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Basement Jam Session

Eighty-six records assembled with one instruction: no sitting down. Dancehall, soca, afrobeats, house and hip-hop, sequenced for a basement rather than a listening room.

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Basement Jam Session

Every other playlist on this blog is built for attention. This one is built for a room full of people, and the difference in construction is total: the tempos are matched, the transitions are hard, and nothing is included because it is interesting.

What makes it worth hearing as a set rather than just using as a utility is the geography. Jamaican dancehall, Trinidadian soca, Barbadian and Nigerian pop, Latin trap, South African gqom and American club records all sit next to each other, and the sequencing treats them as one continuous tradition — which, on a sound system, they effectively are.

What to listen for

Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" is the oldest and most important record here — the 1982 track built on Kraftwerk that effectively invented electro and, through it, a great deal of everything that follows on this list.

Chaka Demus & Pliers' "Murder She Wrote" is the dancehall standard, and its rhythm — the Bam Bam riddim — is one of the most reused in Jamaican music.

Shabba Ranks' "Good Woman" and Collie Buddz's "Mamacita" hold the older and newer dancehall ends.

The soca selections are the ones most listeners will not know and should: Olatunji's "Ola", Ricky T and Skinny Banton's "Saltfish" remix and Biggie Irie's "My Island" are all Carnival records, built for a different kind of crowd movement entirely.

Zacari and Babes Wodumo's "Redemption" is the South African crossover — Babes Wodumo was central to gqom, Durban's hardest dance export.

Beyoncé's "Standing on the Sun" remix with Mr. Vegas is the deep cut from her catalogue, and Paloma Mami's "Not Steady" is the Chilean-American entry.

Sevana's "Bit Too Shy" and Sean Paul and Dua Lipa's "No Lie" are the two best-constructed pop records here.

Go deeper

For the soca tradition, start with Machel Montano and Bunji Garlin, then work back to Arrow and Lord Kitchener.

For dancehall's riddim system — the practice of many artists recording over one instrumental — the Bam Bam and Sleng Teng riddims are the two histories worth following, and they explain how this music actually works.

How to use it: this one is a tool rather than a listening record, and it is built accordingly — matched tempos, hard transitions, nothing included because it is interesting. Judge it by what happens in a room rather than in headphones, and the geographic sprawl stops looking eclectic and starts looking like one continuous tradition.

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