’80s Dancehall Essentials

’80s Dancehall Essentials

Musical history proceeds chronologically, but ’80s dancehall always sounds out of joint. One key to the genre’s unique sound was the introduction of keyboards like the Casio MT-40: Jamaican deejays and dub engineers had been turning amplifiers and instruments inside out for decades, and digital synthesizers gave a new generation of musicians a new set of tools to play with. Thus they created digital basslines that are among the heaviest ever recorded, cool reverberating guitar lines, and lyrics that remain quoted and sampled by artists worldwide. If this is the past, why does it sound so much like the future?

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