The Mystery of Dembow

The search for the timeless, controversial and infectious rhythm that is the essence of reggaeton.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on a flow, and then I was everywhere everywhere.
He was singing in the clothes with the Jamaicans. People
was loving him more than the artist of the show
that night. So you know that you're a good artist
when people you know are coming to see you and
there's a bigger artist on that same show. We never

(00:24):
foresee that it was going to take off, and we
didn't foresee that this type of music would turn into
something like like what it has done. I guess that
was the starting of that new type of music, reggaeton.
Have you ever heard a song and thought this sounds familiar,

(00:47):
but you couldn't really put your finger on when or
where you heard it before, or if you ever really
heard it at all. Well, that happened to Wayne Marshall,
and the inability to put his finger on it drove
him add as an It sparked a year's long obsession.
You see, Wayne is a musicologist and professor at the
Berkeley College of Music in Boston, one of the pre

(01:10):
eminent music academies in the world. So when he listens
to music, he listens to it differently than you and me. No,
I don't listen to music like a normal person. Absolutely not.
I mean, I've obviously trained my ears in various ways.
You know, I've trained them as a musicologist, but I've
also trained them as essentially as a hip hop producer.
I hear things and I start to do pattern recognition,

(01:32):
and I start to say, Okay, this is coming from here,
this is coming from there. Ah, that's from the skull snaps. Oh,
that's from the funky drummer. Musicology can mean a lot
of things to different people, but to Wayne, it boils
down to an anthropological approach to the study of music,
or in his words, I am interested in quote unquote
the music itself. You know, the notes and the rhythms

(01:53):
and all that. But for me, those things like melody
and rhythm and harmony only means something when they mean
something to someone, you know, when they recognize it and
they say, ah, that's the sound of home, you know where,
that's the sound of somewhere else. Wayne describes the first
time he ever heard Raydon as an epiphany. The first
glimmer I had of reggae tone was in two thousand one,

(02:15):
when I was back at my old high school here
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a substitute teacher, and I
was always looking for something to connect with the students
over and when student came in one time with one
of those case logic binders. Remember those things that we
would hold hundreds of CDs? Do I remember? I mean,
I'm pretty sure I still have one of those somewhere.
And I'm like, what is this and he says, Oh,

(02:35):
it's Spanish reggae. You know. It was one of those
kind of moments because I'm like, there's an entire world
here and it hasn't come sort of above ground yet,
but it's gonna be huge. Wayne happens to specialize in
reggae and dance hall, so listening to the songs in
the CD case, he quickly recognized familiar sounds, samples, loops, rhythms.

(02:57):
So I started to catalog those rhythms, more or less informally,
at first in reggaetone. And what I did start to
find was that there were some that were much more
frequent than others, you know, especially this one called dembo
one three one to three, one to one to three,
one to three, one to got gout cut cut cut
cut cut cut right. Wayne found the so called them

(03:25):
beat in so many readon songs that if you plotted
out the results in a pie chart, it would look
like Pacman, somewhere between sent and an insanely high number
for any musical genre. Wayne heard the beat dressed up,
distorted and disguised in all types of ways, but always
present at the base of it all. It was almost

(03:48):
as if this beat was a requirement for any Regadon song.
So for me, there was something really kind of profound
about the idea that a single sample could be so
central um and could be also so generative, right that like, look,
we can put a thousand songs on this one underlying rhythm.
For Wayne, the next step was obvious, find out who

(04:10):
made this. This is a flow, A journey to the
roots of Redon. My name is Lila Luciano, a CBS
News correspondent born and raised in Puerto Rico, The Cradle
of Reydon. You're listening to episode six, The Mystery of

(04:34):
Them Bow. One of the first things Wayne noticed about
why the de Bou rhythm sounded so familiar is that
if you strip it down to its core, there's a
timeless beat in Spanish, some call it you get it.

(05:00):
It's one of the oldest drum patterns in the planet
like literally since the invention of drums and since drumming,
like human civilization started in Africa, That's where this beat
comes from. It's really classic, you know, African afro diasporic
rhythm at some level, and that's why it's been known
by lots of names everywhere, you know, including the haban Era.

