“You can get it if you really want” – Jimmy Cliff

A decade ago, a young college student who’d been living in Foreign for a couple years had a bright idea: A magazine centered on Dancehall music and culture, featuring interviews with the hottest stars in the business, reviews of their albums, reports from their concerts, and commentary on issues affecting the Dancehall massive. But the student did a little research, and he soon realized that the per-issue cost of producing a printed magazine rivaled his college tuition. Back to the drawing board.

Our handsome hero – let’s call him Milo – decided instead to take his idea to a place where all underfunded ideas go: the Internet. Reggaematic’s first home was a humble AOL account. You could find the site at http://members.col.com/regaematic (“regaematic” only had one “g,” because AOL screen names at the time couldn’t exceed ten letters). The popularity of his little AOL site (and rapidly disappearing storage space) led him to spring for his own dot com, and www.reggaematic.com was born on October 22, 1997.

Reggaematic.com grew by leaps and bounds, but the increasing demands on Milo’s time made it harder and harder to keep the site up-to-date and relevant in the ever-changing Dancehall landscape. Plus, a whole new set of up-n-coming Dancehall websites were stealing Reggaematic’s thunder. So like a defeated selector with a depleted dub box, Milo quietly pulled the plug on Reggaematic, and put his dream on ice.

But guess what? A decade later, and still no one has produced a decent Dancehall magazine. Europe has a couple, but USA and Jam-1 were still served with mediocre rags. In other publications, Dancehall was marginalized to a column or a “special issue,” like some exotic wild animal. Dancehall deserved better. Reggaematic.com made it’s long-awaited comeback.

“We nuh beg you fi no sponsor/ so you can’t stop this” – Sizzla

The overwhelming popular response to Reggaematic’s first three Internet issues and downloadable .pdf magazines once again rekindled the publishing dream. The idea was to get the income from advertising sales to pay production costs, and then distribute the printed Reggaematic for free to Dancehall’s long-suffering fans. But the advertisers presented us with a catch-22: They weren’t advertising until they could see an actual issue, and we couldn’t print an actual issue unless they got up off of the advertising money! You see how dem design dem system to keep man down? But this time around, the dream would not take another 10-year detour. Like Nasio says, sometimes the spirit commands you to rise and bear fruit.

“Big Tings A Gwaan” – Tanya Stephens

So here we are: Reggaematic’s first hard copy issue (not counting all the .pdfs that you’ve downloaded and printed). We couldn’t be happier. We have the hottest woman in Dancehall, Tanya Stephens, gracing our cover. Like us, she knows a thing or two about conquering the haters who try to limit your growth. We feature Dancehall’s hottest male DJ, too. Vybz Kartel, who started DJ-ing semi-professionally around the same time Reggaematic made its online debut, understands the struggle of painstakingly building an underground (or Internet) base before becoming an “overnight success.” And the rocky road of Nasio Fontaine – who had to sit on master tapes of his debut album for two years before he got the money to release it himself – is the perfect metaphor for Reggaematic’s halting progress to the printing press. This issue of Reggaematic also puts you front and center in a sweaty Elephant Man concert, imagines a Dancehall Prime Minister, catches up with Singer J and gives you a full dose of up-to-the-time album reviews. All that, and the full has still not been told.

“In it for the love/ not the money or the fame” – Assassin

We hope that this issue does well. And by “does well,” we mean we hope that it reaches the four corners of the Dancehall diaspora and encourages advertisers and subscribers to fund a second issue. If we flop, ah nuh nutting, still. We’ll take Reggaematic back to cyberspace, and the dream will live on.

Bless.

Milo

milo@reggaematic.com