If your reggae knowledge goes more than two steps beyond Bob Marley, you’ve likely heard Wayne Smith’s voice. He was the singer on “Under Me Sleng Teng”, one of the best known singles of the 1980s and the track often credited with kickstarting the entire digital dancehall genre. But his earlier work is just as worthy of attention, so today we’re going to talk about him.

Smith was born in 1965, and began his recording career as a teenager. His first single, “Life is a Moment in Space”, was a gender-flipped version of Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love” with its title disguised to avoid paying royalties. It was not included on his debut album, Youthman Skanking, which came out in 1982 on the UK label Black Joy. The single and album were both recorded at Channel One and King Tubby’s studios, and produced by Prince Jammy (who would later upgrade himself to King Jammy), who happened to be Smith’s next-door neighbor.

Youthman Skanking is peak pre-digital reggae. Lyrically, about half the songs are socially conscious, talking about the plight of the poor, and the other half are lover’s laments. (There’s another disguised track, too; “Take a Trip” is a rewrite of the Drifters’ “On Broadway”.) The music, performed by the High Times Band though no players are credited, is slow and somewhat ominous, with deep bass but almost no distortion; everything is clean and separated, with keyboards and guitar pinging in from the far left and right sides of the stereo field. Smith has an earnest, young man’s voice that’s well suited to this kind of material. He floats in the middle of it all, passionate but never overselling anything.

Jammy and Smith continued to work together, putting out several singles in 1983 and 1984 (“Smoker Super”, “Music On My Mind”, “Uncle Sam”, “Come Along”), but none of them were hits. Eventually he made a second full-length, 1985’s Smoker Super, which included several previously released tracks like “Nowadays Style”, “When You’re Young”, and the title track, as well as new compositions. The lyrics are less concerned with social issues, mostly focusing on the man-woman thing. The music (again, personnel are not identified) is heavier and rootsier, with much more echo on the bass and drums, crashing snares, and occasional effects on the vocals, as on “When You’re Young”. Smoker Super is a strong, solid mid-’80s reggae album, more sonically aggressive and less lyrically conscious than its predecessor, full of deep grooves with a smoky atmosphere that’ll make you sink into your couch. Not a classic, but better than one might expect.

The following year, Smith and Jammy had a breakthrough. The song they created, “Under Me Sleng Teng”, literally revolutionized reggae, permanently altering the genre. Here’s how it happened.

George “Buddy” Haye, a member of the Wailing Souls, brought a Casiotone MT-40 synthesizer back to Jamaica after a US tour, and gave it to a fellow musician named Noel Davey. Davey and Smith set to work playing with the extremely primitive instrument (it had just five drum sounds and six rhythm settings) and after weeks of experimentation, discovered the “rock” bass preset.

That primitive, pulsing “rock” bass line is the key to the whole song. It was composed in 1980 by Okuda Hiroko, an engineer at Casio and major reggae fan (she wrote her graduate thesis on the music). This 2022 article tells her story in much more detail, and is well worth reading.

Davey and Smith used that simple bass line to build a rhythm track, over which Smith threw down some pro-weed, anti-cocaine lyrics inspired by (and a melody hijacked from) Barrington Levy’s “Under Mi Sensi”. They brought their work to Prince Jammy, who slowed it down and added a few more sonic elements — piano, handclaps, etc. They released “Under Mi Sleng Teng” as a single in February 1985, and it was an immediate sensation at soundclash events and on radio.

Jammy immediately began repurposing the rhythm track for other artists. To date, the Sleng Teng riddim (as it became known) has appeared on hundreds of songs. The King Jammy compilation Selector’s Choice, Vol. 1 includes an entire CD of Sleng Teng songs, including tracks by Johnny Osbourne, Shabba Ranks, Dennis Brown, Tenor Saw, Nicodemus and more.

But what do you do when you’ve suddenly got the biggest hit of your career? You rush out an accompanying album. Sleng Teng, the album, is entirely composed of simple digital reggae songs and comes wrapped in a chaotic album sleeve with multiple Smiths step-and-repeating along the lower edge, with images of circuit boards and fingers pressing glowing buttons behind him. There’s absolutely nothing “roots” about this album cover; like George Clinton’s Computer Games from 1982, it says, Welcome to the future.

And even if the rest of the songs on the album were created in a hurry to capitalize on the popularity of “Under Me Sleng Teng”, they don’t always show it. They all have the same digital sound, all ticking drum machines and pocket-calculator synth melodies shimmering through a reverb haze, but some are quite good, especially “In Thing”, “My Lord, My God”, and “Leave Her for You”. Plus, there’s a bonus version of “Under Me Sleng Teng” that’s so bizarrely dubbed-out it’ll make you think your head’s come loose on your neck. It’s still the weakest of Smith’s first three albums, but it’s hardly a throwaway.

That pretty much marked the end of Wayne Smith’s career. In 1989, he left Jamaica for New York, opened his own Sleng Teng Studio, and made one album on his own, 1991’s Life, which appears to have been released only in Japan. He died in 2014, and in 2017 his family released Mr. Bossman, a compilation of singles and other tracks he recorded between 1983 and 1986 that had reportedly been intended for a never-completed album. It’s the last important piece of the puzzle, filling out a portrait of a guy who’s known for one massive, world-changing song, but who had more to offer.

— Phil Freeman