Roots
Five records from before the map starts. Everything else we publish is downstream of one of these, and most of it is downstream of several.
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James Brown / Cold Sweat
Start here. Brown tells the band to put the accent on the first beat and stop changing chord, and the next sixty years of dance music become possible in about eight bars.
Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
The mixing desk becomes an instrument. Every record on this site built from the bass upward, with the vocal free to vanish for a bar, is working from the grammar King Tubby set here.
Neu! / Hallogallo
Ten minutes of a beat that never accents anything. The idea that a rhythm can drive without swinging is the one European contribution the Americans genuinely had to import.
Donna Summer / I Feel Love
Eno reportedly burst into Bowie's Berlin session announcing that the sound of the future had arrived. Early by about six years, and wrong by about nothing.
Public Image Ltd / Public Image
The guitar stops chugging and starts ringing, the bass takes the tune, and British guitar music spends the next fifteen years working out what to do with the space that left.