General Degree lights up the ‘darkness’ with new EP

Dancehall artiste and music producer General Degree, while lamenting the “darkness” of the current trap-dancehall sub genre, is releasing his own counteroffensive through an EP titled Island Hopping, which he says “is all happiness”.

“The title track is ... a song that the entire Caribbean can enjoy. I am thinking of shopping it to Caribbean Airlines or the Jamaica Tourist Board. It’s the type of song that we need now in dancehall to change the vibration and pull it out of the devil’s frequency that it is being trapped in,” shared General Degree, whose given name is Cardiff Butt.

Assessing the changes in modern dancehall, General Degree, who started singing hit songs from the ‘90s, looked at original dancehall, soca, Afrobeats and trap-dancehall.

“Everybody agrees that the ‘90s was the golden era of dancehall and that the beat was integral to that greatness. We come and see Super Cat dem and have that respect and follow what we saw,” he said, adding that “the nowadays artistes don’t have that respect, so they do their own thing called trap-dancehall and the music lose the authenticity”.

Admitting that he liked some of the songs, the producer noted, “It is the same culture on a different beat, and that’s where we went left. Themes are not that much different — sex, rude bwoy — just get more violent and graphic and dem don’t care. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that times change, people change, vibration change, and how people dance change. Dem dance and kotch, it is a staccato kind of dance ... more R&B. But with the changes, the music itself get dark,” he said.

Zooming in on the frequency of the music, he noted that trap-dancehall employs very low frequency which is “deep and not happy”, and this is directly opposite to soca and Afrobeats, which are about high frequency. He opined that soca music has not followed a dark path and that Afrobeats is characterised by its happiness.

“That’s why soca is still up ... a higher frequency is a happier frequency ... and the same for Afrobeats. But trap is using the very dark 808 frequency that attracts darkness, and the lyrics also speak to that. The beat is different and it is accepted locally, but it is going to take more than the beat to trap the international market,” General Degree declared.

The EP will be released on Friday.