At this year’s Fête de la Musique in Paris, British ravers who had streamed over to enjoy the annual street party – think Notting Hill carnival without the procession – found themselves hearing, and then swiftly dancing to, a wildly uptempo tune called Bouwéy.
Built from a languid vocal at odds with clattering African percussion, the track bowled out from sound systems and car windows, quite unlike anything else: a defining song of the summer. Made by Guadeloupean act 1T1, Bouwéy has now hit 12m views on YouTube. But its frenetic pace and startling synth work haven’t arrived in a vacuum – instead it is the vanguard of a sound known as bouyon, part of a whirlwind of dance genres leaping out from the Caribbean to the world, including at Notting Hill carnival this weekend.
“The bouyon is a faster riddim,” chuckles Hillary “Tilly” Thomas over the phone. “You have to drink some rum – it’s carnival music, not everyone can handle it. You have to be crazy!”
Tilly, a mainstay in the bouyon scene since the 00s, now manages rising Dominican star DJ Taffy: countless vocalists have hopped on to his frenetic, warbling instrumental Funny Riddim. “Bouyon is a Dominican French word meaning a mixture of foods,” Tilly says. “Let’s say you’re cooking; you put yam, banana, chicken, fish, dumpling with all the seasonings, it’s an all in one dish. So the music is a fusion of African beats, soca, EDM, the Haitian music kompa, French music and calypso. Like the food, we put it all together to make one pot, it’s a fusion of all Caribbean music. And then it has the ‘dom dom dom’” – he makes the unmistakable sound of a thudding kick drum. “That’s how you know it’s bouyon.”
It’s the genre’s sexualised lyrics – known as “nasty business” in Dominica – that have really turned heads, though, delighting young fans but also dismaying Caribbean radio station bosses. “The nastiness [paired] with the pulsating rhythm, it really and truly brought the music to the world,” Tilly says. “Controversy sells!
With only 44 million people spread across its islands, the Caribbean has had an extraordinarily disproportionate impact on music around the globe. Often western media will use Jamaican culture as interchangeable with that of the whole Caribbean, and while reggae and dancehall remain in rude health, their international acclaim can obscure the fact that the other islands have been gestating their own styles for decades.
Tilly is at pains to point out that bouyon is not new – he mentions 90s big bands such as WCK and Triple 0 as laying the groundwork, followed by 2010s breakthrough acts such as Asa Bantan and the producer Arade Moses, who has acted as mentor for DJ Taffy. But something has changed since 2020: cheap production technology, the availability of low cost digital distribution (along with the late arrival of Spotify to the Caribbean in 2021), and the rise of TikTok have all conspired to push these high tempo styles into the limelight.
This has spread beyond bouyon. In St Lucia, the local variant of the sound is known as dennery segment, the name deriving from the village Dennery where many of the artists originated. Over the last year, scene leader Bozo, who produces under the name of Bad Sound, has had tracks such as Both Twanche Riddim Refix played everywhere from St Lucian raves to London’s tastemaking NTS Radio. He also attributes this newfound success to his ability to blend different styles: the Both Twanche remix fuses dennery segment with the insistent house music of New Jersey, along with a sample from Portuguese producer DJ Marfox. While to the uninitiated dennery may sound like a hyperspeed cousin of soca – the already rapidly undulating iteration of calypso – Bozo points to Africa as the prime source of inspiration. “Kuduro is the bigger influence,” he tells me, referring to the similarly high tempo Angolan dance style. “We try to merge other genres together.”
This magpie mix of styles, frenetic pace, and scandalous lyrics has made bouyon and dennery the perfect soundtrack for TikTok’s attention grabbing accounts. But as kids from London, Paris and New York have started tuning in to the sound, not everyone at home has been quick to welcome the success.
“There was a point in time,” Bozo recalls, “when the radio stations wanted to ban the genre because they said it was too explicit. Then when the songs started blowing up, they thought: ‘OK, maybe we’ll give it a try.’ Now we embrace it as our own. Social media has played a big part.”
For his part, Tilly thinks that the use of explicit lyrics was just a stepping stone to breaking through to a wider audience. “I told the guys making it: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take the blame for the lyrics.’ We used the nasty business to get the music out in the world. Now we’ve done that, we’re back making real bouyon; love songs, serious songs.”
He may be right. The success of a lyrically PG track such as Bouwéy has proved that controversial lyrics aren’t needed for success, and the producer Arade Moses, on the line with Tilly, is certain. “We always knew it would go somewhere,” he says. “It’s so energy-driven, and the way the youth react to it is so different. True bouyon is too melodic to be stopped!”
