As for the two “Dem Bow” recordings — I’ve never heard the song on the Poco Man Jam riddim. Do you have a copy of that? To my ears, the Poco Man Jam riddim, though featuring a similar drum pattern and produced around the same time, is distinct from the backing to “Dem Bow,” and both have been used in reggaeton productions (as has Pounder, which is basically a version of Dem Bow by a Panamanian and a Jamaican — both based in New York — and round and round we go). The Poco Man riff crops up, ironically, in the first track on this mini-mix, “Son Bow (instrumental),” which is really just a hodge-podge of early 90s dancehall riddims (not to mention a Missy Elliott sample), which just shows again how often the two (three?) are conflated.

shabba ranks dembow is on 2 riddims the poco man jam which is the version everyone recognizes and the actual “dembow” riddim

eight years ago i started djing reggae, dub, ska but roots never interested me. i was influenced by uk punky reggae scene very much before i’ve found the compilation fuerza! (manu chao, sergent garcia, macaco, amparanoia…) and it was the best thing i’ve heard until then! i still dj this music and i collected a lot in eight years.
latin music fascinates me because it has so many styles and it evolves! especially mestizo music – every style is welcome! endless possibilities!!
anyway, i’ve listened to some dancehall and i still like to dance to it but when i heard reggaeton it was more powerful! i can’t explain but dembow beat does something for me :) i still remember the moment i’ve heard gasolina, wow, and that second part of the song was so dangerous!! later i’ve started wondering where are the women in reggaeton and found many of them (actually first i was wondering who was that woman (glory) singing with daddy yankee – and why wasn’t she mentioned?!). i kinda feel like a bandolera :)
now it is a nice hobby to me. i dj mostly in ljubljana, slovenija (european union) because there are people from all over the world who love reggaeton. in croatia (not in european union) the situation with reggaeton is moving a bit slower but i’m patient ;) i learned you cannot force culturological things, everything in its time :)

here is a little mix for you:
http://soundcloud.com/luna-morado/lunatica-dembow-in-the-mix-shortcut
i hope you’ll like it!

take care & keep up the good work!

lunatica ~ con el flow dembow*

ps. once again, thanx for your time and your comment on my mix!

it’s an interesting track! thanks for sharing. you’ve definitely crammed your share of dembow beats into that one. it’s often quite dense! sometimes i want a little more variation in the drum sounds, but i like that the track’s form changes shape over the duration.

i’m very curious to hear more about how you got into reggaeton in croatia!

thx,
w

i truly respect what you do!
i’m addicted to dembow and listen to reggaeton every day! (i don’t like this new electro sound of reggaeton, but more of this raw dembow sound) :)

i wanted to ask you for 5 minutes of your time and your opinion on a dembow remix i made of macaco’s song “gacho el peleon”. something like reggaeton mestizo.
it is because i consider you to be an expert on this subject and it would mean a lot to me! :)

here is the link: http://soundcloud.com/luna-morado/gacho-peleon-lunatica-dembow-remix

there are some things i still have to fix but this is it for now.

thank you very much in advance!
luna

I’m quite with you, by the way, on the NY melting pot being more responsible for “Tu Pun Pun,” in a sense, than the JA-Panama connection per se. I basically make that point in my essay in the reggaeton book, where I really try to make a case for NYC’s centrality in that story. Interesting anecdote, btw, about “reggae tone”! Hadn’t heard that one.

He gave me a bit of the story about their inspiration for the riddim, but I’m going to save that for when we can have a more detailed discussion.

What was as interesting was that he said there was a guy who used to work at the VP retail store in Queens, who used to give copies of the latest popular dancehall instrumentals to El General, I’m assuming this would be late 80s and it was before EG was recording. Someone (Karl Miller I assume) heard him and decided to record him, thus “El Pun Tun” from the Little Lenny track and so on. EG was living in New York at this time from what I understand, so although people always tout the Panama Jamaica connection, I think it was more a case of the great New York melting pot connection.

Clevie also said that when someone asked EG about his music he said it had a “reggae tone”, implying that this was the etymology of the term “reggaeton”

Like I said, we only spoke for a bit, but we did decide that we should sit down and actually talk about these things on video so that they can be preserved, since one more stalwart has left us – believe me Steely’s knowledge of music was encyclopedic, and he had a photographic memory, it is a tragedy that that is lost to the world now.

Second, I’m gone to ask Clevie about the story behind Dem Bow and the Poco riddims (conveniently we’re having dinner this evening).

I’m a bit surprised that no one seems to have asked him or Steely (who unfortunately passed away two weeks ago, RIP) about this, nor about some of the issues discussed in “The riddim method” paper, since they were both the writers and musicians on the vast majority of dancehall riddims from 1985 until the late 90s, and Steely in particular was the defacto producer in the actual sessions, regardless of who was funding the session. He could have also spoken with great authority on the pre-1985 era, since as keyboard player for the Radics he was instrumental in much of the late 70s and early 80s output from Channel One and Henry Junjo Lawes.

Let me not, however, take away from this fabulous effort overall.

* a point of correction to something written above – the “Poco” riddim, unlike “Dem Bow”, was a Steely & Clevie production, not a Bobby Digital production.