Small Island, Long Reach

There is a statistic that gets quoted in Kingston and is difficult to verify precisely but broadly holds: Jamaica has produced more recorded music per head of population than anywhere else on earth. For an island of under three million people, it has generated ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall, and — through the sound-system culture that Jamaican migrants took to London and New York — a substantial share of the DNA of hip hop, jungle, garage, dubstep and grime.

No comparable country has exported that much. Understanding how is the most interesting thing about Jamaica, and it has almost nothing to do with the beach the airline advertises.

The sound system

It begins in the late 1940s with a piece of infrastructure rather than a song. Jamaicans who could not afford live bands built enormous mobile PA systems — amplifiers, hand-built speaker boxes, a turntable — and took them to open-air dances in Kingston. The operator was the selector; the man who talked over the records was the deejay; and the competition between rival systems was fierce enough that operators scratched the labels off their exclusive records so rivals could not identify them.

When American rhythm and blues supply dried up in the late fifties, the sound system owners started recording their own, and the Jamaican music industry was born as a by-product of a dance-floor arms race. Studio One and Treasure Isle became the equivalent of Motown and Stax on a fraction of the budget.

The technical innovations came from the same pressure. The version — an instrumental cut of a track on the B-side, for deejays to talk over — created the concept of the remix. Producers began stripping vocals, drenching the remainder in reverb and delay and dropping instruments in and out of the mix in real time, and that became dub: arguably the first music in which the recording studio itself is played as an instrument. King Tubby and Lee Perry are the names, and their influence on everything electronic that followed is not disputed by anyone who has looked at it.

The deejay talking over the version became toasting, which migrated with Jamaican families to the Bronx, where a Kingston-born DJ called Kool Herc set up a sound system and began extending the instrumental breaks. The line from a Kingston lawn dance to hip hop is direct and traceable.

A country too poor to hire bands built speaker stacks instead, and accidentally invented the remix, the DJ and half of modern popular music.

Rasta, Marley and what got exported

Rastafari emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s, drawing on Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanism and on the crowning of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia, and was for decades treated by the Jamaican state and respectable society as a criminal deviance. Adherents were arrested, beaten and forcibly shorn.

Reggae carried its language and its imagery into global culture, and Bob Marley carried reggae. What travelled was partly the spirituality and partly a marketable simplification of it, and Jamaicans are considerably more ambivalent about the result than the T-shirts suggest.

The Bob Marley Museum on Hope Road in Kingston is his actual house, with the bullet holes from the 1976 assassination attempt still in the wall, and it is a serious visit rather than a gift shop. Trench Town Culture Yard, the government housing where he lived as a teenager, is run by the community and is the better of the two if you only do one.

What has happened since is dancehall, which is faster, more digital, more explicit, wildly inventive linguistically, and which most foreign visitors have never heard because it has no interest in being exported. The soundtrack of contemporary Jamaica is dancehall, not reggae, and the assumption that it is otherwise is the single most reliable marker of a visitor.

The Maroons and the mountains

The interior explains a great deal. Jamaica’s Cockpit Country is a karst landscape of conical limestone hills and sinkholes covering hundreds of square kilometres — almost impossible terrain to move an army through, and therefore the place enslaved people escaped to.

The Jamaican Maroons fought two wars against the British in the eighteenth century and won a treaty in 1739 recognising their autonomy and their land. Accompong in St Elizabeth still holds an annual celebration on 6 January marking it, and the Windward Maroon communities in the Blue Mountains around Moore Town maintain their own traditions — the abeng, a cow-horn instrument used to signal across valleys during the wars, and the Kromanti language and ceremony, inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage.

The Blue and John Crow Mountains are a UNESCO World Heritage site listed for both natural and cultural value — the forest, and the Maroon history within it. Blue Mountain Peak at 2,256 metres is climbed overnight to reach the summit at dawn, when on a clear morning Cuba is visible 200 kilometres away. And the coffee grown on those slopes, at altitude in cloud, commands prices that make it one of the most valuable agricultural products per kilo in the world.

The fastest people alive

The other Jamaican export that outruns the size of the country is sprinting, and the numbers are genuinely difficult to explain away.

A nation of under three million has held the men’s and women’s 100-metre world records, won the great majority of available Olympic sprint medals across multiple cycles, and produced the fastest human ever timed. No comparably sized country dominates any sport to that degree.

The explanations that get offered abroad tend toward genetics and tend to be thin. What Jamaicans point to is institutional: the Inter-Secondary Schools Boys and Girls Championships — Champs — held every March at the National Stadium in Kingston, which fills a 30,000-seat arena for a schools athletics meet and has done for the better part of a century. Children are identified, coached and competed seriously from primary age, within a school system that treats track as the prestige sport rather than a side activity.

Add a domestic university programme that retained athletes who would previously have taken US scholarships, coaching lineages that stay in the country, and a set of local heroes who did not leave, and you have a pipeline rather than an accident. Champs is the single best sporting event in the Caribbean to attend, and tickets are cheap.

The two economies

Jamaica receives millions of visitors a year, overwhelmingly into all-inclusive resorts on the north coast at Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios, plus cruise calls. The model delivers employment and foreign exchange and retains a smaller share of spending in the country than the headline arrival numbers suggest, because packages are prepaid abroad and much of the supply chain is imported.

The alternative is not hard. The south coast — Treasure Beach, Black River, YS Falls, the Pelican Bar standing on a sandbar a kilometre offshore — is run largely by Jamaican-owned small businesses and has a community tourism association that predates the term. Port Antonio in the north-east is the old-money, low-key end, with the Blue Lagoon and Reach Falls and rafting on the Rio Grande on bamboo rafts originally used to move bananas.

Kingston is skipped by almost every package visitor and is where the country actually is: the National Gallery, Devon House, the music studios, the food, and a street energy that Montego Bay does not have. Violent crime in Jamaica is concentrated in specific inner-city communities and is real; the practical rule, given by every Kingstonian, is to take local advice about specific areas rather than avoid the capital wholesale.

And eat. Jerk at Boston Bay where the technique is from — pimento wood, a drum, a long slow smoke — ackee and saltfish for breakfast, curry goat, escovitch fish, patties from a Tastee or a Juici, and a cold Ting. The food is as much of an export as the music and considerably less imitated abroad with any accuracy.