“Feeevvvveerrrrr”
Bashment also known as dance hall has grown since it emergence in the mid 1980s to be the most popular genre of reggae music, both within its birthplace of Jamaica and the wider transnational cultural circuits mapped by the mass migrations of Jamaicans and other Caribbean people to Europe, the USA and beyond.(Bakure-Yusuf, 2) “The sexual explicitness and erotic hedonism” of Bashment dance hall culture is defined through the symbolic unity or homology of sexually explicit lyrics, dance, music, fashion styles and values. Dance hall’s unorthodox style and sound has became the most popular music in Jamaica today.(Ardener S, 1) In the song “Fever” , its main function is entertainment and dance. It flaunts a unique character that consists of a moderately fast tempo, a plethora of layered instruments/sounds that gives the song its ‘bop’ feel and a texture of lyrics that contains a secular motive. These traits are very consistent throughout the whole song which helped Vybz Kartel create a legendary song that’s still played in parties and on the radio in the present day.
With me choosing the functional theory, which is the musical traits and all other components of musical connect to and are determined by the function of the music; allowed me to label the function of this project topic as entertainment and dance. When you think of entertainment, you think of something that draws a lot of attention; whether It be positive or negative, set trends, causes debates and arguments. With dance hall, it does just that. One of the main discrepancies with dance hall is its secular lyrics and the image it sometimes portrays. The argument stands that what distinguishes the new age dance hall from its earlier forms is the leadership and dominance of the themes of sex and sexuality within its trend of Jamaican lower-class cultural criticism.(Bakare-Yusuf, 2) This in fact is why people of the Jamaican culture get offended when dance hall is categorized with Rastafarian's pure, inspirational sound and genre. They see dance hall's characteristics as those of less privilege, stating how many academic commentaries view dance hall as an affirmative expression of lower class, which correlates to a negative outlook on black subjectivity and creativity; thus finding it troubling and contradicting.( Ardener S, 4) Even still, by the 1990s dance hall had begun to move from being an emerging sub-genre within Reggae to overtake Rastafarian inspired roots and culture genre of reggae that had dominated dance hall in the 1970s and early 1980s.(Ardener S, 4) Even still, although dance hall had many critics and negative outlooks, it still emerged to be one of the most entertaining and biggest genres in music.
When looking at texture, of my song “Fever” by vybz kartel, while there are some layers towards the beginning that fall in and out, throughout the song I can count at least 3 layers that contribute to the full sound of this song: two of them being one drum layer, and one singing layer. The function of the two drum layers is to keep the rhythm and meter of the song, the singers function to express what the song is about and provide melody to the song, and the correlation of instruments show the actual nature of the event that they are celebrating and participating in as they make the music. The speed of one of the electrical drums is faster than the other (one of the drums has the fastest tempo of the song) and the other voice layers have a slower tempo in the song. Timbre consists of two layers of membranophones (drums) and the one layer of the main vocalists. This connects to the songs context because the song came from the album titled “King of the Dance hall” and in its description it described how ‘King of the Dance hall’ continued an evolution Kartel started with 2011’s Kingston Story, blending the glossed and jittery sound of Jamaican dance hall with the futuristic taste of American R&B and club music, making for infectious hybrids like “Fever”, the sinister but playful “Hey Addi”, and the hustler’s anthem “Western Union”.(getsongbpm, 1) Even with this description is exploits the whole album as futuristic, and taking sounds and inspiration from R&B which is rhythm and blues, also having the bop feel from club music. It singles out Fever for having the perfect mix of them all. With songs consisting of the bop feel and club songs and to be considered party music, it has to have plenty of drums. That creates the upbeat tempo and feel.
One other musical trait that was evident was tempo. Tempo is the speed at which a passage of music is or should be played. One can pair tempo with bpm (beats per minute), in which the beats per minute for Fever was 98. Although that isn’t super-fast, it’s far from slow and certainly above the average beats per minute for songs generally played in parties, events, etc. Other hits from the “King of the Dance hall” album like ‘Hey Addi’ was at 92bpm, ‘Western Union’ was at 104 bpm with the highest beats per minute coming from ‘Lipstick’ at 120 bpm and the slowest beats per minute coming from ‘Sorry Babe’ at 74bpm. Fever fell right under the average beats per minute at 104bpm.(getsongbpm, 1) Although there’s many other musical traits that play an important part to the creation of this hit, Tempo is really the backbone of what Fever’s all about… that function being entertainment and dance.
In the end Dance hall is a very controversial genre of music and piece of sound. It has its negatives per say, and it also has its positives. Not a soul can deny its impact on Jamaica, let alone the whole music industry even in present day. There’s many artist that paved the way for Dance hall to reach the heights its touched; Alkaline, Vybz Kartel, Shabba Ranks, Buju Banton, Shaggy are just a few of the surplus of artists that live in this genre.(Linet, 4) They all may bring different styles to the table, and even some being misinterpreted for a negative image, but one thing they could all tell you is that their purpose was to bring everyone together and make you get up and dance, have fun and ‘turn the party up’. That being one of the main reasons they fell in love with that genre.
Citations :
King Of The Dancehall (Vybz Kartel). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://getsongbpm.com/album/king-of-thedancehall/O2lAg.
Bakare-yusuf, B. (2006) ‘Clashing interpretations in Jamaican Dancehall culture’ Small Axe, №21 (Vol. 10, №3) pp. 161–173.
Ardener S (1987) A note on gender iconography: the vagina’ in ? Caplan (ed) The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, London & New York: Tavistock Publications Ltd.
Linet, Valerie. “Ranks, Shabba.” Contemporary Musicians, edited by Leigh Ann DeRemer, vol. 38, Gale, 2003, pp. 151–153. Gale Ebooks,
