounds and performance practices. Dancehall sounds quite different from roots reggae – so different, in fact, that it can be hard to hear any relation at all. A few higher-status singer-songwriters such as Sonia Silvestre and Luis Dias had begun to experiment with bachata sounds in the mid-to-late 1980s.
