He then lattices in a vocal flex, a naked, syncopated “duh-do-duh” rhythm. The moment that distills the drama, and to my mind, the all-time purest glimpse of Gaye’s bloody-minded vision, can be found on the apocalyptic disco cut “Love Party.” Midway into the song, the fripperies fall away, Gaye turns sultry, and for a minute it’s just you and him, swaying in unison as fairy lights flash up around you. An imitation of Trinity’s squeal, it’s a glorious sound, somewhere between the chirp of a synthesizer and a raindrop striking a taut wire. But then, about a minute in, the surface cracks, and a single, hiccupping yelp rings out in time with a steady, backbeat rimshot. Their voices are cool and restrained as they reel off lines about their effortless style. Their version, produced by Joe Gibbs, boasts a surfeit of vivid textures, all inextricable from one another: Cowbell, clavinet, guitar, drums, horns, and organ cling together like the atoms of some complex molecule. The genre isn’t made to accommodate flashy guitar solos or even spotlight-grabbing vocal turns it’s a music of granular details perpetually being folded back into the mix, and that’s also true of Althea & Donna’s 1977 single “Uptown Top Ranking.” When they recorded their response to Trinity’s 1975 hit “ Three Piece Suit,” Jamaican singers Althea Forrest and Donna Reid used the same Alton Ellis riddim that Trinity had for his song. –Isabelia Herrera Althea & Donna: “Uptown Top Ranking” It felt like finally getting permission to not “make sense,” to embrace the process of becoming-to know that I could exist both imperfectly and impossibly. That I could love emo as much as I loved bachata. When Ivy spit “No soy de hierro/Yo soy una mujer” (“I’m not made of iron I’m a woman”), it gave me the means to recognize that being vulnerable and being powerful were not disparate ways of being. At 14, I imagined an entire lifetime in the space of this song, a future romance turned sour when I was old enough to understand love.

The song is about vengeance: Ivy promises retaliation to an unfaithful lover, in spite of her heartache. Ivy’s coarse baritone, the requinto guitar riffs, and the dembow riddim that hits around the 32-second mark is a potent storm of melancholia. chasing some futile sense of reconnection to the island that shaped me. “Te He Querido, Te He Llorado” (“I Have Loved You, I Have Cried for You”) is a bachatón song, a style of reggaetón that felt like it was made specifically for me, a Dominican kid growing up in the U.S.

Art of noise moments in love rap song