May 1980, London: Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson drops Bass Culture on Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, the first of two LPs he’d release that year. Jamaica-born and Brixton-raised, the album finds Johnson distilling Babylon’s heavy hand into deep, subterranean basslines laced with incendiary street-level missives — “muzik of blood, black reared pain, rooted heart geared, all tensed up.”