“The 1985, that’s the birth of digital Dancehall,” says Maxine Isis Stowe, music executive, historian, and cultural curator, in an exclusive conversation with World Music Views. Her voice bears the weight of first-hand experience as one of the key architects behind Dancehall’s transnational growth, Maxine walks us through the year everything shifted—musically, culturally, and politically.
In the last 40 years, Stowe has worked with every major record company that have a hand in dancehall’s development including Universal Music Group by way of Island Records, Youth Man Promotions, VP Records, Sony and Ghetto Youths International.
She points to 1985 as the year when new technology redefined the production of Jamaican music. “It starts with the new technology that was coming in,” she explains. From Steely & Clevie’s side, it was the Casio synthesizer; from the Robbie Shakespeare side, it was digital drum machines beginning to replace live session musicians.
Clive Hunt previously told World Music Views that while he was working at a Manhattan record store, he introduced Sly and Robbie to the SynDrums—the groundbreaking invention by Los Angeles musician Joe Pollard in 1976 that transformed the trajectory of Jamaican music.
1985 witnessed the release of “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” a riddim with vocals by Ian ‘Wayne’ Smith produced by Noel Davey and Lloyd “King Jammy” James. “Alongside the ‘Sleng Teng riddim’,” Maxine recalls, “there was a more digital focus. Whole riddims were being made with less musicians and more digitization.” The result was a leaner, more futuristic sound that transformed Kingston’s dance floors—and eventually the world.
The genesis of Sleng Teng can be traced back to a seemingly unconventional source—an unexpected gift of a consumer-grade Casiotone MT-40 keyboard to musician Noel Davey by George “Buddy” Haye.
“Because I had a little melodica playing, people used to see my talent and say if this youth got a keyboard, he would do a lot better. So when (reggae group) Wailing Souls went up to America, Garth Dennis (one of the group’s members) came to me and said ‘You know Bunny send a keyboard for you?’ Davey recalled in the Sunday Gleaner.
Initially disappointed by the keyboard’s limitations, Davey, along with fellow musician Wayne Smith who had started hanging around him, stumbled upon a game-changing “rock” bassline preset composed by Casio engineer Okuda Hiroko in 1980, that would become the heartbeat of Sleng Teng.
From Sound to Studio
The King Jammy’s camp was pivotal in this evolution. “The first time I heard King Jammy’s Sleng Teng Riddim, it was a huge impact,” Stowe recalls. The riddim resonated beyond Jamaica, especially in New York City where Stowe herself was splitting time between the Bronx and Miami.
“There was a crossover happening,” she says, linking the early digital Dancehall sound to the parallel evolution of hip-hop in the U.S. “The type of riddims that were coming out of hip-hop were now meeting up with what we were doing in Dancehall.”
When the Sleng Teng riddim dropped, it redefined what Dancehall could be. “That one live (Sound System) recording became the recording that then started to drive the industry,” she says.
DJ Culture and the Rise of the Crew
The mid-80s also gave birth to Dancehall’s sound system-to-studio pipeline. “This was the rise of the DJ culture,” says Stowe. “You had Super Cat, Admiral Bailey, Tenor Saw—those were the first international Dancehall stars.”
She describes how artists formed informal “co-ops” around sound systems, creating a model where live performance directly fed the recording industry. “When something buss in the dance, it went directly into the studio. It was intense—the sound system was the recording industry.”
This was also the period of the famed Volcano sound system, where artists like John Wayne and Yellowman helped create anthems that first soundtracked in street dances before reaching record stores.
Dancehall cannot be separated from its historical and political backdrop as the genre came of age in one of the most politically divided time in Jamaica. “This was after Bob Marley died and after the 1980 election. By 1984, Jamaica was entering the Edward Seaga era, and the whole energy of society had shifted,” she explains. “We moved from roots energy back into dance. The sound system became the voice of the streets.”
She recounts her own journey at the time—working in New York and Miami, collaborating with Kenneth “Skeng Don” Black. “We opened up studios in Miami. It was a dancehall collaboration—artists, sound men, and labels integrating under one umbrella.”
Fashion, Clarks, and Culture
And what was the look of Dancehall in 1985? “It was Clarks, Congo shirts, and mesh Marina undershirts,” says Maxine with a laugh. “Sugar Minott had a bowler hat from England. The style was sharp.” Fashion, she adds, was an extension of identity and a way for Dancehall youth to assert themselves on the global stage.
The seeds planted in 1985 would sprout into full-blown stardom in the 1990s, an era when she spearheaded the international careers of several artists. “Yes, 1985 definitely caused the boom in the ’90s,” Maxine confirms. Super Cat and Nicodemus transitioned into New York’s King Addies sound system and helped establish Dancehall’s dominance in the U.S.
By the early 1990s, Dancehall artists were signing major label deals—Super Cat with Columbia, Shabba Ranks with Epic. “The transition from Kingston to New York made it all possible,” she says.
The Dancehall Museum and the Fight for Ownership
Today, Maxine Stowe is working to preserve that legacy through a Dancehall museum, located near Trench Town and Jungle in Kingston—the very grounds where Dancehall was born.
“It’s about intellectual property and ownership,” she says. “We have to express how and why we do what we do. Our beats, our names—they’re our birthright.” As genres like Reggaeton and Afrobeats evolve from the Jamaican model, Stowe emphasizes the importance of credit and compensation for Jamaican creators.
“We’re a small territory, but our creativity is massive. And we have to exhibit ourselves outside of just the beats and lyrics—we have to attach our culture.”
She describes the 1985 movement as a collective experience, not the work of any one individual. “It was everybody. The producers, the selectors, the artists—it was like farming. One artist helped plant on another man’s label. It was a shared economy of creativity.”
