I do this on purpose today, to mess about with expectations. It’s actually why I was interested in the scene around EDM in the States. I’m fairly on board with the differences in genre/vibe/intent, but I dislike people pigeonholing themselves and media pigeonholing people. I also understand why some people, e.g. Detroit citizens, might benefit from holding onto that identity and label more firmly out of community and pride… this tribalism a subtle, complex subject and worth unpacking and viewing from a lot of angles.
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That does sound like merengue.
The example you added later does not. Not even close.
inspired to have a go at the dancehall beat…
meanwhile, on merengue…
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I thought this thread title was a setup for a joke
It’s not about sound (this time) - it’s about rhythmic structure. Merengue - based - rhythm is not merengue sound or feel. It‘s not merengue.
I took a merengue conga pattern. Source is linked above.
That thing with merengue is just a side thing: from what could be found in different sources, dembow, which is the rhythm of Raggaeton, was based on Dominican rhythms and I see that rhythm in merengue, when conga is swapped, guirra absent.
In that video at 00.51 min.
Nice explanation, just found.
That’s what I had saved in my mind as dancehall
I understand it’s the dancehall culture, and different riddims are are part of that. Now I just need to catch up the past 20 years or so 
Anyway, feels still strange to call these so different sounding tracks with the same name. Like summarizing RocknRoll and Speed Metal under Rock music
And I’m very thankful for the subsubgenre Surfrock:
Else I wouldn’t have discovered Shannon and the clams:
Cheers 
I feel like Speed Metal and Rock and Roll ARE both rock music though.
What you linked above is probably just “80s Dancehall” if you want a sub-genre.
90s Dancehall sounds very different, and everything from then on much more like it.
I guess the difference being most of that 80s style is people toasting on existing Rocksteady/Reggae Riddims. The big schism was probably around 1985 when “Under Mi Sleng Teng” proved you could have a massive hit with digital reggae. By the time the 90s came the sudden cheapness and ubiquity of digital music making gear meant that anyone could make a basic studio so people stopped relying on the old riddims so much and dancehall got it’s own style/riddims distinct from reggae.
A lot of people (especially in Europe) seem to think that was where reggae went “wrong”. They’re silly though, that stuff is great!
What did happen is that ANYONE could afford to make a beat all of a sudden, so there probably was a lot more rubbish pressed too…
So I guess what you think of as the core dancehall sound was more the period where dancehall was becoming a style distinct from reggae/rocksteady.
“Ring the Alarm” uses this, which is from 1973, 12 years before “Ring the Alarm” - and is just a reggae instrumental really, not a specifically dancehall record until Tenor Saw toasted on it.
pretty much all the music in that era has straight reggae versions or is taken from older reggae/rocksteady riddims - what makes them “dancehall” is that they have a deejay toasting on them.
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as always, there was a point in the late 80s where both were happening…
but this classic 1986 riddim has the “new” digital dancehall drum patten for example:
just for good measure - one of my favourite 00s riddims:
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and people using old reggae riddims never really stoped completely, it was just more of a niche/European thing throughout the 90s/00s.
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I tend to forget that from UK POV „Europe“ in most cases refers to that continent across the channel 
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I meant UK too in this case.
Example for „the other style“
I assume the whole King Tubby, RE-201 echo, spring reverb, Mutron phaser, dub plates culture etc. is also called dancehall, because connected to the sound systems and dancehall culture?
(And dub reggae only a part of it?)
thanks for posting this - i’ve always wanted to dig deeper into dancehall/reggaeton but haven’t been find the right entry point - that spice/jugglerz track was great - and thanks for posting the “what is reggaeton” track
what are some of your favorite artists?
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Yes, appreciate the thread as i grew up in Miami, and even the mainstream clubs slammed together dancehall, the “latin music” overbroad catch-all and hip hop.
Humans love to categorize things for useful purposes (tracking indirect influences or intentional movements) less useful purposes (industry mags retrofitting generes to disparate artists of a time and aesthetic, usually to the artists’ dismay at being pigeonholed into a trendy narrative)
Anyway, thanks for the constructive and helpful comments!
Now i need to fix up my casiotone…
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Thx. 
