Showdown

Jamaican DJ and soundsystem culture is often cited as the wellspring of hip-hop. But ever since Kingston-born DJ Kool Herc laid hip-hop’s foundations at raucous mid-‘70s Bronx house parties, hip-hop and Jamaican music have maintained a constant dialogue. By the early ‘90s, the sounds of hip-hop were making their way into Jamaican dancehalls. Pioneering producers like Robert “Bobby Digital” Dixon created rhythms indebted to Marley Marl’s looped breakbeats, while Jamaican DJs adopted more aggressive deliveries and stoked audience interest by staging elaborate on-record feuds. Few were as adept at starting such conflicts as Louie Rankin, who created a stir with his 1991 hit “Typewriter”—an exhilarating play for dancehall dominance that featured gunfire-punctuated putdowns of both Ninjaman and Super Cat in its first 30 seconds. Rankin’s first full-length, Showdown, courted further crossover success with a bone-crushing hip-hop remix of “Typewriter,” but the album’s strongest moments eschewed hip-hop influence for pure dancehall.