The written histories

Pink Panther made Black Kat feared. Tony Matterhorn sharpened his clash craft on King Addies. Then each selector carried that history into a career bearing his own name.

February in Jamaica is an official music month — part commemoration, part trade fair, part argument about what the state owes the culture it now celebrates.

Six records that sit exactly on the fault lines: where ska begins, where it slows, where reggae gets its name, where dub, deejay and digital take over.

Noise laws, broadcast bans and courtrooms have shaped Jamaican music as surely as studios did — and they left the paper trail the studios never kept.

Jamaican television and radio interviews are where most artists have told their own version, and almost none of it sits in an archive anybody maintains.

The record is only part of it. Dancehall is also a dance vocabulary, a weekly street calendar and a man on a microphone whose job is to make the room feel like something.

From the rude boy's sharp suit to a Northamptonshire shoe that dancehall made its own, Jamaican music has always dressed itself, and the clothes carry the argument.

Between the studio and the dance sits a factory. Jamaica's pressing plants, its blank-label pre-releases and its export routes shaped what the music sounded like as much as any producer did.

Reggae did not simply get exported. Sounds in Yokohama, Stuttgart and London built their own scenes, flew to Kingston for dubplates, and started winning.

Archival labels did not make the music, but they decided which of it the world could hear, and their sleeve notes became the first real scholarship the records ever had.

Jamaican records reached the world by half a dozen different routes — a London pop session, a film soundtrack, a cover version, a remix — and almost never the one the industry expected.

Dub poetry put Jamaican speech and reggae bass on the page and the stage at once, and made a form that belongs equally to Kingston, London and Toronto.

Women in Jamaican music ran labels, owned catalogues, sang the rhythms that never went out of print and took dancehall abroad — usually while being described as somebody's backing singer.

The rewind is a review. In the dance, a crowd decides in eight bars whether a record lives, and the argument about what it should be saying has run for forty years.

A sound system has two modes: the clash, where it fights, and the juggling, where it keeps a dance alive. Cassette tapes of both are the closest thing Jamaica has to a live archive.

In Jamaican music a rhythm track is not the background to one song. It is a shared address that dozens of records live at, and it works like an index to the whole archive.

In Jamaica the mixing desk became an instrument, and the men behind it — King Tubby, Errol Thompson, Scientist, Lee Perry — became performers in their own right.

Ska was made by trained musicians working in a real industry: a Catholic school band room, hotel dance floors, a purpose-built pressing plant and a government keen to export a national sound.

Revival, Kumina, Maroon and mento traditions supplied the rhythms, drums and speech that Jamaica's recording studios later turned into ska, reggae and dub.

How distant AM signals, cautious island gatekeepers and pirate transmitters carried Jamaican records from Kingston's dances to London and New York.