Wheel and come again: the pull-up, and what happens when it can be bought

Selector forward and pull-up practice is the live sound-system act of rewinding a record after strong crowd response, turning audience reaction into a performance decision and making the selector's timing part of the music itself.

The 'gun finger' salute and vocal 'forward', the raised-finger gesture and gun-sound approval used by dancehall crowds and selectors to demand a rewind, a ritual of the dance that also figures in debates over gun symbolism in the culture.

United States anthropologist whose 'Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica' (Duke University Press, 2000), based on eighteen months of Kingston fieldwork in the 1990s, offered one of the first book-length ethnographies of the sound-system dance and read dancehall as an arena where class, race, gender and politics are contested.

Human vocal sound-effect practice used in dancehall intros and dubplate culture; should be documented as performance technique, not literal violence.

Professor Donna P. Hope is a Jamaican cultural-studies scholar, author, researcher and public intellectual whose work has helped establish dancehall as a major field of academic inquiry. She is Professor of Culture, Gender and Society in the Institute of Caribbean Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Education, at The University of the West Indies, Mona, where she has been on faculty since October 2017 (Deputy Dean, Graduate Studies and Research, 2018-2019; Director/Department Head of the Institute of Caribbean Studies, 2012-2015; Principal's Research Fellow, 2012-2014 and 2016-2017). She holds a BA in Mass Communication (Hons.) and an MPhil in Government, both from UWI Mona, and a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, Virginia (2006), which named her a Distinguished Alumna in Cultural Studies in 2017. Her scholarship reads dancehall not simply as a genre but as a cultural space through which Jamaican society can be understood, through questions of identity, class, power, gender, sexuality, masculinity and politics. Her first major book, Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (UWI Press, 2006), examined dancehall, power, violence, sexuality and Jamaica's marginalised working-class communities; her working frame for the music's subject matter is what she has called the six Gs — gun, gyal, ghetto, gays, ganja, God — alongside competition and money. Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall (Ian Randle, 2010) extended this into a study of Jamaican masculinity, badness and conspicuous consumption. She has since edited International Reggae: Current and Future Trends in Jamaican Popular Music (2013), Reggae from Yaad (Ian Randle, 2015) and ReggaeStories: Jamaican Musical Legends and Cultural Legacies (UWI Press, 2018), co-edited the bilingual Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion / Subversion Erotica (2023) with Carla Lamoyi, and published the autobiographical Chicken Back Gravy and Such Delights: Life Lessons from My Journey (2019). Her wider output has been described as more than 100 journal articles, chapters, reviews and newspaper pieces, alongside work as a media commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist. In February 2018 Hope founded the Dancehall Archive and Research Initiative (DHA), a repository for dancehall history, photographs, bibliographic material and other records, built in response to the loss and inaccessibility of documentation of Jamaican music. She was President of the Caribbean Studies Association for 2025-2026, describing herself as outgoing president after the June 2026 conference, and sits on the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport's Entertainment Advisory Board (2024-present), the Jamaica Journal Publication Committee (2025-present) and the Reggae Gold Awards Selection Committee (2019-2026). In May 2026 she marked twenty years of Inna di Dancehall, telling the Jamaica Gleaner: "To have your first book still trending after being released 20 years ago is big for me," and describing the book's account of dancehall as a pressure valve for stressed communities. Also known as Donna Hope-Marquis, Dr Donna Hope and Donna P. Hope.

A pull-up bought rather than earned: cash held up, waved or thrown at the selector to make him rewind a record, and increasingly to make him rewind it again. The traditional [[pull-up-wheel-and-come-again|rewind]] is a verdict. The crowd's response is the currency, and the selector is reading a room. The money pull-up changes who is being read. A man with a stack settles the question on his own, and what the rewind now proves is that he could afford it — which is a different kind of status, and a considerably narrower one. It did not come from nowhere. Money has been visible in the dance since the bling era, and the video light long ago made spending a performance in its own right; the money pull-up is what happens when that logic reaches the selector's hand. Defenders point out that it pays people who are rarely paid, and that a selector working a weekly for a small fee is entitled to it. The objection is not about the money but about the reading: once the rewind can be bought, it stops being evidence of anything except a wallet. This record is built from community observation contributed to the archive rather than from a documented history, and is filed as probable on that basis.

Jamaican videographer credited with introducing the 'video light' and live TV-screen technology to dancehall street parties from the 1980s into the 1990s, so that patrons caught on camera appeared live to the crowd; dancers came to say a session did not truly start until his light came on, and his footage of events including Passa Passa forms a foundational visual archive of the scene. His own summary of what the light did to a dance is the most quoted line on the subject. Interviewed by Donna Hope in May 2001, he said that nowadays the men run down the video more than the women — it is the hypeness. Coming from the man holding the camera, that is as close to a primary source as the video light has.

