Bouyon music

Music genre

Bouyon (pronunciation: boo yon) is a genre of Dominican music that originated in Dominica in the late 1980s. Prominent bouyon groups include Windward Caribbean Kulture (WCK); Roots, Stems and Branches (RSB); and First Serenade. "Hardcore bouyon", also called "Gwada Bouyon," is another type of bouyon, different to the Dominican genre which began through musical collaborations between citizens of Dominica and Guadeloupe, who both speak Antillean Creole. The term bouyon means something akin to "gumbo soup" or "coubouyon poisson" (a typical Caribbean dish) in Antillean Creole. Bouyon music is a mix of traditional and modern music, and is popular across much of the Caribbean.

Bouyon blends jing ping, cadence lypso and traditional dances, namely bèlè, quadrille, chanté mas and lapo kabwit, mazurka, zouk and other styles of Caribbean music.

In 1987, Exile One recorded a Chanté mas and Lapo Kabwit song, "L'hivernage", commonly referred to as the yo. The French Antilleans referred to the beat as "jump up music" because of its carnival style sound. This jump upbeat was later modified to become bouyon or modern soca music. (As printed on Exile One's album "creole attitude"). In Guadeloupe and Martinique, "Jump up" refers generally to bouyon music.

Bouyon soca is a fusion genre that blends bouyon and soca music.

A modern offshoot of bouyon is bouyon muffin. It combines elements of Jamaican raggamuffin music, hip hop, and dancehall. The most influential figure in the development of bouyon muffin is "Skinny Banton" (now known as "Shadowflow") who from 1995 collaborated with the WCK band, using ragga influenced vocals to chant on top of bouyon rhythms. Songs like "party" ft Joanne with Bucktown sounds' DJ Cut gave the products of bouyon muffin like "Bushtown clan", a further inspiration to incorporate more hip hop and dancehall into the Bouyon muffin genre to create "reketeng".

Reketeng is a style of bouyon based on sampling. It remixed existing Dancehall and Hip Hop recordings over Bouyon instrumentals. DJ Cut and the creation of Reketeng gave rise to Dominica Dj's experimenting bouyon with other genres and created a new wave in the music of Dominica. Like dub music, reketeng consists predominantly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly altering the recordings, usually by removing the beat from an existing music piece and emphasizing the bouyon drum and bass parts. This stripped down track is sometimes referred to as a 'riddim'.

Due to the popularity of bouyon bands who toured the French Antilles, an offshoot of bouyon from Guadeloupe is called bouyon gwada.