Don’t read the historyLive through it

"007 (Shanty Town)," Desmond Dekker & the Aces' 1967 rocksteady hit, drew directly on "rude boy" street culture and gang imagery, helping establish the rude-boy narrative as a recurring theme in Jamaican pop reaching international audiences.

Sister Nancy (Ophlin Russell) is a Jamaican deejay whose "Bam Bam" became one of dancehall's most widely circulated recordings.

Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981), the singer, songwriter and guitarist from Nine Mile, St Ann who became the most widely heard voice Jamaica has produced. He formed The Wailers with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh in the early 1960s, moving through ska and rocksteady at Studio One before the group's roots-reggae work with Lee "Scratch" Perry and then the international run on Island from Catch a Fire (1973) onward. Shot at his Hope Road home in December 1976 two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, he played anyway, left for London, and returned in 1978 to join the hands of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga on stage at the One Love Peace Concert. He died of melanoma in 1981, aged 36, and was awarded the Order of Merit. His catalogue remains the single largest route by which the rest of this archive reaches the world. He married Rita Anderson in 1966 and had children with several other women during the marriage; Cedella, Ziggy, Stephen, Sharon (adopted), Stephanie (adopted), Robbie, Rohan, Karen, Julian, Ky-Mani, Damian and Makeda are all recognised among his children, several of them Grammy-winning musicians in their own right.

The downtown Kingston street known as Beat Street: the record-shop and label corridor where Prince Buster's Record Shack, Beverley's and a dense run of other retailers and producers operated. For decades it was where a record was pressed, sold, heard and made famous within a few hundred yards, and it functions in the archive as shorthand for the commercial heart of the music.

A cross-border human-rights campaign collided with dancehall over lyrics, cancellations and a disputed pledge.

A Coventry label built its entire sound, and its politics, on records its founders had spent years studying.

How Jamaica's one-producer labels, London's licensing houses and a family firm in Queens joined into a single map of the music business.

Every great Jamaican deejay of the 1960s and 70s served an apprenticeship on a named sound system.

creative revival & free expression vs cultural disrespect & heritage guardianship

Support for the ruling alongside criticism of institutional delay

Gary Exodus's account of the family and institutional lineage behind Exodus Nuclear and Exodus Studios