Mixpak and the Brooklyn-Kingston Connection
March 2017
Dancehall sounds are more popular than ever in mainstream pop, but very few songs feature Jamaican artists. Mixpak, an independent label from New York, has the potential to interrupt this pattern.
Dre Skull, the 37-year-old founder of Mixpak records, had never been to Jamaica when he made his first track for the reggae-dancehall star Vybz Kartel. For several years, he had been building a collection of dancehall beats on his hard-drive, while he worked as DJ and a performance artist in Brooklyn, but hadn’t found an outlet for many of them. By late 2008, though, Dre (whose real name is Andrew Hershey) was ready to share his work. He began reaching out to Jamaican vocalists, and through a series of connections, managed to contact someone in Kartel’s camp. “It came about entirely via the internet,” he said of the process.
At the time, Kartel, a lanky, tattooed dancehall DJ from the rough town of Portmore, was on the way to becoming Jamaica’s most popular musician. So when Dre Skull, finally received Kartel’s vocal track for the song that would become “Yuh Love” in his inbox several months later, he knew he was pretty lucky.
“Yuh Love,” which came out in August of 2009, was a success for both Dre Skull and Kartel. It stood out from the rest of Kartel’s discography, Dre Skull said, because unlike many popular dancehall tracks, it didn’t include any overtly sexual lyrics. “It’s one of his only pure romantic songs, and that helped set it apart,” he said. “To this day it’s a common Jamaican wedding song, because it has a very sweet sentiment.”
“Me seh you are di love of my life, gyal mi a pre’ yuh fi be my wife,” Kartel croons gently over Dre Skull’s beat on the track, which blends a standard dancehall 3-3-2 rhythm with electronic dance music-influenced instrumentals. “Yuh Love” climbed the charts in Jamaica, and more importantly, sparked an ongoing working relationship between Dre Skull and Kartel. Despite the timing, Dre and Kartel’s collaborative approach had more in common with the Jamaican-American crossover hits of the late 90s, than with the silent co-opting of Jamaican sounds on contemporary pop radio.
Before he started Mixpak in 2009, Dre Skull, who was then a recent transplant from Cleveland via Philadelphia, was better known for making house-influenced electronic music than for anything related to dancehall. His first releases, on Vicious Records, feature a blend of hip-hop, house and techno. Working with Kartel influenced his and Mixpak’s trajectory profoundly.
Though far from the first, Mixpak is now the main independent studio and label in New York featuring Jamaican artists. Their roster includes not only Vybz Kartel, but his protégé, Popcaan, and frequent collaborator Spice.
Dancehall and its musical relatives have crossed in and out of the mainstream at multiple points over the last three decades. Its danceable polyrhythms and catchy melodies make it a natural fit with other styles, including hip-hop, rhythm & blues and electronic dance music.
At the moment, Jamaican sounds are more present in mainstream pop than they have been in over a decade--three out of Billboard’s top five songs of 2016 featured dancehall drum patterns. But very few of these popular tracks actually feature Jamaican vocalists, and some don’t even acknowledge their Jamaican influences. Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” is the most frequently referenced example.
“It is a sore point when people like Drake or Bieber or other artists come and do dancehall-oriented music but don’t credit where dancehall came from,” Jamaican singer Sean Paul told The Guardian last year. In this climate, Mixpak may play an increasingly important role in 2017, or at least take on a new level of responsibility. “I’m rooting obviously for Jamaican artists to be sharing some of the success,” said Dre Skull.
The contemporary form of dancehall, roots reggae’s fast-paced, electronic sibling, emerged in Jamaica between the late 1970s and mid 1980s, as vocalists known as “deejays” began to “toast” (improvise lyrics and melodies) over new electronic rhythms. Its origins can be traced back through a long history of DIY dance party culture in the country, and the introduction of the sound system in the mid 20th century.
