Despacito:
how dancehall rhythm brought Justin Bieber’s music to life
Let’s not kid ourselves, songs featuring Justin Bieber bang. Where Are Ü Now. Cold Water + Let Me Love You. I’m The One + Despacito. Lie to me, tell me your world didn’t quake. There’s a code out there — 40% ABV, reservations not taken, feat. Justin Bieber. These all mean the same thing: it’s about to go off.
In the case of Despacito the raw ingredient was already a triple distilled banger, loved the world over. The original video caught 20 million views in 24 hours and a billion in 4 months. Once Bieber got involved, something happened that only the Macarena and La Bamba had seen before; a Spanish language song topped the Billboard Hot 100. Come for the Canadian pop idol, stay for the simmering guitar and haunting syncopated beat.
It was Bieber who intially reached out to Luis Fonsi about Despacito. The idea for a remix came to The Biebz during his Purpose world tour: “He was the one who initiated it” Luis told Yahoo in April, “He was on tour in Colombia when he heard the song in a club. He saw how people reacted and told his manager he wanted to record the song.”
Bieber brought the Anglo Saxons to the party, and it isn’t the first time he’s done it. Look back at those feat.s and you’ll notice a clear rhythmic trend—syncopation. Bieber consistently sings over rhythms that put emphasis on off-beats and sustain rests slightly longer than you’d expect.
Syncopation is dance music’s elixir. Just a few off-beats per bar will make near-enough anyone start to sway. The authors of Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music conclude that “across a wide range of nationalities, syncopation is related to wanting to move”, explaining that “rhythms with medium degrees of syncopation should be most likely to elicit body movement and pleasure, since such rhythms include enough rhythmic complexity to stimulate responses, but not so much as to prevent entrainment.” Put more simply: too much syncopation is confusing, but too little is boring.
“I am not a Belieber” wrote Ryan Dombell at Pitchfork, speaking on behalf of us all, “I was comforted by the assumption that he would dissipate from culture as his fanbase grew up… And that very well still may happen. But I’m not so sure anymore.” His change of heart had everything to do with Where Are Ü Now, the song that made 2015 collectively ask ‘wait, is this Justin Bieber?’. Dombell goes on “the song combines sharp dancehall stabs and a gloriously sad Eastern melody in a way that recalls golden-age Timbaland.”
Remember that word dancehall. It’s coming up a lot.
Dancehall is a genre of music that came out of Jamaica in the 70s and 80s. It was more upbeat than the ska and reggae that went before it, but it still kept the emphasis on syncopation that made those genres so good for dancing. Out of dancehall came reggaeton. Originally just called Dembow, reggaeton is the genre that formed around an infectious and culture-defining boom — ch-boom-chick ‘Dembow riddim’. Dancehall would later be a prominent influence on grime, but that’s another story.
Those ‘dancehall stabs’ referenced by Dombell come in at the second drop of Where Are Ü Now. The snare gives way to a half-time kick drum that clashes with the pipes, and that clash gives birth to the boom — ch-boom-chick that took dancehall by storm when it was first highlighted by Shabba Ranks in 1990. It’s the moment that Bieber starts dancing in the video (because tbh you can’t not).
The song wouldn’t be Bieber’s last experiment with dancehall. October 2015 saw him release Sorry, an unashamedly dancehall piece of pop which rides a Dembow rhythm throughout the entire piece. Nine months later, Bieber featured on Cold Water, the #1 song from dancehall producer Major Lazer; and August 2016 brought ‘feat. Justin Bieber’ to DJ Snake’s Let Me Love You — both songs prominently haunted by Shabba Rank’s boom — ch-boom-chick.
And so to Despacito. Released in January 2017 and remixed that April, Despacito is thoroughbred reggaeton-pop. You can hear the ska coming through right from the start, as the second and fourth beats are underlined to give the track an off-beat, bouncy feel. Then Bieber half utters, half sings the song’s title and the full-fat Dembow rhythm bursts through with the passion of a rampant gazelle. We’re all clubbing Colombians now.
There’s something about that sustained rest in the boom — ch-boom-chick of Dembow that stays with you. Calling it a rest almost feels wrong: it’s the sort of rest that makes you get up and move, a rest so pregnant with rhythm that it forces you to rethink what you meant by rest in the first place. It keeps things interesting.
The Dembow rhythm of rest brought a new lease of life to Bieber’s music, and it’s also why you were caught out by Tesco being closed on Sunday evening. Sustained rests take the Anglo Saxon world by surprise, we’re so used to the relentless, regular beat that’s come to dominate our weekends as much as our weekdays. As the Anglo Saxon world has drifted from its Christian heritage, so too has it drifted from the sustained Sabbath rest that underpins Christianity – the physical, emotional and spiritual rest won for humanity when Jesus burst up from the grave to break the relentless rhythm of death on the first proper Sunday. The only hangover from that today is that most 24/7 shops are really 24/6.
There’s an idea afoot that to rest is an empty thing, serving only as the necessary gap between beats. Bieber’s musical resurgence teaches quite the opposite: to rest is to embrace life. Too much is confusing, but too little is dull – rest isn’t for the weak, it’s for people that dance. The change of pace that rest brings keeps life interesting. To commandeer Emma Garland’s review of Despacito, proper rest “grabs you by the hips and forces you to move in ways that are ungovernable and probably quite upsetting if you’re as white as I am.” This is what rest actually involves. It’s just that somewhere along the line, we forgot.
There’s a prayer from St Augustine that I never especially liked, because I never particularly wanted to be someone who needed rest:
“You inspire us to take delight in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Dancehall music has put me to rights. It reminds me that Christian rest isn’t an empty thing, devoid of meaning and needed only by the weak. Rest is life-bringing. It keeps us on our toes.
We know what it means to be restless in the West. Our feet shuffle awkwardly to a lifeless and tiring beat. We need to rediscover proper rest — rest which acknowledges the work of the day gone by and coils our springs for the day ahead. Perhaps then our restless shuffle might break out into real dancing.
