Sleng Teng riddim

How a preset rhythm on a consumer keyboard turned Jamaica's oldest studio economy into the digital age.

A rhythm built in a Kingston studio in 1989 travelled to Panama, through New York, into San Juan, and became the pulse of the biggest Spanish-language pop music on earth. A Los Angeles court is now preparing to put the question of who owns it to a jury.

In the studios of 1970s Kingston, engineers learned to dismantle a finished song and rebuild it as something stranger, launching the version, the remix and the idea of the producer as author.

The digital riddim turned the producer into the star of the record - and the story runs from a Casio preset to the modern hit factory.

For fifty years the surest way to hear Jamaican music was not to turn on a Jamaican radio. This is how that changed — and what it cost the people who changed it.

When King Jammy's went digital in 1985, a wave of deejays rode the new Waterhouse computer sound into the dancehall mainstream.

In Jamaica the rhythm track, not the finished song, is the durable unit of creativity.