Dre Skull travelled to Jamaica in 2010, a few months after “Yuh Love” came out. He had a collection of tracks ready and planned to record songs with a few different artists, including Kartel. In what now seems like a lucky turn of events, his plans with every artist besides Kartel fell through. Dre Skull and Kartel, the white, bearded Brooklynite, and the Portmore-raised gangster, ended up recording all the songs Dre had brought over together, beginning what would become the album Kingston Story.
The trip, which was the first of many, was life changing for Dre Skull. Through making dancehall rhythms, he already understood the genre from a technical perspective. But there was something transcendent about experiencing the music in its original environment--dances, packed with sweaty bodies, the floor vibrating with the power of a booming soundsystem, an infectious beat propelling each dancer’s next movement. “It was eye opening,” he said, “seeing how prevalent and important the music was, how much it was a part of the fabric of every day life.”
Working with Kartel in the studio, Dre Skull observed new and different approaches to recording. Kartel, he said, would rarely take more than two hours to record a song “He just looks for the melody and gets it extremely quickly.” At these sessions he also made connections with a number of engineers, producers, and artists, including a young vocalist and member of Kartel’s crew named Popcaan. “He came through with a couple of people who I still know to this day and they were just having fun, drinking, learning the song that we’d just recorded,” Dre Skull said of their first studio encounter. “They rewound the song on the keyboard for and hour until they had all the lyrics and were just singing it.” Popcaan is now one of the biggest artists on Mixpak’s roster, and is also affiliated with Drake and his label OVO.
“Kingston Story” was released in June of 2011, and was the first of Kartel’s albums to reach the US reggae charts, peaking at number 7. In contrast with most popular dancehall albums, which pool together previously released singles, “Kingston Story” is a cohesive body of work, with peaks and valleys (including a soft, piano interlude).
On certain tracks, Dre Skull’s production taps into the style of many contemporary Jamaican producers. On others, though, his beats sound more like hip-hop or R&B than dancehall. He applied a similar genre-blending approach several years later as executive producer of Popcaan’s “Where We Come From”, which features the production work of American electronic musician Dubbel Dutch as well as Jamaican producers Anju Blaxx, Jamie YVP and Adde Instrumentals.
This hybrid sound has become Dre Skull’s (and arguably Mixpak’s) signature. “He draws on a musical palate that is very informed by contemporary electronic dance music, but stylistically its always really grounded in dancehall,” said Caribbean-focused ethnomusicologist, Wayne Marshall, who teaches at the Berklee College of Music. Regardless of whether this blended sound is good or bad, it certainly had crossover appeal. Kingston Story received more coverage in the American press than any of Kartel’s previous albums.
Shortly after “Kingston Story” was released, though, Kartel was arrested and charged with murder for his alleged involvement in the death of Jamaican music promoter, Barrington Burton. Despite several previous arrests, it was his first crinimal charge. According to reports, Burton had been shot on July 11, 2011, while standing on a street corner in Portmore, Jamaica. Police alleged that the gunman was one of Kartel’s associates and that Kartel had ordered the killing. “Obviously I was shocked,” Dre Skull said in an interview with the Redbull music Academy in May 2013. “Working with him, it was the last thing I could possibly expect.”
Kartel was later acquitted of Burton’s murder, after two of the prosecution’s witnesses failed to appear in court, but he remained in jail for his connection with the death of another associate, Clive “Lizard” Williams. Williams was allegedly beaten to death Kartel’s house in August 2011 over two missing guns. While Williams’ body was never recovered, police testified that they had found text messages on Kartel’s phone saying that Williams’ remains were “mince meat”. After a 65-day trial, Kartel was finally convicted, and sentenced to life in prison on March 27, 2014.
A video uploaded to YouTube days before the verdict was announced showed crowds of fans protesting outside the Kingston Supreme Courte chanting “Free World Boss,” (Kartel’s nickname). Three years later, this fierce loyalty amongst his Jamaican fan base has not died down. Even behind bars, Kartel remains Jamaica’s biggest dancehall star. He has won “Favorite Dancehall Artist” at Jamaica’s Youth View Awards every year since his arrest, including in 2017.
