BAM BAM
Sister Nancy voiced the Stalag riddim in 1982 and made a dancehall record with an afterlife nobody could have predicted. Decades of samples turned “Bam Bam” into a global echo of Jamaican deejay culture.
Sister Nancy recorded “Bam Bam” in 1982 over Winston Riley’s Stalag 17 riddim. The track came from the early dancehall world of reusable foundations, deejays and sound-system performance, but its second life became almost as important as the first. Later artists and producers sampled the recording repeatedly across hip-hop, R&B and pop, making Nancy’s voice familiar to listeners who may never have known the original riddim or session. That global sampling history is worth following back to the source: a Jamaican woman deejay riding a foundation that was already nearly a decade old.