The cost of the bar

What the drink records do not sing about, and what the sponsorship money does not pay for.

Liquor in Jamaican music is a business, a pleasure and a genuine harm, and all three are true at once. The dance ends and people drive home from it: Jamaica's Road Traffic Act 2018, brought into force with the Road Traffic Regulations on 1 February 2023, tightened the drink-driving regime and put breath testing on a statutory footing precisely because that journey kills people. Dependence is the slower version of the same cost, and it lands hardest on the people least able to absorb it.

Reggae said this long before the law did. Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus' "Don't Sell Daddy No Whisky" puts it in a child's voice. Mike Brooks' "Rum Drinker", Freddie McGregor's "Wine of Violence", Steel Pulse's "Man No Sober", Macka B's "Don't Drink Too Much" and Lucky Dube's "Slave", the record that gave the phrase "liquor slave" its currency, form a cautionary tradition running parallel to the celebration, and mostly on the roots and conscious side of the music. Rebel Salute's alcohol-free main stage is the same argument built as a festival.

This record exists so that the archive's drinks collection reads as history rather than advertising.