By 2003, rap had thoroughly conquered the Hot 100, and dancehall was always a sort of cousin to hip-hop, one that evolved on a parallel track around the same time. His tracks had a sharp melodic immediacy as well as a hypnotic, almost psychedelic quality.

There’s no one reason why Sean Paul became the dancehall artist who topped the Hot 100 without compromising. Instead, Paul operated within the same space as his dancehall peers, using the same instrumental that dozens of other dancehall artists were riding. Sean Paul wasn’t a pop interloper, and he wasn’t going far out of his way to attain crossover status. But “Get Busy” was a whole lot closer to primal dancehall than anything that had previously topped the Hot 100. Paul threw in bits and pieces of then-current rap slang that he thought could help the song translate, and his sense of offhand melody had none of the booming rupture that a peer like Bounty Killer or Elephant Man might’ve brought. When Paul wrote the song, he was just starting to break out in America, and he kept American audiences in mind. “Get Busy,” the first #1 hit from the Jamaican deejay Sean Paul, isn’t exactly dancehall in its rawest, purest form.

They didn’t necessarily reflect what was happening in Jamaica at the time. You can hear echoes of reggae in something like the Staple Singers’ “ I’ll Take You There” or Johnny Nash’s “ I Can See Clearly.” Bob Marley never had a big American pop hit in his lifetime, but Eric Clapton got to #1 by covering Marley’s “ I Shot The Sheriff.” As reggae evolved into dancehall, a couple of dancehall tracks crashed the American charts and even made it all the way to #1: Snow’s “ Informer,” Ini Kamoze’s “ Here Comes The Hotstepper,” Shaggy’s “ It Wasn’t Me” and “ Angel.” But those songs were generally received as novelties - silly pop songs with a slightly different flavor. Over the decades, Jamaican music has had occasional moments of intersection with American pop, often as a texture or an inspiration.

Jamaican music has never stopped evolving - not in the past 60 years, not for one second. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

Stereogum the number ones