By the 1970s, Jamaica had become the voice of resistance calling out the evils of Babylon. With the explosion of reggae, roots, rock steady, and dub, the music followed the diaspora as it spread around the globe, dominating the underground scenes in global capitals including New York, London, Toronto, and Tokyo with the arrival of dancehall in the 1980s.
Hailing from the Halfway tree part of Molynes Road in Kingston, Jamaica, Walshy Fire (born Leighton Walsh) lived walking distance from the arcade where local legends Jack Sowah, Skunkman, and Cassette Peter set up their booths, hustling dancehall mixtapes. “The moment I left the house, these guys were right here with huge speakers playing the latest tapes,” Walsh says. “They were all competing, trying to get the person to buy their taste over someone else by having the latest and the highest quality.”
Party flyers were stashed inside the tapes, their hand drawn art capturing Walsh’s imagination. At a time when paper was fast and cheap, artists and promoters embraced the DIY ethos of the times, getting the word out by handing out passes and leaving stacks at local shops and hubs. “You had no other distraction, so you’re immersed and the artwork on these cassette tapes was amazing,” he says. “These guys were hand drawing each one. The competition was so lethal to make a great flyer. It was like a movie poster so these guys didn’t want to come out half assed, and the competition for business made everybody step it up. The reason they were getting the most work is because their art was too good to ignore.”
After the family moved to Miami, Walsh came into his own as a natural born entrepreneur, selling the latest dancehall tapes. “I had the best plug,” Walsh says of his brother, legendary Jamaican cricketer Courtney Walsh. “He was the Michael Jordan of cricket and would fly to Miami all the time so I could always tap into him to bring up a box full of cassette tapes of the newest stuff. I saw the opportunity and I’ve always been a hustler. I was outside every night at 14 years old, walking around the flea market and the mall. I used to go to parties and wait until they would be let out. I sold tapes everywhere I could.”
For a time, Walsh kept the flyers, not thinking of why, until his college years when he started traveling to New York and Washington DC during the mid 1990s. “I started to actively go to every Jamaican restaurant and record shops, and take as many flyers as possible,” he says. “I used to visit the bike store on Houston [Street], and collect as many flyers as possible. They weren’t all any particular genre; I just thought it was cool that I was in New York. Then it became a passion, where I started to seek it.” In time Walsh amassed an archive of dancehall history and art, elevating these exquisite slips of ephemera into artifacts that map the culture as it made its way across the globe.
Now Walsh — a Grammy-nominated artist, producer, DJ, MC, and member of Major Lazer and Black Chiney — adds a feather to his cap, as author of Art of Dancehall: Flyer and Poster Designs of Jamaican Dancehall Culture (Rizzoli Universe). Organized by country, the book brings together historic works from Walsh’s collection, along with selections from Lee Major, Muscle, Mark Professor and Stanjah, charting the history of the scene as it took the world by storm.
The Art of Dancehall begins in Jamaica, with handcrafted flyers by Denzil “Sassafrass” Naar, the nation’s original celebrity poster artist, which set the tone, promising epic revelry the likes of which one might encounter in a Hollywood film. And like the music, flyer styles quickly branched out, making their way across the UK, US, Canada, and Japan, and taking root in places like Brooklyn, the unofficial “15th Parish” of Jamaica.
“This dance created musical history,” Lee Major wrote of the 1993 flyer featuring his sound system, Earth Ruler, against reigning champion Addies. He continued, “Biltmore Ballroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was the most iconic spot for dances in New York City. It was definitely the proving ground—you had to prove yourself there, you had to make it or break it there. Earth Ruler were the up and coming sound—they were killing everything, and there was only one more left to kill and it was the big dog [Addies]. This felt like the biggest dance New York ever saw. Earth Ruler changed things musically at that point.”
Earth Ruler also brought Brooklyn style into the scene, rocking Tommy Hilfiger and Timberlands just as the Hip Hop-dancehall fusion started to hit with artists like Heavy D, Doug E. Fresh, Supercat, Mad Lion, and Smif-N-Wessun. “When I went to New York, and started pursuing [my flyer collection], I started to realize that something there was way bigger than me,” Walsh says. “You have Earth Ruler – Lee Major – he was actually clashing, and winning and losing, this was his life.”
For Walsh, The Art of Dancehall is a love letter to the world that made him.“Not only did you have to know where to go, you had to say to yourself, am I willing to put myself in danger – is it that important, that good?” Walsh remembers. “Man, the danger can’t be left out. That’s what makes us, older people, so proud of these moments. Everything was sketchy, so you came out with these war stories.”
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