The Kingston-Queens Connection
Reggae's next big ting---a street-smart offspring called dancehall---is born of the islands, was raised out in Brooklyn, and is going global. At the center of it all is VP Records, a family-owned business in the heart of Jamaica---Jamaica, Queens.
by Peter Rubin

Not much about the world's most important reggae label conforms to expectations: VP Records' headquarters is not a shining palace festooned in black, gold and green but a low-slung warehouse butt-up against a McDonald's on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, New York. Only a plain banner announces its presence: MILES AHEAD IN CARIBBEAN music. And while VP's matriarch, a small, bespectacled woman known as Miss Pat, is in many ways exactly what you'd expect, she's also exactly what you wouldn't, because despite the mellifluous East Kingston accent and the ebullient love for the music of her country, Patricia Chin is Chinese.

The Chins were like any other middle-class family in the multihued Kingston suburbs, only their family business, a secondhand record shop started by Miss Pat and her husband, Vincent (the V and P in VP Records), is today the largest independent distributor of reggae music on Jah's green earth: VP releases sixty albums annually and over the years has been Caribbean music's most consistent champion, all while nurturing reggae's dynamic next wave--dancehall, a subgenre now erupting in the urban mainstream and luring the major labels to Jamaica Avenue, checkbooks in hand.

Just a few miles west, in the midtown Manhattan office of Atlantic Records, VP's prize dancehall artist, Scan Paul, is sitting pretty. His single "Gimme the Light" dominated car speakers and clubs in Caribbean neighborhoods all summer, made the leap into the mainstream and spent fall in heavy rotation on BET and MTV and on Billboard's Top 10 All while going to number one in Jamaica. For reggae--real dancehall reggae, not the quasi-patois stylings made famous by Shaggy--this means he has won over the streets as well as the malls. In September, Atlantic Records beat out Virgin and Universal by signing Sean Paul to an eight-record deal and striking a long-term partnership with VP that could pipe dancehall to all corners of america. "VP is a perfect stepping-stone," says Paul. "We need them to put our albums out, but they can't always support us with the exposure that dancehall needs."

VP has provided a boost for reggae crossovers like Beenie Man (currently in a multirecord deal with Virgin) and is now ready to deliver all the dancehall Atlantic Records can handle: There's T.O.K., a vocal quartet who sing doo-wop harmonies and chant rapid-fire patois with equal aplomb; Warrior King, a young crooner who could be conscious reggae's next big thing; Lady Saw, Jamaica's top-ranking female, infamous for her sexually charged lyrics; and the buzz-saw-voiced veteran Buju Banton, heir apparent to the Marley legacy. They're all on the cusp of American stardom, thanks to a jukebox repairman named Vincent Chin.

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Before the Maytals released "Do the Reggay" in 1968 and coined a term for a new genre, and decades before the ubiquitous dorm-room Bob Marley marathons, Jamaican music revolved around sound systems: mobile PA setups with bone-rattling speakers that would take over a lawn and play the newest R&B tunes at all-night parties. Miss Pat was a young nurse in the late '50s. "It was the thing to do," she remembers. "You'd go to the dances and listen to all the different DJs. It's always a competition, which is what makes the music so nice: Which sound had the most crowd?"

Currency was key, and so was exclusivity; selectors (disc jockeys) like Tom the Great Sebastian, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd and Duke Reid would scour music outlets in search of the newest 45S from the States. Mail-order outfits like Randy's in Tennessee did a brisk business among the jukebox owners, who hustled to stock records once a selector had made them popular. Vincent Chin was working for one such jukebox owner, replacing old 45s when a new tune hit the charts and keeping the discard pile for himself. Soon he realized he was sitting on valuable inventory, and in 1959 he opened Randy's Record Shop, boldly borrowing the name of his favorite mail-order company. "We started out selling jukebox rejects," says Miss Pat, laughing. "We didn't know there was such a demand for old records!" After two years, that demand forced the Chins into a larger store in downtown Kingston, where they added new releases to the old and built a recording studio upstairs.

Visionary as it seems today, opening a studio was just a savvy business decision for a Kingston entrepreneur, as anyone with enough money could capitalize on Jamaica's fertile music scene. When Randy (as Vincent would come to be known) opened Studio 17 in 1969 it was only the fifth bookable studio in the country and was mobbed by producers and artists looking to record, VP's day-to-day operations were the stuff of reggae history: a young Lee "Scratch' Perry recording a younger Bob Marley; singers Dennis Brown and Gregory Isaacs, Burning Spear laying down the classic Marcus Garvey album. Downstairs in the shop, Miss Pat oversaw a salon of sorts, with musicians coming and idling for hours. As Randy's eldest son, Clive, who produced a great deal of the studio's output, once told reggae historian Noel Hawks, "Randy's was like the Jamaican Motown. If your tune's not distributed by Randy's, it ain't going nowhere!"