(05:20):
For a while, it was known as the tango. You know,
tango music, you know has this as its basic rhythm
as well. Um a lot of Cuban music has had
that in it. Intrigued by the riddle before him, Wayne
dove into online chat rooms looking for clues, and he

(05:41):
kept seeing mentions of a song called them both by
the dance hall superstar Chaba Ranks, a dembo song with
a dembo beat. Mystery solved, right not quite. What I
knew right away was that the rhythm I was hearing
in reggaetne that they were calling dembo was not the
rhythm from the Chaba Rank song. I could listen to
the kick and the snare and say I hear the resemblance,

(06:05):
but clearly they're sampling something other than the backing track
to Chaba Ranks. So that automatically told me like there's
something missing in this story. Let's take this step by step.
When dance hall was born on the streets of Kingston
in the nineties seventies, it came with its own subculture,

(06:28):
customs and codes. Case in point, rhythms or rhythms if
you're in Jamaica. They're the building blocks of the genre.
Producers would create rhythms to give to vocalists so they
in turn could make their own versions. A popular rhythm
could have tens or even hundreds of versions. Jeo Macha
is always competing with each other, the producer, the singers.

(06:52):
It's a competition. It's a competition who can make it
more popular because their version the same song over and
run over in different ways. That's Patricia Chin or Miss Pat,
co founder of VP Records, the world's largest distributor of
reggae and dance hall. Maybe they do it with a

(07:12):
different musician, maybe they put more harns, maybe they put
a different DJ to DJ in the radium, so they
call it version and it makes the record so longer
because it stays on the chart more. And that's how
I think reggae music has developed. So it turns out
that Shabba ranks as Dembo was a version of this

(07:32):
instrumental called fish Market, created by the influential production duo
Steely and Cleave. So the problem there, of course, is
that if you go back to fish Market, that's not
what the Reggae Tone guys were sampling either. So so

(07:54):
this didn't actually lead me to the end of the story. Instead,
I ended up eventually figuring out that the record the
Reggae Tone guys were sampling was a cover of Dembo
was a relick a reproduction of Dembo done in New
York City in Long Island by Jamaicans working with Panamanians

(08:16):
at the time to basically do Spanish language cover songs
of the hottest songs coming out of Jamaica. Uh huh
cover of a cover, Now we're getting somewhere. When the
MBO was released, the most sought after studio among dance
hall artists in New York was h CNF, run by
dance hall mastermind Philip Smart. A lot of the Panamanian

(08:40):
artists we met last episode recorded their hit songs at
h CNF, including and then the Womb who on this
occasion were brought into the studio by the label Superpower Records.
The producers at Superpower knew the rhythm on them Bo
was lit and wanted to record a version asap, but

(09:00):
Shaba Ranks did not release an instrumental, so they worked
with h CNF on an imitation of that rhythm Between
and Now the Womb. They recorded three songs on the
h c n F instrumental. Eleni did a song called Sombo,
and Now the Womb initially recorded a track called Bensoung,
but later did a second version called Agios Bania that

(09:24):
was a pretty direct cover of Shaba Ranks's controversial lyrics
on the mo. It's a song about bowing to imperialism
and foreign pressure and that kind of thing. Right. He says,
you know, freedom for black people come now. That means
say they all presses them, just bow, right, So he
wants to invert this and say we're not going to
bow to the oppressors. The anti imperialist claim definitely has

(09:47):
its merit, as we discussed an episode one, it's a
big part of the whole birth of the genre, but
the song is also seen as being homophobic put up.
The other part of the bowing here is more of
a kind of literal bowing, like bending over and so

(10:07):
that song Dembo is mostly an anti oral sex song.
A lot of times people just dismiss it as homophobic.
I do think it has homophobia built into it as well,
but it's more broadly about taboo sexual practices, especially what
has been called sodomy, whether it's oral sex or or
anal sex. The new songs brought instant attention from Spanish

(10:29):
speaking listeners, especially now in the wombs Agusmania. But there
was a problem, at least there was for Wayne Marshall.
None of the tracks included an instrumental version or even
a clean sample long enough to turn into a loop.
It was back to square one. The Internet, there were
lots of Panamanians talking about their place in the story

