At the foundation of almost every reggaeton song is the unmistakable two-bar “boom-ch-boom-chick”. The immensely recognizable kicks and snares marry short, recurring drum rolls at each downbeat to produce the infectious beat that stands as the hallmark of what scholar Wayne Marshall estimated to be upwards of 80% of all reggaeton tracks as of 2008.
Shabba Ranks’s 1990 hit “Dem Bow” is often credited as the origin of the dembow loop. Shabba Ranks raps/toasts explicit anti-colonial calls to action, violently condemning homosexuality and oral sex as imperial products from the West of Babylon. But, the genealogy of its distinct rhythmic pattern is much more complicated. In “Dem Bow”, produced by Bobby Digital, Shabba Ranks raps/toasts over a riddim originated from Jamaican production duo Steely and Clevie.
“[Steely] came to the studio and said, ‘I want make a Pocco riddim’. He started including some tambourine in the riddims… Of course I was doing electronic music, so I started programming some of the beats and what we came on with, the Pocco man jam riddim eventually, was introduced in the Hispanic market. We gave Bobby Digital a version of the riddim and Shabba Ranks made a song named ‘Dem bow’” (Clevie qtd. in Delphin).
The extra snare rolls on top of Steely & Clevie’s essential rhythmic structure from the “Pocco man jam riddim” would later become a hallmark of the iconic dembow loop (Marshall 2008, 134) — which is actually not a sample of either Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow” nor Steely & Clevie’s “Pocco man jam”.
Recorded by Panamanian singer Nando Boom, “Ellos Benia” is a close translation of Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow”. At Philip Smart’s legendary HC&F studio in Long Island, New York, Dennis “The Menace” Thompson produced its instrumental by reproducing Steely & Clevie’s riddim and adding “a catchy timbal line… evoking the 3/2 clave of such quintessential ‘tropical’ genres as son, mambo, and salsa” (Marshall 2013). The resulting instrumental, known as “Dub Mix II”, “Dembow riddim”, or the “Pounda” (Marshall 2008), was placed on the B-side of Nando Boom’s “Ellos Benia” and taken up by producers in Puerto Rico, which we will discuss in the next section.
The multiple lineages of what is now known as the “dembow loop” complicate the dominant narrative of Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow” as the singular origin of reggaeton’s backbone beat. But it would be a mistake to ignore the influence of Shabba Ranks’s song, which sparked multiple covers and translations that similarly “conflated sexual deviancy [and homosexuality] and colonialism, resistance and nationalism” (Marshall 2008, 139).
Between Jamaica, Panama, and New York, a truly global musical movement was igniting that would soon spread even further and eventually lose its original anti-imperial, anti-homosexual themes.
References
Delphin, Stephan “Live Up”. “Dancehall History: a Clevie Browne Interview from Steely and Clevie — Jamaica.” Syncope: The Drums Culture Website, 21 July 2015, syncope.be/percussions-tambours/index.php/fr/84-musical-styles/dancehall/209-clevie-brownie-steely-and-clevie-interview-13.
Marshall, Wayne. “Dembow: A Loop History.” Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 2 July 2013, daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/07/dembow-a-loop-history.
Marshall, Wayne. “The Loopy Origins of Dembow and Reggaeton’s Knotty Dancehall Roots.” Wax Poetics, 28 Jan. 2014, www.waxpoetics.com/blog/features/articles/digital-rhythm/.
Rivera, Raquel Z., et al. Reggaeton. Duke University Press, 2009
