Toppa Top 10: The Best Dancehall Albums

10 9 8 7 6 5 4/3 2 1
August 15, 2012

4/3. Bounty Killer, My Xperience (1996) and Ghetto Dictionary: Art of War (2002)

bounty-killer-my-xperience

Bounty’s Art of War wasn’t conceived as a concept album per se but it was organized along a single theme—it’s made up of all clash, or war, tunes—lending it a uniformity rarely heard in dancehall albums. Beginning, oddly enough, with one of the earliest album appearances by superstar hip-hop personality (and former pirate radio reggae DJ) DJ Khaled, Art of War is quite possibly the hardest, most thoroughly vicious dancehall album ever.

My Xperience, meanwhile, was a more diverse and well-rounded showcase of Bounty’s abilities, from the classic hip-hop collaborations with Raekwon and Rza, the Fugees, Jeru tha Damaja and Busta Rhymes and Junior Reid to the light-hearted and radio-friendly combination with Barrington Levy, “Living Dangerously.” But the heart of the record was still the war tunes that made Bounty Bounty.