Shinehead’s “Jamaican in New York”: Cultural Circularity and Reggae’s Eventual Resonance in Hip-Hop, from the Bronx to Brooklyn and Beyond

Raised in the Bronx, singer and rapper Shinehead is widely acknowledged as the first artist of Jamaican descent to fuse elements of reggae and hip-hop, leading to the birth of a largely New York-based raggamuffin hip-hop sound at the end of the 1980s. The first of a corpus of artists of Jamaican descent to sign a major record deal in 1988, Shinehead further paved the way for the emergence of his peers, including Shaggy, who like him had sung and MC’d on the Jamaican sound systems of New York’s dancehalls, as the diaspora of the ‘second mass migration’ (1965-1990) took root.

I analyze Shinehead’s biggest hit, 1993’s Jamaican in New York, a cover of Sting and The Police’s Englishman in New York, using references from the song to revisit the significance of the ‘second mass migration’, in terms of its demographic and, moreover, cultural impact. Here, I address factors surrounding the integration of the diaspora, and the negotiation of identity in the emerging cosmopolis, building on existing discussions on the ‘delayed reception’ of Jamaican culture in New York. Furthermore, I identify key phenomena within the narrative of the song as a testament to features of an emerging hybrid Jamerican identity.

In one of few scholarly discussions on the subgenre, musicologist and DJ Wayne Marshall’s raggamuffin hip-hop mixtape project envisaged the “Musical Record as Historical Record”. Through a musical analysis of the song, I identify elements of this fusion in its production, while placing lyrics using Narrative Theory. Visually, I analyze aesthetic symbols in the song’s accompanying video, all of which I support with interview data from the artists themselves. I argue that flows between black American and Jamaican music, beginning in the late 1940s, demonstrate an overlooked degree of historical circularity between the two in New York’s popular music history.