Dancehall 101 · Lesson 7 of 9
Visual Media
From hand-drawn flyers to VHS and social video — how dancehall has documented itself.
Dancehall has always been intensely self-documenting. Long before smartphones, promoters commissioned hand-drawn and later desktop-published flyers to advertise dances — vivid, text-dense posters that are now studied as a folk-art tradition in their own right, capturing the visual slang and aesthetics of each era.
The rise of affordable video cameras in the 1980s and '90s produced a huge informal archive of dancehall on VHS: recordings of dances, sound clashes, and stage shows that circulated hand-to-hand and were often the only surviving record of a given night. Much of what is known today about specific dance moves, fashion trends, and even specific sound clashes comes from this grassroots video archive.
That documentary instinct has carried directly into the internet era — YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok now serve the same function flyers and VHS tapes once did, spreading new dances, fashion, and deejay clips within hours rather than weeks. Dancehall's relationship to visual media is part of why the culture has always felt current: it has never waited for outside media to tell its story.
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