It's All Up To Scratch!

In the steamy dancehalls of northwest Jamaica in the 1950s, Lee "Scratch" Perry was a teenager fresh from the sugarcane fields, scooping up prizes with his energetic renditions of dances like the Yank and the Mashed Potato to the hottest boogie-woogie and R&B; tracks newly washed in from the nearby U.S. Half a century later, the tide has turned — as it did in the '60s and '70s — and it's the rhythms of the Jamaican dancehall that are now storming the U.S. (and European) charts. Leading the charge are young guns like Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder, who are bending...