The 1970S were a fruitful time for reg- gae (and for Randy's), but Jamaica's political climate was degenerating from postcolonial unease into downright upheaval. Michael Manley, the prime minister, had a Socialist agenda that made much of the island's comfortably capitalist middle class, including the Chins, uncomfortable enough to flee. in 1979 Randy and Pat and their sons, Chris and Vincent junior--who's also known as Randy--set up shop in Jamaica, a Queens neighborhood that was rapidly filling up with the city's sizable West In- dian community.

But by the time the Chins got the label up and running again, most Americans had already had their fill of "Buffalo Soldier," and the family struggled to sell reggae in a post-Marley world. Reggae was beginning to change, shifting from the lush acoustics and praise-jah spirituality of '70s roots music to the bottom-heavy bass of a stripped- down, chanting style coming to be known as dancehall.

Dancehall was directly related to the evolving sound-system culture, which highlighted the vocal skill of DJs who would rhyme over instrumental versions of hit records played by the selector. Early dancehall relied less on lilting harmonies and Rastafarian consciousness than on wit and bare-bones charisma. Popular as dancehall was with Jamaican audiences, DJs like Yellowman and Josey Wales remained well under the American radar. So VP found a retail niche in cities with Caribbean-immigrant strongholds--New York, Miami, Washington, Boston, Toronto--and dancehall continued to grow. In the '80s, the digital age allowed producers to forgo live musicians and program a digital rhythm, or 11 "riddim," to be recycled endlessly with different vocalists or, as they're known in dancehall, DJs.

Every year VP releases more than twenty-five "one riddim" albums-compilations of different artists voicing over the same rhythm. Five to ten riddims are released every week, and with each riddim spawning five to twenty singles Jamaica is awash in music. VP wades through the glut with seasoned precision, keeping an eye on potential opportunities. It also releases a number of anthologies--two of which, Strictly the Best and Reggae Gold, are among any given year's best-selling reggae albums--and provides a home for legends like Beres Hammond and Freddie McGregor.

"VP is the Microsoft of reggae," a publicist at the label says, laughing. "Artists want to work with us to get their music out, but they hate us because we're the biggest." VP is one of a few Caribbean record companies with global reach, and it enjoys a status at the top of a very small heap. Artists may see VP as evil, but if it is, it may be a necessary evil: Now, more than ever, the label's prominence offers reggae artists access to a world alive with promise: the American hip-hop market.

In Caribbean neighborhoods, as with any immigrant population walking a fine line between adaptation and assimilation, the younger generation skews decidedly toward the latter. So in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brooklyn's Flatbush, home to many of New York's half-million West Indians, reggae and hip-hop coexist in a cross-cultural gumbo, their individual flavors commingling in the streets. Jamaican kids bump hip-hop from their trucks while Yankee teens mimic rude- boy patois. Meanwhile, in Jamaica, American cable TV beams the bling-bling imagery of Jay-Z and the Cash Money Millionaires twenty-four hours a day, conveniently packaged for emulation.

The creative symbiosis seems perma- nent. Rappers, particularly those with island roots, have long shown love for dancehall, and Sean Paul--outfitted in hip-hop's standard-issue jeans and gray Timberlands--is slated to work with pop princesses Mya and Pink. This is all part of the plan. "Over the years, hip- hop artists have used Jamaican slang," Sean Paul says. "What I'm doing is using some terms I've gotten from hip-hop. I'm speakin' it in patois, but the words are familiar to hip-hop kids." Familiar enough that the chorus to "Gimme the Light" is a party chant straight out of Nellyville: Jus' gimme the light and pass the 'dro / Buss anodda bokkle of Mo / Gyal dem inna mi sight and I got to know / Which one is gonna catch my flow? Translation: "Pass the weed and pop the Moet, because I'm 'bout to git it on." It's dancehall with a hip-hop sensibility--a party-themed alloy that helped propel his latest CD, Dutty Rock, to hot-button status.

Though the hip-hop nation's zeal for dancehall promises growth for VP, purists fear their beloved genre will capitulate to the shallow glamour of rap's platinum- coated grasp-and they're wary of crossover sounds. "People forget their own identity," says Craigy T of T.O.K. "The roots of hardcore reggae will be lost. Some of the stuff coming out now is just regurgitation."

The question is whether crossover exposure and pure dancehall can coexist. Sean Paul insists they can. "Right now, 'Gimme the Light' is number one there [in Jamaica] because it don't feature R&B production or hip-hop artists. It's just straight dancehall." As long as reggae artists keep that in mind, America could be vibing to a whole new beat. And VP Records is more than ready. Sitting in his office, Chris Chin looks forward to the next step. "As the barriers come down," he says, "I think we're well positioned for when reggae and dancehall become more widely accepted in America." When. Like it's a foregone conclusion. Because, as they say, big tings a gwaan.