Dre Skull still posts Instagram pictures on of he and Kartel, from those first recording usually in honor of Kartel’s birthday on January 7. He never fails to acknowledge Kartel’s impact on his career. But unless probed, he doesn’t talk a whole lot about his friend’s incarceration.
On a rainy afternoon in late December, Dre Skull was holed up at Mixpak headquarters in a repurposed warehouse building in Greenpoint Brooklyn, perched behind the mixing board, sipping a cup of tea. Vinyl pressings of both Vybz Kartel’s “Kingston Story” and Popcaan’s “Where We Come From” are displayed prominently.
With his dark beard, hat, flannel shirt, and Timberland hiking-boots, he looked every bit the hip, north Brooklyn resident. He has a quiet, gentle manner about him. He doesn’t seem shy, but speaks in a slow, measured way, that suggests that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his music and the issues surrounding it. “He lives in the studio, that man,” said his former housemate, and Mixpak artist, Jubilee, on a recent podcast.
He was working on a project for an up and coming Ghanaian musician called Mr. Eazi. While Mixpak’s core is rooted in Jamaican sounds, their roster features artists from a around the world. A few days before, he had released a track with the Nigerian musician, Wizkid, who frequently uses dancehall-like drum patterns, exemplifying the increasing overlaps between dancehall and afrobeat. “Jamaican artists get a lot of airplay on the radio in Nigeria, Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa,” Dre Skull said. “There’s definitely a cross-pollination of sorts.”
Digital music distribution has also blurred cultural and genre lines. “We are still not totally understanding how the internet has exploded everything,” he said. The flow of information, and part of that being cultural, is just reaching further and further with less friction.” In mid 2016 report, Nielsen Music found that while album sales decreased, streaming increased by almost 60 percent. Conforming to this trend, most of Mixpak’s business happens online. All Mixpak releases are available for purchase in MP3 format on their website and iTunes, and available to play on major streaming services. For certain albums, they also release limited quantities of vinyl records and CDs.
This allows the company to save on production costs and cut out middlemen. If your product is physical, Dre Skull said, you rely on “working with certain record stores and certain distributors.” Mixpak also taps into YouTube as a source of revenue. As “content partners” with the site, they make a small amount of money every time one of their songs plays. As some of their videos rack up hundreds of thousands, and millions of views, this income adds up. The video for Vybz Kartel’s “Go Go Wine” now has almost 27 million views, and Popcaan’s “Everything Nice,” has over 20 million.
Their recording process, too, still relies heavily on the Internet. “I definitely prefer to be with an artist, just to weigh in and talk it through, but as a practical thing it doesn’t happen that way all the time,” Dre Skull said.
For obvious reasons, Kartel cannot record live in studio, and Popcaan is not allowed into the United States at the moment. Having to record remotely can often be a blessing in disguise, though, he said, because it gives the artist a chance to really think about the song before laying down their vocals. “Maybe they’ve soaked up the track for a week, lived with it, drove around in a car with it.”
The idea of a New York-based studio that records both Jamaican and American artists, and produces hybrid Jamaican-American sounds, is not new. Through the 1980s and 90s, there were many studios in the city that did just this. Arguably the most important of these was HC&F studios in Freeport, Long Island.
Beginning the early 20th century, New York experienced several waves of Jamaican immigration. The largest followed Jamaican independence in 1962, and continued in the 1970s and the 1980s following periods of political and economic unrest on the island. Between 1971 and 2004, slightly more than half a million Jamaicans entered the country. Almost half came to New York.
One of these immigrants was a young, bespectacled, studio engineer and producer named Philip Smart. After several years working at King Tubby’s legendary studio in Kingston, he settled in Freeport, Long Island and founded his own recording studio, HC&F in 1982. The name, which stood for “Herbert Chin & Family,” was an homage to his father-in-law, the studio’s primary investor. He also founded a record small label that operated out of the building, called “Tan-Yah”.
