The History of Reggae & Dancehall in New England

Born into it — the basements and the sound clashes

Before I knew anything about the scene, I knew the house parties. Family parties in Mattapan — every house had a DJ set in the basement. Friends and family from all over the Caribbean packed in, and that was the sound of growing up. Not just Jamaican — the whole Caribbean, in one basement. That's where the ear got trained.

I strayed for a while. Got into the early sounds of hip-hop — that raw, stripped-down thing — and I didn't even know I was hearing Jamaicans who'd made it. When hip-hop stopped being dynamic enough for me, I was flipping channels and caught the Mötley Crüe "Dr. Feelgood" trailer. That muted guitar hit like a hip-hop sample. I was a skateboarder then, one of the kids chasing that hard sound, and I was sold.

I found my roots again around the time I got out of high school in '92 and went to Dean Junior College. Sitting home one day, my sister came back from school with a sound cassette cued to Buju Banton. His voice sent chills down my spine. I wanted more. My cousin JKOOL ran a sound called Evalast Movements and taught me to DJ. I bought my own sound and started clashing — we were Loquats, and we went up against Poison Dart out of Boston and wrote them off. I was the fresh young talent in the city. I even knew Rodigan back then — he worked at Tarus Records in Mattapan, and I'd brought him my sound clash tape to sell.

School is where it all connected. After Dean I was selling my mixtapes at Northeastern — they had a strong Caribbean club, so people on campus knew me from DJing. Later I went to Massachusetts College of Communication for my Associate's in Sound Engineering. And the record labels would send their street teams to the student center to pass out new music to the urban crowd. That's where I built the bonds. I started shooting their shows, ended up on the hip-hop side, working with the labels. By 1998 I was already shooting major artists — I was around the Wu-Tang and Jay-Z Hard Knock Life Tour. That's how a skateboard cameraman got inside the industry.

The dances themselves lived in Dorchester. The Caribbean Culture Center, the 3C's, was the mecca. Around it were Kay's Oasis, Zodiac, Windsor Cricket Club, Unity Sports Club, Sky Cap, Russell Auditorium and Prince Hall, and across the river in Cambridge there was House of Blues, The Middle East and Western Front. No sound had a home room. It depended on where the promoters could get a venue date.

The sounds were all Boston sounds, but the selectors were from the Caribbean: Krystal Movements, Riddim Rider, Mega Tech, Sound Vibration, Prima International, Mad Man Charlie, Legacy and Eagle Force. The tunes that mashed up the dance were Shabba Ranks, "Shine and Crisis", Capleton, "Everybody", Buju Banton, "Love Mi Browning", and Bounty Killer, "Lodge". Before I ever filmed a dance, I was in the crowd for Tenor Saw and Early B.

The fisheye, the two rooms, and the record covers

The camera turned toward the culture at a park. I was at Walsh Park in Dorchester shooting basketball when Super D asked if I was still DJing. I told him no — I was filming now. He looked at me and said, "You're Jamaican. You should do our culture." So I brought my fisheye lens to his event at the Syrian Temple in Dorchester.

That fisheye was a skateboard thing — nobody in the reggae world was shooting like that. My first big dance was Afrique at the Syrian Temple. Super D's next show was Merciless at the 3C's, and Merciless was fresh off Sting, where he'd clashed Bounty Killer. That's the level Super D was bringing in. I brought two crazy fisheye videos to Rodigan — I took the Afrique tape down to Vibes Records on Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan first. There was a little TV in the shop, all the TVs were little then, and when the footage came on the whole place erupted. Dancers filling a 13-inch screen corner to corner, shot on a lens nobody in the culture had seen. Rodigan bought the tape, booked me to film Mr. Vegas, and told me to charge $175 to videotape a dance. That was the moment it stopped being a hobby.

After Afrique I was getting hired every week to videotape whatever big name came through — Sean Paul with Vegas, Lady Saw, Zebra, Wayne Wonder, Vybz Kartel back when he was clashing Spragga Benz. I went from a skateboard cameraman to a reggae historian in one show. My partner Guytano Frizzy shot the stills — his job was to follow me around and snap everything I was filming. Then we did something nobody else was doing: we put the real photograph from the show on the video cover. What was on the insert was what was actually on the tape. Everybody else used the show flyer. We used the real image — basically the world's first video thumbnail, the cover matching the content.

That first night at the Syrian Temple was 1998: a juggling night with Evalast Movements and Afrique from New York, no clash, and I was holding a Panasonic 3CCD camcorder. After that we were booked every weekend, Friday through Sunday. Every weekend was a big show: Bounty Killer, Sean Paul, Mr. Vegas, Zebra, Wayne Wonder, Lady Saw, Merciless, Ghost, Tony Curtis, Sanchez. Sky Cap closed, and new sounds came up beside the '90s crews: Undertaker, Third Rail and Black Reign.