(10:50):
and talking about, you know, the importance of certain records
to the Panamanian reggae and Espanol sound. Panamanians, we're saying, no,
it's not Dembo, it's Pounder. Listen. If you're confused, don't worry.
All you have to do is summon your inner as Ventura.
Pounder is Zimbo. Theimbo is Pounder. Yeah, it's that simple.
Once I discovered Pounder, you know, that seemed like a

(11:14):
real key. The song Pounder was recorded by the Jamaican
duo Bobo General and Sleepy Wonder at HCNF. Pounder had
the same beat as the others and post the same challenges,
but when Wayne flipped the record there it was a
full instrumental version called dub Mix two, credited to Dennis

(11:34):
the Menace. Wayne cross checked dub Mix two with Reydon
songs and instrumentals coming out of Puerto Rico, claiming to
be the definitive Reydon rhythm, and so that allowed me
to verify that, oh yeah, that's the one that's being sampled,
because when I listened to dub Mix two alongside like
um Dembo Dembo oricinal that's dubbed mixed two with Sleepy Wonder.

(11:58):
Remembers that the day he recorded at HCNF with No Bomb,
he didn't even know what rhythm he was going to
be using. In fact, when he got to the studio,
Dennis the Menace was still putting the finishing touches on it.
Even so he had plenty of lyrics ready to go.
We write lyrics every day because we were competitive, and
we used to battle wrap a lot, so I would

(12:20):
never be caught not on my tours back then and
that day. I think like three or four songs was
recorded on the rhythm. I no, no, the bomb was
one for sure, and the Pounder was another one. I
think we were the second artist to go into voice
on it and just the huk. Go tell it on
the mountain, Oh for thels and everywhere, go tell it

(12:44):
on the mountain General no one dot com again. Once
we did that, the whole studio was on fire. Everybody
back deal was just saying, this is it, this is it.
It wasn't long before Sleepy Wonder was hearing a familiar
rhythm all around him in New York. But it wasn't Pounder.
It was something new. Those Puerto Ricans in New York

(13:07):
they're they're very proud people when they drive by with
those booming systems. You know, I could walk two blocks,
three New York blocks and here that played three or
four times in different people's cars or just coming through
the window of an apartment. When I tell people I
had something to do with reggaeton, I'd probably get a
laugh with Sleepy Wonder didn't know was that his record

(13:28):
was a hit in Puerto Rico, but not because a Pounder,
because of dub mixed too This is dj Adam, a
Puerto Rican DJ and producer who's been around as long
as reggaeton on the island. They bounded, so the runaway

(13:50):
hit was nunder wombs agus Bania. People were going crazy
over it, but just like Wayne, a decade later, they
couldn't find the instrumental until one day. Dj Adam was
at his favorite record store and one of the ladies
working there shows him Pounder, but he was like man

(14:13):
until she turned the record around one hirado elo bony
okay yo. He was happy. He was like, this is
the track that everybody's been looking for, and once we
had that rhythm, the rest is history. It's happy wow.

(14:41):
And that's the truth because the legacy of Pounder isn't
as much about who made it, but about what was
made as a result, and that legacy is undeniable. Look
at the fine for dj Adam, that beat defines. But

(15:03):
if you don't agree, please take a look around. It's
been thirty years since Pounder came out and what do
people still like? Founded on the next episode of A Flow,

(15:24):
Puerto Rico takes over. L Flow is a production of
Exile Content Studio in partnership with I Heart Radios Michael
To Podcast Network. The show is hosted by me Lilia
Luciano and was created and produced by Vitens Julius. Production
and sound designed by Dixo, Additional production by David Kennones

(15:45):
and Mirnakoto. Story editing by Nouriat, original music by Truco Production,
supervision by Alberto Cespdes. Executive producers for Excel Content Studio
are Nando Villa Exactly and Alejandro rib Executive producers for
i Heeart Media are Connel Burn and just Sell Bounces.
For more podcasts from My Heart, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(16:08):
favorite shows. H