Super Cat

By the time he debuted with 1985’s sly, playful Si Boops Deh!, Super Cat had already spent years inching his way toward the center of Jamaica’s music ecosystem. Before long, the dancehall pioneer would transform it—and help expand its reach abroad. Born in 1963, Super Cat grew up in Kingston and started DJing and recording when he was still a teenager. His approach to dancehall (the sweatier, more uptempo cousin of roots reggae) was to make it simultaneously harder-edged, with steely “gunman” songs, and more comical—his breakthrough single was about the alleged proliferation of sugar daddies in the Kingston nightlife scene. In 1992, he moved to New York, signed with Columbia, and dropped the relentless, pulsating Don Dada, which helped break dancehall in the U.S. while maintaining the broiling kineticism that had made him a star back home. Through his career, Super Cat has grown particularly adept at one of Jamaican music’s greatest magic tricks: making social ills and their escapist solutions exist on the same plane. Just take “Nuff Man a Dead,” a song that is nominally about the epidemic of murder that surrounded Super Cat at the time, yet sounds uncannily carefree.