The Riddim Economy: One Riddim, Many Voicings

The music that followed Sleng Teng in 1985, built on programmed keyboards and drum machines rather than a band in a room. It made records cheaper and faster to produce, which put them within reach of far more people, and it changed the sound completely — harder, drier, and rhythmically freer than anything a live rhythm section had been playing. Almost every Jamaican record since is downstream of it.

William Maragh, billed the Wild Apache, born in the Cockburn Pen area of Kingston also known as Seivright Gardens, of Jamaican and Indian descent. His debut album Si Boops Deh! in 1985 carried "Boops" — the word entering Jamaican speech for a man who keeps a younger woman — and established a delivery that was faster, more rhythmically intricate and more melodically inventive than most of what surrounded it. Don Dada in 1992 took him to a US major and into the New York hip-hop orbit, where he worked with the Notorious B.I.G., Heavy D and Puff Daddy, and made him one of the handful of Jamaican deejays American rap treated as a peer rather than a novelty. He has recorded sparingly since.

Tenor Saw (born Clive Bright, 1966-1988) was a Jamaican dancehall singer widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the early digital reggae era. Working with Sugar Minott's Youth Promotion and the Black Roots label, he recorded hits including "Pumpkin Belly" and "Fever," but is best remembered for the 1985 anthem "Ring the Alarm" on the Stalag riddim. He died in Houston, Texas, in 1988 after being struck by a car.

A small consumer keyboard sold from the early 1980s, and the most consequential piece of equipment in dancehall's history. One of its preset accompaniment patterns — slowed down and reworked by Noel Davey — became the rhythm of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng", produced by King Jammy in 1985. A machine intended for living rooms replaced the session band, and the music has been made on keyboards ever since.

"Under Mi Sleng Teng," released in early 1985, is widely credited as the record that pushed Jamaican music from live-band production to computerised digital riddims almost overnight, spawning several hundred versions. Its authorship is more crowded than the usual telling allows: Noel Davey and the singer Wayne Smith arranged the rhythm on a Casio MT-40, using the keyboard's "rock" preset, at a tempo considerably faster than the release; they brought it to King Jammy in December 1984, and he slowed it, matched it to Smith's singing key and added piano and clap tracks before voicing and issuing it.

Wayne Smith (1965-2014) sang "Under Mi Sleng Teng" (1985), the record that is the conventional starting gun for digital dancehall — and he co-built the rhythm as well as voicing it. With Noel Davey he found the "rock" preset on a Casio MT-40 and arranged a first version, faster than the release, before the two took it to King Jammy in December 1984. Smith recorded plenty besides, but this is the record that changed the music's economics: no session band, no studio hire, a rhythm one keyboard could carry.

The practice that organises Jamaican music: a rhythm track is not used once but voiced repeatedly, by different artists, across years or decades. A riddim is a shared commons — competing, answering and building on one another over the same bed. It is why the archive is threaded with version chains rather than isolated records, and it has no real parallel elsewhere in popular music.

The 1985 riddim, built by Wayne Smith and Noel Davey on a Casiotone preset at King Jammy's and voiced by Smith as "Under Mi Sleng Teng", that ended the era of the live band as the default of Jamaican music. Cheap, fully electronic and instantly copyable, it triggered the digital turn: hundreds of versions followed within a few years, production costs collapsed, and dancehall's tempo, texture and economics were remade around it. Nothing else in the archive divides a before from an after so cleanly.

Arthur "Duke" Reid's studio above his liquor store at 33 Bond Street, Kingston, and the label of the same name. If Studio One owned ska, Treasure Isle owned rocksteady: from 1966 Reid's productions with Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon and John Holt defined the slower, sweeter, bass-forward form, and those rhythms became a second foundation catalogue — the basis of countless later versions, not least through U-Roy toasting over them in 1970. Melodians singer Brent Dowe recalled Duke Reid running an unusually hands-on studio: a speaker wired through to his liquor-store office let him monitor every take while doing other business, and he would reportedly run upstairs shouting corrections the moment something sounded wrong. Dowe also credited Reid as first to deliberately lengthen recordings once rocksteady's slower tempo allowed it, from roughly 2:20 ska cuts to three- or four-minute rocksteady tracks. A between-takes tape fragment on the compilation "Ska after Ska after Ska", titled "Duke Speaks", preserves Reid's own voice mid-session demanding "plenty more bass and drum".

Lloyd James, the engineer and producer who came up under King Tubby in Waterhouse and then changed the music twice over. He built and ran his own sound before turning to production, and in 1985 issued "Under Mi Sleng Teng" — the Casio-preset rhythm that ended the live-band era and opened the digital one. Through the late 1980s his Waterhouse studio was the busiest room in Jamaica, cutting for Half Pint, Admiral Bailey, Chaka Demus, Ninjaman and most of the era's voices, and his Super Power sound carried the same material into the dance.