Who was Bogle, the man who named a generation of moves

A man, not just a move

Ask most people outside Jamaica what the Bogle is and you get a description of a movement: weight low, knees soft, the torso rolling forward and back while the arms wheel in front of the chest. Ask inside the culture and the first answer is a person. The Bogle is Gerald Levy — born in Trench Town, West Kingston, on 22 August 1964, shot dead in St Andrew on 20 January 2005, at forty.

That inversion is the whole story. He built a step; the step took a name; the name took him. For the rest of his life Gerald Levy was Bogle, later Mr Wacky, and by the end he had given Dancehall more of its vocabulary than any dancer before or since.

If you have ever learned a Dancehall step from a video without being told who made it, this article is the correction.

Roses Corner

Levy came up between Trench Town and Lincoln Crescent, the stretch of Kingston 13 everybody calls Roses Corner. He was a founding member of the Black Roses Crew, the crew that formed there and set the standard the rest of the island measured itself against through the 1990s.

It is worth saying plainly what that meant. Roses Corner was a poor neighbourhood in a city where poor neighbourhoods were also political territory. The crew’s reputed leader, Willie Haggart, was shot dead alongside two other members on a Kingston street on 18 April 2001, and the reprisals that followed took many more lives. The dances that came out of that world are joyful, and they were never naive. Anyone who teaches them owes the room that context.

The name Bogle is generally understood to come from Paul Bogle, the deacon who led the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 and who stands today among Jamaica’s national heroes. Accounts differ on exactly how the name attached itself to the dancer. What is not in dispute is that a young man from Kingston 13 ended up carrying the name of a national hero, and that nobody in Jamaica found this strange.

How a move gets its name

To understand what Bogle did, you have to understand the machine he was working inside.

A dancer invents a step at a session — a sound system stacked in a yard, a street claimed for the night. The floor watches. If the step is good, the floor takes it, and within weeks it is everywhere. Then a deejay who was in that room records a tune that names the step and tells you when to do it. The record travels — London, Toronto, Tokyo, Paris — and the step travels inside it.

That is why so many Dancehall steps share a name with a song, and it is why so many people get the order backwards. The song is the distribution. The dancer is the origin.

Bogle’s own step went out into the world on Buju Banton’s “Bogle”, one of the hits that made 1992 Banton’s year in Jamaica. A decade later, Elephant Man’s “Log On” (2001) did the same job for the Log On. After Bogle’s death, Elephant Man’s “Willie Bounce” carried a step Bogle had made in his final years — with a line in the lyric telling you outright that the man was gone and his dancing was not.

The rooms mattered as much as the records. Weddy Weddy Wednesdays at Stone Love’s headquarters, and, from Ash Wednesday 2003, the Passa Passa street dance that took over a stretch of Spanish Town Road in Tivoli Gardens, were not nightlife in the ordinary sense. They were where a step was proposed, judged, and either adopted or dropped, in front of the only jury that counted.

The vocabulary he left

A partial list of the steps credited to him reads like the index of an entire decade: the Bogle, World Dance, the Wacky Dip, Log On, Row Like a Boat, the Willie Bounce, Zip It Up, the Urkel, Jerry Springer, Sesame Street, Pop Yuh Collar, Out and Bad, Sweeper, L.O.Y.

Read the names again and you can see how he thought.

Some are pure action, named for what the body does: Row Like a Boat, Sweeper, Zip It Up. The mime is not decoration — it is what makes a step legible from the far side of a crowded floor.

Some are 1990s television, arriving in Kingston through a satellite dish: the Urkel, after the character from the American sitcom Family Matters; Jerry Springer; Sesame Street. Dancehall has always absorbed whatever is in the room and answered it in its own accent.

One is technology. Log On was made when logging on was still a new phrase in ordinary speech, and it became the most widely exported Dancehall step of its decade.

And one is a memorial. The Willie Bounce is named for Willie Haggart, killed in 2001. When you dance it, you are saying a man’s name with your body. If you cannot say who Willie was, you have learned a shape and left the story behind.

20 January 2005

He had been at Weddy Weddy Wednesdays at Stone Love’s headquarters and left around two in the morning. At a service station in St Andrew, gunmen fired into his car. He was taken to Kingston Public Hospital and died there. He was forty years old.

No one has ever been prosecuted. Beenie Man, who called him the greatest dancer of all time, publicly offered a reward for information; nothing came of it. Rumours circulated then and circulate still. This article will not repeat them, because they remain rumours and a man is dead.

His funeral filled Kingston. Two decades on, dancers still mark the date.

Why we say his name in class

The reason to know all of this is not reverence for its own sake. It is that Bogle established the rule Dancehall still runs on: a step has an author, and the author is named.

That rule is what separates practising a culture from borrowing one. It is also, in the most practical sense, what separates dancing a step from performing an impression of it. The Willie Bounce danced by someone who knows what it commemorates does not look like the Willie Bounce danced by someone who saw it on a phone. The weight sits differently. The pause means something.

Every dancer who came after him works inside the system he built — Ding Dong and the Ravers Clavers as much as anyone. When they make a step, name it, and a deejay puts that name in a tune, they are using a mechanism Bogle proved.

So when you learn the Bogle here, you will be asked who made it, and when, and why the name matters. That is not a formality. It is the first thing the step is for.