The written histories

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.

How Kingston's record shops, and their heirs in London and New York, worked as A&R desk, bank, distributor and meeting point for Jamaican music.

From the Skatalites to the Firehouse Crew, uncredited studio bands built every era of Jamaican music while record labels named only singers and producers.

How black British teenagers turned reggae towards romance in 1970s London, and why the front-room blues dance became the music's true home.

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.

A path from Millie Small's 1964 crossover to Sister Nancy and Marcia Griffiths in global dance memory.

When Jamaican video vixens talk about the job themselves, the story is less about spectacle than about bookings, contracts and a path into other work.

Dancehall's music video directors turned VHS-era stage footage into a global visual language, and rarely got their names remembered for it.