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The digital riddims that ran the dance
Probable
When producers like Steely and Clevie, Dave Kelly, Tony Kelly and Don Corleon began building rhythms on drum machines and keyboards, a handful of their tracks came to run entire dancehall seasons.
Poco Man Jam, Martial Arts, Buy Out, the 85 Riddim and Summertime each turned into season-defining juggling sets, with dozens of artists queuing to voice the same digital rhythm.
One rhythm, one season
Where a Studio One riddim might spend decades accumulating versions, a juggling-era riddim compresses that same accumulation into a single dancehall season. A producer builds a rhythm on a keyboard workstation, presses it, and calls in as many artists as will come to the studio that week.
"Poco Man Jam", voiced by Gregory Peck for producers Steely and Clevie in 1990, is often cited as an early template for the form. A decade later, Sizzla's "Karate" on the Martial Arts riddim and Beenie Man's "Gotta Be Mine" on Tony Kelly's Buy Out riddim showed how thoroughly the practice had taken over Kingston's studios: the same handful of rhythm tracks, dozens of different voices.
A juggling riddim doesn't ask to be remembered for decades — it asks to win one summer.
Elephant Man rode several of Don Corleon's uptempo, horn-sampling rhythms through the same stretch of the 2000s, part of a run of producers — Dave Kelly's Madhouse among them — whose riddims became shorthand for entire years of dancehall rather than single songs.
By 2011, the Summertime riddim carried Vybz Kartel's title cut and Popcaan's "Raving" through what became a genuinely seasonal phenomenon — proof that the juggling riddim, twenty years after its digital-era template, still ran exactly the way it always had.