In Kingston, Smart had been a lover of American music as well as reggae and Dub. As a teenager, he collected soul music, and for a while, he hosted an American music program on Jamaican radio. In the US, his first studio experience was an engineering course at Electric Lady Studios. This cross-cultural background gave Smart an edge when it came to picking hits.
HC&F’s sound, while infused with “international” features, maintained an authentic, Jamaican quality. “You had to get it as close to Jamaica as possible otherwise people won’t work here,” Smart said in an interview with the reggae blog Boomshots in 2013. Quickly, it became the number one studio in the country for Jamaican artists and producers to record. Influential reggae tracks “Murderer” by Barrington Levy and “100 Weight of Collie Weed” by Carlton Livingston were recorded there in the studio’s early years.
As Jamaican popular music changed to incorporate electronic recording and faster rhythms in the form of dancehall, Smart’s studio evolved too, and became a central destination for dancehall artists to record. In the 1990s, the decade’s biggest Jamaican dancehall stars Shabba Ranks and Super Cat laid tracks down there, and Brooklyn based artists Red Fox and Screechy Dan began to develop their own New York dancehall sound.
The studio also evolved to incorporate another new genre of music–hip-hop. Sparked by a Jamaican immigrant named Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc), hip-hop had become the most popular form of urban music in New York by the early 90s, and Smart saw the potential for integrating its sounds with dancehall. Like hip-hop, dancehall was a rough, soundsystem-based, street-level genre, and was beginning to be incorporated into tracks by the Bronx based rap group Boogie Down Productions. HC& F’s most concerted efforts to appeal to the hip-hop industry came in the form of Collaborations between the rapper Heavy D and Super Cat, along with the rap-dancehall hybrid Louie Rankin.
HC&F’s biggest pop crossover, though, was Shaggy. Shaggy, who is the only other Jamaican artist besides Bob Marley to have a diamond album (selling over 10 million copies), recorded his first five albums at HC&F with Smart. His first single, “Mampie” was even released on Smart’s Tan-Yah label. With the help of producers Sting International and Robert Livingston, Shaggy developed a completely hybrid sound while recording at HC&F, drawing on pop, R&B, hip-hop, reggae, dancehall and ska.
In addition to engineering at HC&F, between 1979-2004, Smart also hosted a radio show on WNYU called “Get Smart”. He would play Jamaican artists alongside New York-based ones in an effort to increase New York’s legitimacy as a home for Jamaican music. “I’d blend them together so people didn’t know which one was from New York and which one was from Jamaica,” he told Boomshots in 2013. “Get Smart,” along with shows by Dahved Levy on KISS fm, and Bobby Konders on WBLS (and later Hot 97), helped to foster the careers of a number of New York based dancehall artists and production houses.
During this time, New York radio was the gateway to the rest of the country for Jamaican artists. “A Jamaican record that would start to get play on New York radio and then it would become a national hit,” says Wayne Marshall of the New York radio’s influence at the time.
One of New York’s strongest proponents of this crossover was the DJ Bobby Konders. Konders, who calls Smart one of his “mentors”, has hosted the reggae show on hip-hop station Hot 97 for over twenty years. The show, called “Fire Sundays” (previously called “On The Reggae Tip”) introduced hip-hop listeners in the tri-state area to the newest reggae, dancehall and hybrid tracks.
“I used to have to wait until Sunday night and turn on the radio to get to hear two hours of reggae, and then we would all go crazy trying to find the records we’d heard, ” said Max Glazer, who is one half of the New York dancehall label and soundsystem Federation Sound.
Konders came to New York’s Jamaican music scene, like Dre Skull, as somewhat of an outsider. A long haired white kid with a beard and glasses, he moved to Brooklyn from his hometown in Eastern Pennsylvania in the mid 80s to pursue a DJ career and an internship at the urban radio station WBLS. At the station, he got a chance to DJ and mix, and eventually got his own show on Saturday nights.