And for years, there were only two rooms. From about 2000 to 2008, the 3C's and Kay's Oasis right down the street were the whole scene — the only two reggae venues that would rent to a promoter to bring in reggae artists. You couldn't do it downtown for a long time, and that was racism, plain and simple. So the whole culture lived in those two rooms in Dorchester.

Everything went on bobbyshakes.com. They wouldn't publish Black culture, so we had to make our own outlet. When Apple put video on the iPod in 2005, we launched The Reggae Cast, our concert footage on iTunes. It was a top 100 podcast, beating BET, MTV and VH1, and we were the first people to put Sean Paul on iTunes, with our footage of him at the 3C's. That's how the press found us, through the podcast or the website. The first to reach out was Skunk Magazine.

Frizzy's stills started on Canon PowerShots. In 2005 we bought a Nikon D70s at launch, for him. Then HD video and Blu-ray arrived, and I didn't have the money for an HD camera, so I picked up the D70s myself. My first night on it was a Riddim Rider show at the 3C's.

Downtown, the collapse, and the years in between

What ended the two-room era was violence. On June 15, 2006, the day England played Trinidad & Tobago in the World Cup, I was covering that event at Unity Sports Club when Frizzy told me Blacks had been killed and Bucky Famous had been shot in the foot. Blacks was a street kingpin at a young age. Bucky is a close friend of ours who played on Evalast and had his own sound. That killing at the 3C's shut it down for a while, and it forced the scene out of the neighborhood. Promoters had to start taking events downtown. The scene that had been boxed into two rooms in Dorchester finally moved — but not by choice.

The first club downtown to open up for our generation's reggae scene was Club ID, the upstairs room at Axis on Lansdowne Street in Boston. It worked because the club owners had to bend to us. See, we don't drink Bud Light — we drink Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Guinness, Heineken. The bars made more money off a Caribbean event than they did off hip-hop or rock, and once the owners saw the register, the doors that had been closed didn't stay closed. That run at Club ID was a joint venture between Media Soul and Ingenious Concepts, with Evalast Movements in the DJ booth — the same sound that ran through my whole story, from the basement to Lansdowne Street. Me and Guytano Frizzy, we were the ones capturing it. We weren't running the nights. We were making sure they'd never be forgotten.

On Lansdowne Street we worked Avalon Ballroom, Axis, and Club ID upstairs from Axis. But the artists were losing their lives and their work visas, and catching cases in Jamaica and America. Bogle was killed in Kingston in January 2005. Buju Banton was sentenced in 2011. Vybz Kartel was sentenced in 2014. That destroyed the dancing scene.

Then it dried up. The 3C's shut down — it reopened but didn't last. And the bigger blow was at the border: a lot of the reggae artists were getting their U.S. visas denied. You can't build a scene when the headliners can't get into the country. Guytano went back home to Canada, and reggae in Boston went quiet. So I did what I've always done — I followed the culture where it was moving and started shooting house music downtown to keep working. I never fully walked away, though. I'd pop in and out, shooting reggae just to keep my chops, but only artists I hadn't documented yet — always building the archive, never repeating it. By 2016 I was basically out of the Boston reggae scene, working with motorcycles, but I'd still shoot a reggae concert whenever one came through, just to feed the record.

Bringing the archive back

When I saw reggae was dead in Boston, I decided to start streaming and shooting again. The stream started as a Warzone livestream — but between map loads, I'd play archive footage on it. So people who tuned in to watch me play video games got a taste of thirty years of reggae history. I smuggled the archive into a war game. That's always been the instinct: find the channel that gets the culture seen, and use it.

Today the New England scene runs through rooms like Bill's Bar and The Grand in Boston, Alchemy in Providence, and Ocean Mist in Matunuck, Rhode Island. Recent stages have brought Kabaka Pyramid, King Yellowman, Serani, Buju Banton and Stephen Marley through the region — all documented on bobbyshakes.com. Thirty years in, the mission is the same as it was the day Super D handed me the culture at Walsh Park: make sure the scene is on record, in real frames, from someone who was actually in the room. That's the whole reason this archive exists — so it can't be erased, and it can't be faked.

The artists are finally getting their visas back: Buju, Kartel, now Popcaan. Kartel walked out of prison in July 2024. Dancehall is back, but I can't answer that for another couple of years. The culture has to rebuild itself.

The archive is for telling people the history of Boston reggae during the reign of Bobby Shakes.