STEEL PANS AND BOOM BAP
How Caribbeanization Established, Influences, and Maintains Hip-Hop Culture
“The Great Melting Pot” is a tagline often used to describe The United States of America. From its dubious inception in 1774 and the war that was fought to maintain its sovereign existence until now this has been known as the country of immigrants. The people here come from all walks of life and bring all manner of holiday and culture with them. None had quite affect that people from the Caribbean nations have had. Great scores of immigrants from these countries had always been able to come to America and push Black culture forward while injecting some form of their native culture into the mix. Chasing and achieving dreams of more for their children and families at home while
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Based on streaming performance from many large streamers including Spotify, Hip-hop is currently the most widely streamed and downloaded of the musical forms in the United States of America. In Early 2016, the number one album in the country for over 13 weeks was a Rap album which leaned heavily on it’s Dancehall singles to achieve that feat. Drake’s seventh studio album Views was promoted with 5 singles. Of those singles, three of them were heavily influenced by Dancehall and Soca music. “One Dance”, “Pop Style”, and “Controlla” were major parts of the concoction that served to bring Views to RIAA certified multi-platinum success and made it the first album to have over 1 billion streams since tracking begun. The important question is why did Drake’s Album have so much of the influence and why didn’t the greater rap community reject it? Normally songs like with that type of genre-cross get pushed to different audiences outside of the niche. An Example of this would be Nelly’s “Just a Dream” from his 2010 Album, 5.0. This was a popular crossover single between the worlds of Hip Hop and Country music.