Terror Fabulous and Nadine Sutherland’s playful, infectious duet followed the lead of “Telephone Love,” released a few years earlier, and perfected it, becoming the standard by which male/female dancehall duets are judged. Rough and sweet: the ultimate dancehall combination. Listen: Ini Kamoze: “Here Comes the Hot Stepper” would do years later to devastating effect. In the chorus, he inte rpolates a Cypress Hill ch ant and ends with the non-sequitur, “Still love ya like that.” Its most lasting contribution: It demonstrated the power of combining dance grooves with hard-edged vocals, something rappers like Notorious B.I.G. Lyrically, “Here Comes the Hotstepper” drifted far afield from the coherence of the original it’s an eclectic, sometimes zany sequence of hip-hop cultural references, folding in the movie Colors, Nike’s Bo Jackson campaign (“I know what Bo don’t know”), Das Efx, Kris Kross, and Homey D. “Here Comes the Hotstepper” became a sensation, rising to No. Remi sampled “Heartbeat,” the 1981 disco classic by Taana Gardner, and Kamoze rewrote accordingly. In 1994, four years after his joyful, sublime, Phillip “Fattis” Burrell-produced hit “Hot Stepper,” the Brooklyn-via-Jamaica Kamoze enlisted the rising hip-hop producer Salaam Remi to work on a radically different version of his song. Ini Kamoze crossbred hip-hop culture and dancehall, and America loved it. The new Taxi Records release was a bold move, but it worked-and it helped open the door for more digital experimentation. When Minott heard the raw cut, he was fascinated and decided to try voicing the same lyrics he had recorded for the Wackie ’s label in New York in 1983, this time over a much slower, mellower beat. Sly Dunbar ’s sequencing technique took all the swing out of “Heavenless” but left a pounding, relentless beat that shocked fans not yet acclimatized to the harsher, grittier sound of the “computerized” rhythms. One of the most critical efforts of this era was Sugar Minott’s “Herbman Hustling.” Voicing over a driving sequencer-generated version of the familiar “Heavenless” riddim, Sugar sings about watching his friends in the ghetto struggling to make a living hustling herb. While the landmark “Sleng Teng” riddim was still an event on the horizon, independent producers and musicians were already experimenting with pre-programmable instruments. In 1984, the way music was made in Jamaica was undergoing seismic shifts.
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