A compelling introduction to the cultural history of the Jamaican musical genre dancehall, Ben DiGiacomo and Dutty Vannier’s “Bad Like Brooklyn Dancehall” sheds light on what one interviewee calls the associated “attitude, culture, and lifestyle” that crops up around dancehall music. Produced by Shaggy, one of the most notable names to push the genre into popular culture, ‘Bad Like Brooklyn’ may seem paint-by-numbers in its formal approach to introducing and dissecting a cultural movement — there are a lot of talking heads, archival footage, etc. — but its content is just fascinating enough to hold one’s interest.
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Deploying a somewhat standardized linear approach, the film begins with the Jamaican diaspora that led to an influx of immigrant communities surrounding Brooklyn in the 1980s. Within these communities, dancehall music took root at basement parties before being codified by a number of influential artists, including Shinehead, Super Cat, and Shabba Ranks. From there, dancehall flirted with pop culture, slowly gaining popularity before becoming a dominant force in pop music when Shaggy hit the mainstream in the late ‘90s.
For an artist like Shaggy, whose 2000 hit “It Wasn’t Me” has gone through every permutation in the life cycle of pop music, the film acts as something of a reclamation, positioning his music outside the lineage of Top ’40s and onto a historical continuum with other dancehall music. The same goes for Sean Paul, another artist who snuck dancehall beats into the lexicon of early Aughts radio hits. Yet, despite Shaggy’s centrality, it never feels like a vanity project, as he often cedes the interviews to other, lesser-known artists, drawing concrete lines between the music that dancehall pioneers made and the genre today.
“Bad Like Brooklyn Dancehall” works best when contextualizing the overlap between pop and dancehall, noting how Caribbean music and dance became mainstream. The film foregrounds Tanesha Scott and Blacka Di Danca, both of whom were influenced by the early dancehall pioneer Bogle and the weekly Passa Passa parties that happened in Kingston, Jamaica, and, eventually, found their way to Brooklyn on DVDs.
When DiGiacomo and Vannier turn to their camera to dancehall’s growing popularity — in mainstream clubs, dance classes, etc. — the film does well in mapping the various ways that dancehall has animated pop and hip-hop and influenced music videos and dance hits. A particularly compelling sequence traces the origins and importance of the DJ during basement parties throughout Brooklyn in the ‘80s and ‘90s and how that role prefigured freestyle rapping.
Yet, by design, ‘Bad Like Brooklyn’ is wide-ranging, moving through decades, styles, and artists very quickly, trying to encompass an entire culture within the span of 90 or so minutes. While we get numerous talking heads, we also never get to explore any particular artist in-depth or even note the sub-genres that cropped up in reaction to dancehall. This is even true of Sean Paul and Shaggy, two artists that perhaps did more to bring the genre to the forefront but also mixed genres, pulling freely from R&B and hip-hop, as well as dancehall. The intersections between these genres are backgrounded in favor of broad historical strokes.
Sometimes, then, the film reads as a Wikipedia entry, never slowing down to unpack a particular moment, musician, or dance and its importance to the growing cultural influence of dancehall. But, such a sweeping overview seems to be by design, as ‘Bad Like Brooklyn’ acts as more of a preamble to, hopefully, other works that can dive a bit deeper into particular artists and moments. While sometimes too expansive for its own good, DiGiacomo and Vannier’s film is also a riveting introduction to the world of dancehall. [B]
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