The dancehall 'video light', the bright camera or videographer's light that dancers and stylish patrons perform toward at sessions such as Passa Passa, a practice tied to visibility, glamour and self-fashioning, and to debates about display and materialism.

Live rounds fired into the air at a dance as a mark of approval — the loudest and most literal form of the forward, and the one that is a criminal offence. The gesture is older than dancehall and was not originally lawless. Reggae historian Roger Steffens traces it to the military cannon salute, arriving in the dance as the "boom salute". In the sound-system era the deejay's call of "Legal!" was addressed to the police and militiamen in the room, inviting a salute from them in return; the same act from a gunman disrupting the dance was something else entirely, and the language kept the two apart. "Lick a shot" still carries both meanings. What made it durable is that it works. A shot is a reading of the crowd rendered instantly and unmistakably, and a room that expects it does not scatter — it lifts. That is the part outsiders find hardest to credit and the part worth recording plainly: for a long stretch, in certain dances, not reacting was the normal response, and the vibes were understood to be built by it. The discharge is the offence — firing into a crowd in celebration is unlawful whether or not the weapon is licensed — and it is unaimed and occasionally lethal, because every round fired upward comes down. The archive holds the practice as history rather than endorsement, and files the substitutes that replaced it — the gun-finger salute, the vocal "bap bap", the air horn — as the same impulse made harmless.

The UK dancehall collective behind the biggest link-up dances of the 1990s and 2000s: London-based promoters, patrons and scene figures whose events — staged in Britain and in Jamaica — put diaspora money, high-spectacle fashion and Kingston's current dances in one room. British Link Up made the UK a full participant in dancehall's social calendar rather than an export market, and its dances are fixtures of the video-light archive of the era. Donna Hope's 2004 study gives it an origin and a calendar. Owen "Roy Fowl" Clarke — Father Fowl, Sir Roy — started it with early-1980s "shub-een" parties in north-west London basements, working between Waltham Park in Kingston and north-west London, and by 2004 the annual Jamaican events had been running for over a decade around Easter and the pre-Christmas weeks, with the London event timed to Jamaican independence at the start of August. Her argument about what the crew was doing is the reason it belongs in this archive rather than in a fashion history. She calls it consumption masquerading as masculinity: where schooling, a career and social background are out of reach as markers of male status, the public display of money becomes the route to standing instead. Brand-name clothes, jewellery, cars and grooming, performed where they will be seen and filmed. That is the same logic the archive records in the video light and, later, in the money pull-up — the dance as a place where status can be bought outright.

A one-off acetate cut for a single sound system — originally a test pressing, then the core weapon of clash culture. A sound commissions an artist to voice a custom version of a known tune naming that sound, and plays it as an exclusive nobody else can answer. The dubplate turns a record into a possession, and its economy sustains a whole layer of the business.

Donna P. Hope's 2004 article in Interventions, and the sharpest available account of why spending became a performance in the dancehall. Its argument, in her title: consumption masquerading as masculinity. Where the ordinary markers of male status — schooling, a white-collar career, socio-economic background — are out of reach, public display of economic wealth becomes the route to standing instead. Brand-name clothes, jewellery, cars, bodily care down to the barbershop and the bleaching cream, all of it performed in a room where it will be seen and, increasingly, filmed. She quotes the videographer Jack Sowah in May 2001: nowadays the men run down the video more than the women, because it is the hypeness. She is careful about two things this archive should copy. She does not claim the identity is uniform, and she sets the crew's reputed involvement in illegal activity aside as not her subject while noting plainly that in the Jamaican inner cities significant masculine power is bestowed on men reputed to be engaged in it. It is also the direct ancestor of the archive's record on the money pull-up. Once standing is bought rather than earned, the currency of the dance has already changed; the rewind is just the last thing to be priced.

Winston "Wee Pow" Powell's Kingston sound, built in 1972 on locally made amplifiers and now the most durable operation in dancehall — a sound that outlived the eras it played through. Stone Love defined juggling culture and the weekly dance as an institution, and its selector roll (Rory, Geefus, Billy Slaughter, Diamond, Scary Gary and many more) reads as a history of the craft. Its tapes are among the most widely circulated documents of Jamaican dance culture.

The rewind: when a crowd's response demands it, the selector hauls the record back to the start and plays it again — dancehall's most public form of criticism, delivered in seconds. "Pull up" and "wheel" are the calls; a tune pulled up twice is a verdict no chart can overrule. The practice travelled intact into jungle, garage and grime as the reload.