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One index for everything published: records, stories, watchable media, community memories and places. 25 records match.
Late-1970s British ska-revival movement centred on Coventry, named for the 2 Tone Records label Jerry Dammers founded in 1979; racially integrated bands (The Specials, The Selecter, The Beat, Madness) fused Jamaican ska and rocksteady with punk energy, and the black-and-white checkerboard imagery advanced an explicitly anti-racist message during a period of National Front agitation. It is a direct diaspora transplant of Jamaican ska onto post-Windrush multicultural Britain (Wikipedia '2 Tone'; Dave Thompson 'Wheels Out of the Garage'; BBC Music).
genre · Well supportedAfro-dancehallA two-way fusion of Jamaican dancehall with West African pop (notably Nigerian and Ghanaian Afrobeats), audible in collaborations linking Jamaican and African artists across the 2010s and 2020s. Emblematic of a Black Atlantic exchange rather than one-directional influence.
genre · Well supportedDancehall-popA pop-facing style that fuses dancehall's riddim feel and vocal phrasing with mainstream pop and electronic production, popularised internationally in the 2010s. Documented as a distinct crossover label alongside the debate over whether such records credit their Jamaican source.
genre · Well supportedDembowDominican genre named directly for Shabba Ranks's 1990 "Dem Bow": the rhythm loop from that record's Jamaican production line became the fixed pulse of a whole Santo Domingo street music. A clear case of a single Kingston rhythm seeding a national genre abroad.
genre · Well supportedDigital dancehallThe music that followed Sleng Teng in 1985, built on programmed keyboards and drum machines rather than a band in a room. It made records cheaper and faster to produce, which put them within reach of far more people, and it changed the sound completely — harder, drier, and rhythmically freer than anything a live rhythm section had been playing. Almost every Jamaican record since is downstream of it.
genre · Well supportedDrum and bassUK genre that emerged from jungle in the mid-1990s: breakbeats at high speed over sub-bass, with the bass-weight, MC culture and dubplate economy inherited from Britain's Jamaican sound systems. One of the clearest cases of sound-system culture generating a new music outside Jamaica.
genre · Well supportedDubThe remix before the word existed: Jamaican engineers of the early 1970s — King Tubby foremost, with Lee Perry, Errol Thompson and their successors — stripped the vocal from a rhythm and rebuilt what remained live at the desk, drums and bass forward, fragments of voice and horns drenched in reverb and delay. It began as B-side economics and became a form in its own right, and its fingerprints are on remix culture, hip hop instrumentals, jungle, dubstep and every music that treats the studio as an instrument.
genre · Well supportedDub poetryPoetry written to be spoken over a reggae rhythm, or written with that rhythm already in it. The name is generally credited to Oku Onuora, and the form runs through Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Michael Smith and Jean Binta Breeze — political, spoken in Jamaican language, and taking the deejay's relationship to a rhythm somewhere the dancehall was not going.
genre · Well supportedDubstepThe south London sound of the early 2000s: half-step drums and enormous sub-bass grown out of UK garage's darker rooms, named — accurately — for its dub inheritance. Its dubplate culture, bass-weight priorities and soundsystem listening all descend from the Jamaican line.
genre · Well supportedGospel reggaeGospel carried on reggae and dancehall rhythm — a substantial Jamaican industry of its own, and the destination of major dancehall careers: Papa San and Lt. Stitchie took their deejay craft to ministry, and Marion Hall left the Lady Saw persona for gospel in 2015.
genre · Well supportedGrimeEast London's 140bpm MC music of the early 2000s, built on UK garage's wreckage with the pirate-radio, reload and clash culture of the sound system underneath. The Jamaican inheritance is generational — many of its founders are the grandchildren of the Windrush sound men.
genre · Well supportedJungleUK genre of the early 1990s built from chopped breakbeats run at high speed under reggae and dancehall basslines, with MCs working crowds sound-system style. It grew where Britain's Jamaican sound-system culture met hardcore rave, and fed directly into drum and bass.
genre · Well supportedLovers rockThe romantic reggae style that grew up in Britain from the mid-1970s — softer, slower and sung largely by young Black British women, over reggae rhythms shaped for the front room and the house party rather than the sound clash. Louisa Mark's "Caught You in a Lie" is usually treated as the starting point. It gave second-generation Caribbean Britain a music of its own, distinct from what Jamaica was exporting.
genre · Well supportedMentoJamaica's rural folk music and its first commercially recorded popular form — banjo, guitar, hand drum and the rumba box supplying the bass, with lyrics that ran to social comment, innuendo and topical wit. Mento was being recorded from the early 1950s, notably at Stanley Motta's studio, and was often sold abroad under the "calypso" label. Everything that followed grew from it, and its rhythmic and lyrical habits persist right through ska, reggae and dancehall.
genre · Well supportedNyabinghi chantThe ceremonial music of Rastafari groundations: chanted hymns — many reworked from church sources — over the three-drum ensemble of bass, funde and repeater, sustained for hours in worship. It entered the studio through Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari and underpins roots reggae's whole rhythmic conscience.