I am not good with remembering names of people.
With music I normally remember pictures (of a physical record, the label, the sleeve, the inner sleeve (new paper, old paper, thin paper, plastic, missing)) and sound. I know how a certain cassette sounds because I connect the type of cassette, the handwriting, if the color of the pen bleed out and so on with soundbite memories.
Obviously I like that Spice stuff and things that have a similar vibe. I listened a lot to a few jungle and hip hop tapes (the local radio proxy-broadcast radio shows from London) which I had recorded off the air in the 90s. Meanwhile I came to Horace Andy and all that King Tubby stuff (and like it a lot), sometimes from the other end - Berlin dub techno (DUB TECHNO - playlist by Pulshar | Spotify)
I was very happy when I, thanks to the internet, finally found the original to the devil out of space sample imprinted as early memory from that Prodigy track:
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so…
basically, dub came from producers removing the vocals from existing vocal records, and then playing them in the dancehalls as instrumentals (supposedly originally by accident… although, you know, legends are sometime a bit exaggerared. This then had the side effect that it gave space for the deejays on the soundsystems to have a bit more space to chat, and so essentially gave birth to dancehall. as a musical style So the two kinda came hand in hand really.
Then dubs got ever more experimental and became a recording thing of their own… and deejays started appearing on tracks themselves - hence most of the 80s 12" stuff will have a vocal version, a deejay version of the same tune, the straight riddim track and a dub of the vocal on the b-side. and eventually there would be tens of versions of a succesful riddim with different vocals/deejay cuts and dubs/versions.
partly, studios time and musicians were expensive, so people wanted to wring the maximum value out of anything they’d recorded - hence every riddim being versioned to the maximum.
this book is pretty great on how all this happened, although like a lot of history of Jamaican music it peters out a bit when talking about the 90s onwards:
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Yes, that thing with the dub and dubplates is (Dubplate - Wikipedia) is part of the dancehall and jungle and techno culture and the word doubles (dubbles? 
) for
- immediate exclusive copies of a track to be played at a sound system, dancehall, club the night of the production and for
- excessive use of delay (literally doubling the voice, although, the RE-201 had 3 playheads and one of the dub reggae effect comes through feedback loop with the echo signal getting ever stronger, so, not that literally ;).
That makes the initial question even clearer and at the same time more unsolved, because dancehall seems to denote even more different things
- dancehall as a physical place (like disco)
- dancehall as a musical genre
- played in (Jamaican style) dancehalls (and at sound systems)
- including dub reggae
- including Spice’s tracks
- including a rather wide range of rhythmic styles
- played in (Jamaican style) dancehalls (and at sound systems)
- dancehall as denotation for a musical experience soundwise or culture-wise including
- toasting
- riddims as basis for many different tracks
- dubplate (acetat copy) culture
- special sound effects
- dub tape echo (like with RE-201)
- spring reverb
- phaser, resp. Phasor (like Mu-tron biphase)
- electric sound FX (dub sirens)
It is a bit like disco which (depending on location and decade) can refer to
- the place (discothek)
- any music/dance event (at least in Eastern Germany) for the youth (even in paramilitaric communist style youth camps („Pionierlager“, „Ferienlager“, where uniforms were not required to be worn for the dance) or as peak event for a school trip)
- the music being played there (at discotheques or disco-events): („Diskomusik“ or „Diskomugge“) - not live, but from disc — and therefore needed to be on vinyl records
- special style of music (you know, what was just before house music (same thing with Chicago warehouse as name of a place and term for a genre), with
- strings,
- prominent and recorded
- live drummers and singers,
- prominent bass,
- instrument solos,
- breaks and
- dancable
- the connected culture with
- clothes
- hairstyles
- dance moves
- glitter
It gets clearer, sort of 
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That’s cool. I like standards. Especially those that developed on their own by self-organizing systems without higher authority.
Will try to get hold of a physical record from that era.
Brexit made trade with UK not only more expensive but Royal Mail partners with GPS who, locally, have very special subcontractors, parcels gone missing despite being tracked, other parcels thrown over high walls/fences… And the customs office, if the parcel lands there, is a tough complex test for mental skills.
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