Bassculture Islands No 5 | Page 146

and Kanye Yeezy) or Five Steez... so I stuck with Steez ‘cause I understood what the word meant and it sounded cool. Kingston is definitely the undisputed capital of reggae music, so why hip-hop? Why become an emcee in a world of deejays? eight and two verses. Also the hip-hop production was widely varied. It had a crazy range. And the rappers at the time had a lyrical range as wide as the production. I just wanted to be a part of it and express myself within those limitless boundaries. Five Steez: “I bomb atomically, Socrates philosophies and hypotheses can’t define Sly Rankin: At the time, how I be dropping I fell in love with how these...” (This is a verse much the rappers were from Inspectah Deck saying. They had a min- on the Wu-Tang Clan’s imum of sixteen bars. classic track entitled Dancehall songs had “Triumph”). That’s why. I heard superior rhyme skills and more room for expression in Hip Hop than I did in Reggae and Dancehall. I also liked that it could have almost any sound and sample from any genre, including Reggae and Dancehall. As many people may or may not know, the origins of hip hop are deep-rooted in Kingston, more specifically in the community of Trench Town, where a man by the name of DJ Kool Herc