The dembow beat or dembow riddim is a musical rhythm best known for its use as the core percussion element in

reggaeton Reggaeton (, ) is a modern style of popular music, popular and electronic music that originated in Panamanian reggaetón, Panama during the late 1980s, and which rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s through a plethora of Puert ...

music, having taken its name from the 1990

dancehall Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots reggae, roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s.Barrow, Steve & Dalton, Peter (2 ...

song "

Dem Bow "Dem Bow" is a song performed by Jamaican reggae artist Shabba Ranks, produced by Bobby Digital. This song uses the "Ku-Klung-Klung"/"Poco Man Jam" riddim (based on the title of the 1990 Gregory Peck and Red Dragon song) created by Jamaican ...

" by

Shabba Ranks Rexton Rawlston Fernando Gordon OD (born 17 January 1966), better known by his stage name Shabba Ranks, is a Jamaican dancehall musician. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was one of the most popular Jamaican musicians in the world. Throu ...

. The rhythm, first developed by Jamaican and Afro-Panamanian producers in the early 1990s as reggaeton was beginning to form, employs the tresillo pattern that is common in

Latin American music The music of Latin America refers to music originating from Latin America, namely the Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese-speaking regions of the Americas south of the United States. Latin American music highly incorpor ...

Characteristics

The dembow rhythm is usually employed as a loop, in line with reggaeton's mainly electronic production. Described as having a "bounce", it has a 3+3+2 (tresillo)

cross-rhythm In music, a cross-beat or cross-rhythm is a specific form of polyrhythm. The term ''cross rhythm '' was introduced in 1934 by the Musicology, musicologist Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980). It refers to a situation where the rhythmic conflict fou ...

with a slight

syncopation In music, syncopation is a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat (music), off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of ...

on every other half-beat. While dembow is the main building block of the reggaeton genre, similar modern rhythms can be found in

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

with the genres of

afrobeats Afrobeats, not to be confused with Afrobeat or Afroswing, is an umbrella term to describe popular music from West Africa and the diaspora that initially developed in Ghana, Nigeria, and the UK in the 2000s and 2010s. Afrobeats is less of a st ...

, on account of their common ancestry. There are also connections with

Arabic music Arabic music () is the music of the Arab world with all its diverse List of music styles, music styles and genres. Arabic countries have many rich and varied styles of music and also many linguistic Varieties of Arabic, dialects, with each countr ...

, credited to "cross-pollination" between

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

, the

Arab world The Arab world ( '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in ...

, and

sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the list of sovereign states and ...

History

At the beginning of the 1990s, there existed several closely related Jamaican-origin dancehall riddims revolving around a "boom-ch-boom-chick" sound such as the "Bam Bam riddim" or the "Fever Pitch riddim". Added to this group was the beat of Shabba Ranks' song "Dem Bow", which became known as the "Dem Bow riddim". The song's popularity resulted in the adoption of the "dem bow" name to describe the entire nascent genre that would eventually come to be known as reggaeton. The term "dembow" today commonly refers simply to the drum beat of reggaeton, which, while retaining its core "boom-ch-boom-chick" sound, has stylistic variations.

References

{{commons 20th-century music genres Music of Jamaica Riddims Caribbean music genres