Why does dancehall sound samey and repetitious to me when hip hop doesn't ?

Well, Patrick if it's dancehall reggae yer on about, I have a very sketchy knowledge but I can find a big difference between Mr Vegas's "Heads High" and Beenie Man's "Girls dem Suga". Dont ask me to pinpoint what it is about them thats so different, cos I couldnt be bothered, go check for yerself..I think it's pretty obvious. I wish I could hear more of the stuff to be honest. I cant really get into drum n' bass because I dont know how the hell you dance to it. But then, what the hell do u know, you gave away a perfectly lovely Chic album

PS. I'm only kidding, Patrick

Well, for one thing, the riddims are recycled ridiculously. It's the only genre I know of where you can buy an entire album devoted to *one particular rhythm* with a different MC being the only difference between tracks. It's a bit of a headfuck the first time; even those 8 hour sets of samey-samey trance that get slagged off have some minor variations rhythmically. But, that said, I don't think they can equal the intensity of a live-in-the-studio night of MC chatter and banter over the "doorslam" riddim and nothing else. (Since I've never had the pleasure of attending a dancehall live thang.)

I think you tapped into the real answer with this: "Rap, metal and country all sounded samey to me at one point, and I started enjoying them once I became capable of making finer distinctions within those styles." The voices are initally off-putting I think. There's not, on first listen, a tremendous range in ragga vocals (and if there is, it goes from baritone to bass.) But there's been quite a lot of activity in dancehall in the last couple of years, any number of micro-genres, etc. There's been a lot of "contamination" from outside genres...sort of completing the circle of that whole "macro dub infection"/dancehall-culture-legacy thing. Beenie Man's "Moses Cry" was probably my favorite track of 2000, but owes just as much to techno as it does dancehall proper.

I love Heads High.

If the riddims are recycled and the vocal range is narrow, the hook is going to be the vocal and if you don't get the patois it's going to all sound the same. You may be just more conversant with the spoken North American idiom.

Yes riddims are recycled, and at any given time it may sound same-y but with 20+ years of dancehall to pick from you can hear a lot of variety. I don't really think you can argue that a genre that has produced Big Youth, U-Roy, Prince Far-I, Smiley Culture, Papa Levi, Buju Banton, Capleton, Sizzla et al all sounds the same.

On the other hand, maybe it's a matter of having acclimatized oneself to the genre to hear the constant evolution of the same. To me, drum & bass "all sounds the same" on a superficial level, but I haven't spent any time listening to the music or learning about it.

What's interesting about a lot of the more commercial techy/rap-flavoured dancehall is the uneasy tension between purism and cross-hybridisation. Elephant Man's Comin' 4 You! has tonnes of songs following the basic syncopated 5-beats-per-bar rhythm (forgotten its name), and then another track is based around J Lo's "If You Had My Love" - there's no coherence or consistency.

i have several tracks with people 'toasting' (?) over the same riddim, and they can sound drastically different. capleton and elephant man on the typhoid riddim both do drastically different things; elephant man sounds like a thug, capelton sounds clever and adds more melody. it's just a shame that every other fucking dancehall song seems to be about killing homosexuals, isn't it? which is why i'm never paying for a record by any of them. thanks for for napster^h^h^h^h^h^h^h kazaa.