STORIES
The written histories
Longer pieces about how the music actually happened — a studio, a rivalry, a rhythm, an argument that would not settle. Each one is tied to the records it concerns, and carries how firmly the atlas stands behind it.
144 published
The dance's endless argument: the warmth of the tube against the raw power of the transistor.
Is it still reggae? A living genre argues with itselfAs fusion, revival and trap reshaped the sound, the authenticity question came home.
Reggae becomes 'heritage'UNESCO's 2018 listing dignified the music worldwide - and started an argument about freezing a living culture.
The Reggae Grammy argumentOne category, a whole family of genres, and a recurring question: who counts as reggae?
The world dances to Jamaica: exchange, extraction, and creditDancehall's rhythms, moves and slang went global in the 2010s - the argument is over who gets credited.
Who gets paid when the world streams dancehall?Streaming globalised Jamaican music's reach - and rewired who earns from it.
'Murder music': an international campaign and a free-expression argumentA cross-border human-rights campaign collided with dancehall over lyrics, cancellations and a disputed pledge.
Gun talk: lyric, metaphor and the reality debateAre dancehall's hard lyrics reportage from the ghetto or incitement? The argument never closes.
Respectability and the dancehall space: bodies, fashion and the lawFashion, dance, skin and noise turned the dancehall into a battleground over Jamaican respectability.
Slackness and culture: dancehall's long argument with itselfHow the fight over 'slack' versus 'conscious' lyrics became dancehall's defining debate.
The airwaves on trial: dancehall and the Broadcasting CommissionJamaica's 2009 broadcast directives turned a dance craze into a censorship debate.
Drums they didn't want on airRastafari drumming came down from the Wareika Hills and onto record while colonial-era radio kept its distance.
Rude boys in the dockA mid-1960s moral panic over Kingston's rudies played out, verse by verse, on record.
Smutty songs and the respectable earFrom mento's bawdy word-play to a BBC-banned reggae hit, Jamaican music kept colliding with the politics of decency.
The rod, the bandwagon and the handshakeBetween 1972 and 1978, reggae went to the polls and then tried to broker a peace.
Apprenticed to the sound: the deejay ladderEvery great Jamaican deejay of the 1960s and 70s served an apprenticeship on a named sound system.
Lawn kings of downtown KingstonHow fenced yards, imported 78s and crowned sound men turned 1950s Kingston dances into an industry.
The amp men of KingstonFrom a 1947 shop-front amplifier to King Tubby's workshop, engineers built the sound system before anyone sang through it.
From Kingston to the Bronx: DJ Kool Herc and the Sound-System Roots of Hip-HopHow a Jamaican teenager carried the logic of the dancehall sound system into a South Bronx rec room and helped set hip-hop in motion.
Lyrical War: Dubplates, Sting, and the Art of the Sound ClashHow a one-off acetate became Jamaica's ultimate weapon, and the arena culture that turned selectors and deejays into generals.