Playing under the name “Bobby Konders and Massive Sounds,” the first genre of music that Konders played was House, a form of electronic dance music that dominated New York and Chicago club scenes in the late 80s and early 90s. As soon as he moved to Brooklyn, though, his tastes could not help but be influenced by Jamaican sounds. Konders would play house music in cocaine-fuelled Manhattan nightclubs some nights of the week, and spend the rest at Jamaican dances in Brooklyn. His first release, The Poem, reflects these competing interests, opening with a poem by the Rastafari dub-poet Mutabaruka, before launching into seven minutes of deep house.
By the early 90s, he was deeply immersed in the New York reggae and dancehall scenes, and in 1991, he founded his own label and soundsystem Massive B. Konders also made explicit efforts to blend dancehall with hip hop in his own creative endeavors. With the help of a young producer named Salaam Remi, Konders took the vocal tracks from Supercat’s “Ghetto Red Hot” and “Don Dada” (recorded at HC&F), and remixed them onto bass-heavy, hip-hop beats.
“I thought, basically by mixing the two genres, that it might explode dancehall music into a new community of people who weren’t solely into in reggae or dancehall culture,” Konders said, now in his early 50s.
His prediction was right. These remixes, along with the other fusion tracks, anticipated a huge wave of mainstream dancehall inflected hip-hop, and hip-hop inflected dancehall. By the late 1990s, “You have a generation of producers who are savvy about making dancehall that’s very much informed by contemporary hip-hop and R&B to some extent pop and electronic dance music,” said Wayne Marshall. “And it turns out those records end up breaking in the U.S. in ways that Jamaican records hadn’t in a long time.”
Jamaican sounds, styles and words became completely integrated into New York’s hip-hop language. “We got influenced by them and then they got influenced by us,” says the hip-hop DJ, Cipha Sounds, who worked at Hot 97 for 17 years, beginning in the mid 90s. “I took what I was seeing a lot of dancehall DJs do, the style of DJ-ing, and I applied it to what I was doing.”
For many young Americans outside of the country’s Caribbean communities, hearing Jamaican voices on popular hip-hop provided an easy window into reggae and dancehall – genres they may not have previously engaged with. “Being a fan of rap music is really where it started for me,” Dre Skull said. “Producers and people I like were sampling older Jamaican music.”
By the early 2000s, dozens of Jamaican artists were signed to major label deals, and crossing over into global pop markets. In 2001, Shaggy’s fifth album, “Hot Shot,” reached number one on the charts in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and number two in Australia. Sean Paul’s second album “Dutty Rock,” also reached the top ten in the charts in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Europe in 2002.
Within a few years, though, this mainstream wave passed. The deals dried up, and in America, for a while, dancehall resumed its place as a subculture rooted in the East Coast’s Jamaican enclaves. In New York it continued to thrive in Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens clubs, and on the radio. While Smart, who died in 2014, stopped broadcasting Get Smart in 2004, Konders and his partner Jabba continue to play reggae and dancehall every Sunday night on Hot 97, and host a weekly dance at “The Buzz Nightclub” in Crown Heights.
Mixpak is in an interesting position in New York’s musical landscape. It has ties to the local reggae-dancehall scene and its history. Hershey has played at parties with many of Brooklyn’s most important DJs, including the new generation of the legendary King Addies soundsystem. But they are not truly a part of it in the way that someone like Konders and Massive B has become. They are just as, if not more, embraced New York’s electronic and indie music scenes. Mixpak shows are more likely to take place in a DIY venue in Bushwick or a bar in Williamsburg, than in a ballroom or Caribbean club in Flatbush.
Its current roster, too, crosses scenes and cultures. As well as a core group of Jamaican artists Mixpak also features the Japanese punk band, Hard Nips, London based electronic musician Murlo and the rapper Lil Scrappy. “I think for some Mixpak has always been slightly confusing,” said Hershey. “We want to challenge people slightly, so everything we do as a label kind of has some of that tension.” On one hand, this might allow them to introduce Jamaican artists to new audiences, but they could also risk alienating the communities whose culture they draw on.
