I had hoped that this was a tune about sex and that the butterfly of the title referred to the sexual technique, the Venus Butterfly. Whenever I include a reggae/dancehall track on this blog, I always check West Indian patois dictionary sites to see whether words on the records have alternative meanings in Carribbean dialect. You can imagine how my spirits soared when the index for one dictionary had it spelled buttafly. Here we go, I thought, confirmation that Admiral Bailey is singing about anal sex. Giddy up, giddy up just seemed to offer further encouragement to that line of thinking. New style come up (“He’s talking about his cock”), yes it was all becoming clear.
And then I clicked on the link and discovered that buttafly is indeed patois for er…butterfly and I must reluctantly concede that it’s about a dance craze which was sweeping the clubs and if Bailey is to be believed, was conquering the world as well.
Any disappointment about this banality is tempered by the fact that it’s a tremendous piece of music and in the reggae dominated singles charts of 1993-95, I’m surprised it never got picked up for wider release. It could have been a Loco-Motion for the 1990s.
Video courtesy of IrOnLiOnZiOn92
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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