The written histories

Willie Bounce, Dutty Wine, Gully Creepa: dancehall's dance crazes travelled as a package deal of move, name and tune.

From a Waterhouse dance troupe to a fashion collective archived in art museums, Jamaica's street-dance crews built a lineage of their own.

When the camera came on, the dance began: how a handful of videographers turned being seen into the point of the party.

Outside Passa Passa, Uptown Mondays and Weddy Weddy Wednesdays, the parking lot was its own runway.

A Coventry label built its entire sound, and its politics, on records its founders had spent years studying.

Before jungle had a name, London's ragga deejays were already writing its vocabulary.

How a London label turned King Tubby's mixing-desk science into a post-punk-era sound of its own.

Long before streaming, a ring of summer festivals across Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands turned reggae into one of Europe's most durable live-music economies.

From Grammy categories to TikTok trends, Jamaican music has always come with an argument attached.

How a scattered corps of print critics and radio DJs first wrote and broadcast reggae into international recognition.

How Jamaican television built a daily newsroom for dancehall - and what happens to it when artists broadcast themselves.

From Lady Ann's toasting through Sister Carol's feminist chat to Tifa and Lisa Hyper's 2000s run, women built a parallel lineage on the mic.

Jamaican-born women carried dub poetry's reasoning voice from Kingston yards to Toronto stages and a Halifax poet laureateship.

Before the I-Threes, a chain of Kingston vocal trios gave reggae's harmony sound its female voice.

Producers, executives and one dancer whose stand-off with a promoter opened a stage to Rastafarian drumming -- the women who ran the business side of Jamaican music.

A Jamaica, Queens record shop, a Sunday-night radio slot and a Queens concert hall built dancehall's American home base.

From one Yokohama selector in 1984 to stadium-sized festivals, Japan built the most devoted non-Jamaican dancehall scene in the world.

West Indian canal labourers, Panamanian raggamuffin deejays and a wave of Spanish- and Portuguese-language bands carried Jamaican reggae across Latin America.

A handful of Jamaican rhythm tracks are so familiar that a single drum fill or bassline note identifies them across fifty years and three generations of dancehall.

When producers like Steely and Clevie, Dave Kelly, Tony Kelly and Don Corleon began building rhythms on drum machines and keyboards, a handful of their tracks came to run entire dancehall seasons.