STORY · GLOBAL
Who keeps the record
Well supported
The museums, archives and channels that store Jamaica's musical memory.
A tour of the institutions - from the ACIJ and National Library to the Peter Tosh Museum and the music-TV channels - that decide what of Jamaican music is remembered.
The memory problem
Jamaican music travelled the globe faster than anyone thought to file it. The result is a permanent tension between a culture largely made in yards and dances and the formal institutions trying to catch and keep it.
Much of the deep record sits in state bodies. The African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, with the Jamaica Memory Bank folded into it, holds thousands of audiovisual records of folk song and oral history; the National Library of Jamaica keeps the print and photographic trail; and the Institute of Jamaica's Jamaica Journal carries the scholarship.
Shrines and screens
Other memory is public spectacle. Purpose-built shrines like the Peter Tosh Museum and the Jamaica Music Museum turn artefacts into pilgrimage, while a great deal of everyday memory lives on screen - the music-video and interview output of Hype TV, RETV and Television Jamaica.
A culture made in the dance still has to decide what it saves.
Live memory
Some institutions keep the record by keeping it moving. Televised competitions like Dancin' Dynamites archive the present tense of Jamaican dance even as they create it, a reminder that in this music the archive and the stage are often the same place.