When Dre Skull and Bobby Konders met for the first time in November 2015, this tension regarding Mixpak’s place in the culture, and what they represent, was highlighted. Dre Skull was interviewing Konders for Mixpak’s monthly digital radio show, on RBMA radio. He spoke, as he usually does, softly and carefully. Konders, with years in the game, was loud and enthusiastic, ready to get whoever was on the other side of the speaker excited. “Free up!” he told Dre Skull, joking with a light patois inflection. The two voices, side by side, could not be more different.
With the help of Dre Skull’s co-host, Jubilee, the three covered the key turning points in Konders’ career. As he described his move to New York, the transition from Club DJ to running a reggae/dancehall label, and producing genre-bending tracks, it seemed impossible not to draw parallels between the two. But Konders made sure to highlight small differences. “My studio is not a pretty studio like yours,” he digs at one point. “You the Ivy League guy,” he said to Dre Skull.
Since then, though, Konders has been very giving with his advice to Hershey. “He tells me about a different era of running a label, ” he says. “He’s still on the radio and still playing new artists. He’s still an important part of the fabric of dancehall in New York.” The two also headlined a show at the Natural History Museum last November. “When it ended, he dragged me on stage,” Hershey said. “We were palancing, and and then the whole museum was palancing,” (a party dance inspired by a 2010 Trinidadian hit with the same name).
When Mixpak won the Red Bull Culture Clash competition in June 2016, though, there was little confusion over what their role was. They were there, in London’s 20,000 Capacity 02 Arena, to represent Jamaican dancehall.
The event, which takes place every year in a different location, brings together four teams of electronic musicians from different genres to compete against each other in a modern, international incarnation of a British-Jamaican Sound Clash. The other teams at the 2016 event represented UK Grime, Garage, US Hip Hop. Over four rounds, each team plays a selection of exclusive tracks, known as dubplates, and brings out live performers. The winner is determined by the crowd’s reaction, and has been British every year apart from 2012, when the competition was held in New York.
Mixpak was late to join the lineup, having been asked only three weeks before to participate and had to scramble to put together a team. “We had to call in every favor, call every artist we know,” said Dre Skull. “We were by far the underdogs.”
Despite the quick turnaround, they managed to get dub plates from artists who span the Jamaican diaspora, including the British R&B group Soul II Soul, Chaka Demus & Pliers (of “Murder She Wrote” fame) and Shaggy. Drake even provided an exclusive version of his dancehall-inspired track “One Dance” for the team. As an air horn blasted and their victory was announced, Dre Skull, who had spent the majority of the competition behind his laptop, ran out and danced wildly across the stage, surrounded by Mixpak’s winning team of Jamaican musicians.
Dancehall’s current place in mainstream pop remains a contentious issue. Some see its often-unacknowledged influence as hopeless example of appropriation; others see it as potential opening for Jamaican musicians. Sean Paul, for instance, has just signed his first major label deal in several years.
“The rougher stuff is always at the front lines, on the street level,” said Max Glazer. It’s not realistic to think that the street level innovators will break through to the mainstream without some level of pop translation, he said. “The message doesn’t get there by a front line soldier.” But that doesn’t mean that Jamaican musicians can’t break through at all. “The seeds of it are hearing Assassin’s voice on Kanye and Kendrick album, hearing Beenie Man’s voice on Drake’s album, and Supa Dups and Steve Mcgregor being involved in making those records,” he said.
Dre Skull, too, is hopeful. “I think a lot of artists have songs that sound very ready,” he said. “I see all the signs. I think everyone kinda is hoping and waiting for the right situation to emerge.” And who knows, it might even be another Vybz Kartel track that makes the jump. Kartel has now been in jail for over five years, and he won’t be eligible for parole for another 32. But through some channels that remain mysterious, he continues to release music. In 2016, he released over 50 new songs.