Songs that crossed over

There is no single crossover story. "My Boy Lollipop" was cut in London, "Israelites" arrived on its own terms, The Harder They Come sold reggae through a film, Eric Clapton's cover did what Bob Marley's original had not, and "Cheerleader" needed a German remixer. Each breakthrough went through a different door.

Six doors, not one

Jamaican music has broken internationally roughly once a decade for sixty years, and almost never twice by the same route. The interesting thing about the list of crossover records is how little the entries have in common: a teenager recorded in London, a film soundtrack, a cover by an English guitarist, a children's group, a dancehall album on a major label, a remix commissioned in Germany. The music travels; it is the mechanism that keeps changing.

London makes the first one

Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" reached number two in Britain and the United States in 1964 and sold in the millions. It was a Jamaican singer on a bluebeat shuffle, but it was recorded in London and produced by Chris Blackwell for a British pop market. The first mass foreign exposure to Jamaican music arrived already adapted for the audience receiving it.

Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" did the opposite and worked anyway. Produced by Leslie Kong in Kingston, sung in Jamaican English that a great many British buyers could not fully parse, it reached number one in Britain in 1969 and the American top ten — the first Jamaican-made record to do so on its own terms. Ken Boothe followed with a number one in 1974, Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking" with another in 1978.

A film and a cover

The Harder They Come, released in 1972 with Jimmy Cliff in the lead, did what no single had managed: it gave foreign audiences a place to put the music. The soundtrack sold steadily for years on American college campuses and in art-house cinemas, and "Many Rivers to Cross" and "You Can Get It If You Really Want" entered the standard repertoire. A film succeeded as a distribution strategy where records had not.

Two years later Eric Clapton took "I Shot the Sheriff" to number one in the United States. Bob Marley had written and recorded it and it had not charted there; the cover made the song famous and its author bankable. Island's reworking of Catch a Fire in 1973 for rock listeners had already established the approach, and Marley's own international run followed — Exodus in 1977, and after his death in 1981 the compilation Legend, which has outsold everything else reggae has ever released.

The music travels. It is the mechanism that keeps changing.

Dancehall arrives

The 1990s opened the American door properly. Shabba Ranks won consecutive Grammy awards for Best Reggae Album in 1992 and 1993 with major-label backing; Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1994; Maxi Priest had got there in 1990 with "Close to You". Shaggy's "Oh Carolina" topped the British chart in 1993, a version of the 1960 Folkes Brothers record with Count Ossie's drummers on it.

Then the run that made dancehall a pop format. Shaggy's Hot Shot topped the American album chart in 2001 on the back of "It Wasn't Me" and "Angel"; Sean Paul's Dutty Rock followed in 2002, with "Get Busy" reaching number one on the Hot 100 in 2003 and a string of guest appearances putting his voice across mainstream radio for years. Damian Marley's "Welcome to Jamrock" in 2005 crossed over without softening anything at all.

The remix era

OMI's "Cheerleader" shows the current shape of the thing. Released in Jamaica in 2012 to modest notice, it became a global number one in 2015 only after a remix by the German producer Felix Jaehn recast it for European dance radio. The record that conquered the world was made three years after the record, by someone who had nothing to do with it.

That is the recurring shape, and it is worth naming plainly. Jamaican music has usually crossed over when someone outside Jamaica translated it — a London producer, a film distributor, a rock guitarist, a European remixer — and the translator has generally captured most of the value. Koffee's Grammy in 2020 and the streaming reach of a generation who publish without asking anyone's permission are the first serious change to that arrangement in sixty years.