Jamaican Music, Technology, and Memory-Making

This presentation examines the relationship between Jamaican music, technological innovation, and cultural memory, situating Jamaica’s sonic traditions as foundational to global popular culture and, crucially, the emergence of hip-hop. It argues that Jamaican popular music functions as both an expressive form and a mnemonic system, where technologies ranging from Nyabinghi drums and sound systems to dub studios, digital audio workstations, and contemporary streaming platforms act as repositories and transmitters of cultural memory. Through the theoretical lens of the creative echo chamber and concepts of cultural memory and the archive, the study traces how repetition, versioning, and communal curation embed music into collective consciousness. Importantly, it frames Kingston’s creative echo chamber as the sonic blueprint for the global DJ. Practices pioneered in Jamaica including the selector’s soundclash, the producer’s versioning, and dub’s technological innovations migrated with Caribbean diasporas to the Bronx and became the core techniques of the hip-hop DJ as both artist and archivist. These transnational flows highlight how Jamaica’s musical innovations not only preserved memory but also generated new aesthetic and cultural futures across the Black Atlantic. The analysis highlights critical historical moments, including the rise of sound system culture, the studio experiments that led to the development of dub, the digital rupture brought about by Sleng Teng riddim, and the algorithmic governance of streaming platforms. It further considers the fragmented nature of Jamaican musical archives and the ethical questions surrounding rights, recognition, and preservation within the framework of the Kulcha Economy. The conclusion is that Jamaican music exemplifies a unique model of technological memory-making, where each innovation simultaneously conserves the past and catalyses new global movements, and argues for urgent policies to safeguard this living archive.

This event is part of Hart House’s Hip-Hop Diaspora 2.0: Hip-Hop, Technology, and Memory in the Americas, a series co-sponsored by the Faculty of Music.