The American Music Continuum
Linguists describe creole languages as a continuum, a gradient with no hard borders. American music works the same way: every sound on this map is a different blend of the same inherited voices.
Dates are best approximations, marked c. where a sound has no single starting point. Music rarely begins on one night in one room. Most of these sounds form over years before anyone names them, and by the time the world says a scene is here, it is often already turning into the next thing. So circles fade in before their date and fade out slowly after.
Each circle sits where a sound took shape; large circles cover a region, small ones are offshoots of a genre. Lines appear while a sound is new, or when you select it. New York has its own zoomed view, where lines from elsewhere enter at the edge of the map. A prototype: placement and lineage are editorial calls, simplified on purpose.Made by Dash Brody , music curator and DJ, New York. More at dashspeaks.com .