ENTITY · PERSON (ARTIST, SELECTOR, PRODUCER…)
Gerald "Bogle" Levy / Mr. Wacky
Well supported
Gerald Levy, born in Trench Town on 22 August 1964, was the dancer the dance was named after. As Bogle — later Mr Wacky — he led the Black Roses Crew and invented steps at a rate no one has matched: the Bogle itself, World Dance, Willie Bounce (named for his crew-mate Willie Haggart), Wacky Dip, Urkle, Sesame Street, Pop Yuh Collar, Row di Boat, Out and Bad.
The significance is structural rather than decorative. In the 1990s and 2000s a Jamaican dance move arrived first on the floor and was then written into records by deejays chasing it, which made the dancer, for a while, the author of the music's direction. He was shot dead at a Kingston gas station on 20 January 2005, aged forty, after an altercation involving Beenie Man's entourage; two gunmen fired into his vehicle and he died at Kingston Public Hospital.
Beenie Man later called him the greatest dancer of all time, and Rihanna put one of his moves in the video for "Rude Boy".
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What people argued about this record — two documented positions each time, kept apart from verified fact. Browse every argument in the archive →
Dancers are authors of dancehall history
One side
Artist-centred history
The other
Dancer authorship
Dancehall dance creators and crews should be credited as cultural authors, not treated only as background performers in artist stories.
Read the argument →Male dancers and the effeminacy charge
One side
Acrobatic, stylish male dancing as valid masculine creative artistry
The other
Suspicion that expressive/effeminate movement signals homosexuality
The rise of male dance stars and crews in the 2000s (in the lineage of Bogle/Gerald Levy and the Black Roses Crew, then Ding Dong's Ravers Clavers) sharpened a gender argument: elaborate, fluid, fashion-forward male moves and 'out and bad' styling were read by some in a homophobic dancehall context as effeminate or 'gay', while dancers and scholars argued the moves were a legitimate, hyper-visible form of masculine artistry and inner-city creativity (Jamaica Observer, 'Masculinity and dancehall', 2011; academic work by Patrick Helber). The tension coexisted with dancehall's broader documented homophobia and the international 'Stop Murder Music' controversies.
Read the argument →Who owns the move? Dancers as uncredited creative labour
One side
Dancers as originators owed credit and pay for moves that drive songs
The other
A system where recording artists and promoters reap the returns
As street-dance videos and DVDs made dancers briefly famous in the 2000s, commentary questioned the economics of the dance-song feedback loop: dancers invented moves (Bogle, Willie Bounce, Dutty Wine, Nuh Linga and others) that fuelled hit records and riddims, yet often went uncredited and unpaid while artists and promoters captured the value. The Jamaica Gleaner's 'Dancehall's dancers go hungry' (28 Apr 2013) documented dancers' complaints that the collapse of street dances under the Noise Abatement crackdown left them without income.
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Compiled and researched by The Jamaica Music Atlas music desk. The sources that informed it are credited above.
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