The 9 best Daggering tracks of all time
Daggering
A dance that took over a stretch of dancehall and then got that stretch banned. From 2006 the riddims ran fast and skeletal, the lyric described the dance instead of boasting around it, and in February 2009 Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission outlawed the whole subject on air.
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Vybz Kartel & Spice / Romping Shop
Built on Ne-Yo's Miss Independent without asking, then recalled by EMI's lawyers and re-cut over a riddim of its own. In the weeks between the two versions a schoolteacher's newspaper column reached the Broadcasting Commission, and the February 2009 ban followed. The best record here, and the one that ended the run.
Major Lazer / Pon de Floor
Diplo and Switch's producer's-eye view, with Vybz Kartel on top and Eric Wareheim's video doing the exporting — a suburban cartoon of daggering that travelled further than any Jamaican footage of it. Two years later Beyoncé built Run the World on the same track.
Spice / So Mi Like It
Five years on, the woman from Romping Shop returns with the subject in her own hands. Lighter riddim, sharper writing, and a chorus that argues rather than describes. It is the answer record the era never got while it was still allowed on the radio.
Aidonia / Hundred Stab
Cut on the Sky Daggering riddim, which tells you how fast the dance had become a product with rhythm tracks named after it. Aidonia's delivery is the quickest on this list and the least interested in charm.
Mavado / Squeeze Breast
A year before anyone used the word, and the apparatus is already assembled: the flat instruction, the sung hook doing what a chorus used to do, the riddim cut back to a kick and a shape. Mavado sounds mournful about it, which nobody else managed.
Busy Signal / Up in Her Belly
The finest technician of his generation spending three minutes proving it on material that offers him nothing. Worth hearing for the phrasing; the writing is the weakest thing on this list.
PWFT / All Daygering
The one record here that treats the dance as a discipline rather than a boast — ten years in training, a signature trick, hundred hundred hours like a footballer drill. It names Corsica Studios rather than anywhere in Kingston, and it makes the injury folklore the 2009 panic called scandal into the badge it always was on the floor.