When most people think of Miami Bass, they immediately think of 2 Live Crew, and for good reason. 2 Live Crew brought the most national attention to, and had the most commercial success with, Florida’s booming homegrown sound. 2 Live Crew’s connections to the Caribbean run pretty deep. Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, who led the group during its boom in the 90s, is half-Jamaican (and half-Bahamian), while founding member and rapper Chris Wong Won, aka Fresh Kid Ice (or “Chinaman”), was born in Trinidad.
It’s not a stretch to imagine that the raunch in Chinaman’s lyrics had some precedence in the slack calypso of Mighty Sparrow, and in fact he admits as much in LargeUp’s interview discussing his Trini roots. “I remember [hearing] all the Sparrow songs [in Trinidad],” Wong Won says. “That’s one of the things I gotta use to my advantage, knowing about wining and all that stuff… There were things I’d seen and picked up in those days that I used later on.” Also apparent to Wong Won and others was Miami Bass culture’s emphasis on stacking large sound systems for maximum effect, much like within Caribbean sound system culture.
Providing some crucial assistance to 2 Live Crew in their early years, meanwhile, were reggae legends Inner Circle. Relocating to Miami after the death of singer Jacob Miller, brothers Ian and Roger Lewis of Inner Circle founded one of the earliest Black-owned recording studios and record pressing plants in South Florida, Circle Sound International. Michael Sterling, who played guitar in Inner Circle (and also wrote the original “Lovers and Friends” remade by Lil Jon and Usher), connected Uncle Luke with the Lewis brothers. Most of 2 Live Crew’s second album, Move Somthin’, was recorded in Inner Circle’s studio.
“My dad worked on Uncle Luke stuff, 2 Live Crew, MC Shy D, LeJuan Love,” says Ian Lewis’ son, Abebe Lewis, who runs the current incarnation of the studio, now known as Circle House Studios and Circle Village, in North Miami. (One of Miami’s best-known studios, it’s been the site of countless current-day hits, including Pharrell’s “Happy.”) “The credits are there. If you look on the backs of those albums it will say CSI Studios, mixed by Ian Lewis and David Hobbs [aka 2 Live Crew’s Mr. Mixx].”
These factors all coalesced on “Reggae Joint,” from 1989’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be. 2 Live Crew’s stab at dancehall features the crew rapping with patois flows over a version of the Sleng Teng riddim:
Pacjam, the teen club in Miami’s Carol City area run by Uncle Luke, was ground zero for Miami Bass during much of the ’80s and ’90s. Walshy Fire of Major Lazer and Black Chiney, remembers going to parties there as a kid, and hearing dancehall getting reactions—though not as much as Bahamian junkanoo.
“The DJ would play a reggae song or a dancehall song—there wasnt really a set or, if [there] was, it was about three songs long,” says Walshy, also noting the influence of merengue from the Latin Caribbean on songs like DJ Laz’s “Esa Morena,” a subject for a whole different article perhaps. “Whatever was hot. It was mostly Bahamian descendants so he might play [Red Rat’s] “Tight up Skirt” and yell “Where them Jamaicans at,” but when he dropped this Bahamian song, the whole club [would] start yelling, Goombay!”
As dancehall became more prevalent in the American mainstream in the early ’90s, it became common to have Jamaican-style toasting on hip-hop records. Though the trend was most notable in New York, it was felt even in L.A. gangster rap. Miami Bass artists also recorded songs featuring Jamaican-style toasting with varying levels of authenticity. Walshy Fire points to Bass crew Miami Boyz’s “Gangsta Bass” as a “video that sums up a whole era,” and “the complete merger of two cultures each influencing each other.”
Uncle Luke himself even went on record to state that the Miami Bass sound is “more like reggae than anything else,” in Spin magazine’s 1990 “Hip-Hop Map of America.”
Speaking today, Fresh Kid Ice, who has recently revived 2 Live Crew with fellow rapper Brother Marquis (but minus Uncle Like), directs us to “listen to the percussions … the congas, the different sounds, the way it moves” when considering the influence of the Caribbean on Miami bass. That emphasis on percussion and live feel in 2 Live Crew’s music is, he notes, “a cross between Miami Bass and Caribbean culture.”
Read on to hear some more reggae/dancehall-inspired Miami Bass.