What it is
Dembow is the drum pattern under most reggaeton, the one people sing as “boom-ch-boom-chick.” The name comes from Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow” (1991), a Jamaican dancehall track whose riddim was played by Steely and Clevie and produced by Bobby “Digital” Dixon.
The musicologist Wayne Marshall wrote in 2008 that pieces of that riddim show up in more than 80% of reggaeton productions. The original lyric was homophobic; the word later came to mean just the beat.
The path runs from Jamaica, through Panamanian reggae en español, to the underground in Puerto Rico in the nineties, and from there to the whole world.
How it shows up for me
I grew up with this beat coming out of every car in Puerto Rico. Knowing the history makes me love it more, not less: it’s a Caribbean conversation that took decades, between islands, in two languages.