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Don Letts wrote Dancehall Queen? Madness. Loved this interview, will have to get both of his books. I came up listening to dancehall in the late 80s and 90s but kinda clocked out a little post Vybz Kartel, not completely, still have loads of tunes by him and lots of his contemporaries and proteges, but a lot of the content appealed less as I got older and it took me about a decade to accept auto tune. My point being, I'm excited to read about that era and fill in the gaps.

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Fantastic work as ever, I also didn't know the Don Letts connection! Marvin's patient progress in this work has been amazing, the invisible (and very visible) barriers here are huge... His point that "people that write about music don't necessarily care about dancehall and the people that care about dancehall don't necessarily read about music" is a fascinating and vital one, I think we can't understand why the history is so unwritten unless we grasp just how separate the music ecosystems have been, kinda incompatible operating systems... dancehall was endlessly sampled and imitated and of course the influence on jungle, grime, hip hop etc over the years has been huge, but the way the records themselves and news about the artists and all the rest reached people was just a whole different set of channels. Back in the 90s I remember even people who were into a broad range of music almost had dancehall fandom as something out on its own, a separate category. Really had this brought home by talking to IRAH recently, he only ever wanted to be dancehall as such, but in the UK he had to navigate grime, dubstep and then the jungle revival to get known - any dancehall success came via talking direct to Jamaicans. Lloyd Laing aka Reggaeology is a fascinating speaker on these topics if you don't know him: he speaks directly to the Jamaican scene about the nature of these very barriers... https://www.instagram.com/reggaeology/

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