The night the riddim went digital

In 1985 a riddim built at King Jammy's, voiced by Wayne Smith as "Under Mi Sleng Teng", helped push Jamaican music from live bands to computer-built riddims.

In late 1984, musician Noel Davey brought a Casio MT-40 keyboard - picked up in the US by George "Buddy" Haye, who'd actually gone looking for a Yamaha DX7 - to producer Lloyd "King Jammy" James. The MT-40 carried a factory demo rhythm programmed by a young Casio engineer in Japan, Okuda Hiroko. Davey and singer Wayne Smith built a song around that preset, with Smith's lyrics borrowing its cadence from Barrington Levy's 1983 hit "Under Mi Sensi"; Jammy slowed the preset down and added piano and clap tracks to make "Under Mi Sleng Teng." The riddim's real coronation came in a sound clash: on February 23, 1985, Jammy's system played it against Black Scorpio at Waltham Park Road, and the crowd demanded it be rewound over and over until Jammy won by acclamation. Sleng Teng went on to spawn something like 500 different cover versions and is widely credited as the record that pushed Jamaican music from live-band riddims to computerized, digital production almost overnight.

Sleng Teng's origin and the February 1985 clash: Wikipedia (Sleng Teng); The Quietus's 40th-anniversary feature on the riddim's real history, which also complicates some of the tidier popular-legend versions of the story - worth reading in full for nuance.