1917 – 1928
New Orleans Jazz
As Storyville goes dark, a Creole city's marching bands and blues braid into the first recorded jazz, then ride the riverboats north to Chicago.
Enter this chapter1917——2000/18 MOVEMENTS · 6 CONTINENTS
Every music scene has a geography.
A source-backed atlas of a musical century — from New Orleans 1917 to Seoul 2000, eighteen movements across six continents. Every node, every date, every claim cited.
Every node, edge and date traces to a verified open source. · MUSICBRAINZ · WIKIDATA · CC0
Eighteen movements, one world map
02 / Movimentos1929 – 1941
Delta Blues
On Mississippi plantations a lone voice and a bottleneck guitar distill hardship into a form that would seed nearly all of American popular music.
Enter this chapter1944 – 1950
Bebop
In the after-hours rooms of Harlem, breakneck tempos and serpentine harmony reclaim jazz from the dance floor as a music for listening.
Enter this chapter1951 – 1956
Memphis Rock'n'Roll
In a storefront studio on Union Avenue, blues and country collide into a backbeat that would remake American popular music.
Enter this chapter1956 – 1964
Bossa Nova
A hushed guitar and a cool harmony reinvent samba in the apartments of Rio's Zona Sul — and quietly cross into the jazz rooms of New York.
Enter this chapter1968 – 1973
Kingston Reggae
The downbeat slows and deepens in Trench Town, and a single island studio sound carries a message of resistance across the globe.
Enter this chapter1960 – 1966
Merseybeat
In the sweat of Liverpool's Cavern Club, imported American rock and roll is rebuilt as bright guitar-pop — and four locals carry it to the world.
Enter this chapter1967 – 1976
Rock Nacional
In Buenos Aires, a generation insists on rock sung in Spanish, turning the language and the city into a music of its own.
Enter this chapter1967 – 1972
Tropicália
A Bahian generation answers that elegance with electric collage and pointed critique — until the dictatorship pushes its voices into London exile.
Enter this chapter1970 – 1977
Lagos Afrobeat
Highlife, jazz and funk fuse into long, insurgent grooves at the Shrine, where the band and the politics are inseparable.
Enter this chapter1973 – 1979
Bronx Hip-Hop
Two turntables and a microphone turn block parties into an art form, looping the break until a borough invents a new language.
Enter this chapter1976 – 1978
UK Punk
Three chords and a sneer detonate across London, trading virtuosity for velocity and handing the means of music to anyone.
Enter this chapter1979 – 1985
City Pop
Tokyo's boom years glow in glossy, studio-perfect funk and soft rock — a soundtrack for the neon, the cars and the late-night city.
Enter this chapter1983 – 1988
Chicago House
On the floor of the Warehouse, a drum machine and a four-on-the-floor pulse turn disco's ashes into a new sacred groove.
Enter this chapter1981 – 1988
Detroit Techno
Three friends in the suburbs imagine a machine future, building cold, propulsive funk from drum machines and synthesizers.
Enter this chapter1988 – 1994
Seattle Grunge
Distortion, flannel and dread rise from the Pacific Northwest, dragging the underground into the center of the world's attention.
Enter this chapter1991 – 1997
Berlin Techno
In a reunified city's empty vaults and power plants, Detroit's machine pulse becomes the relentless heartbeat of a Wall that has just fallen.
Enter this chapter1995 – 2000
K-Pop
In Seoul, a new industry engineers idol groups that fuse hip-hop, R&B and pop into a polished export built for a coming global wave.
Enter this chapter04 / Método
An atlas you can audit
MusicScene is not a playlist and not an opinion. It is a scene-graph: people, works, releases, events and venues, each pinned to a place and a date, each connected by an influence, a collaboration, a migration or a reaction. Facts trace to MusicBrainz and Wikidata; the prose is our own. Nothing ships without a citation.
452sourced nodes
261mapped connections
100%open citations
05 / Lista
New movements, as we chart them
We are mapping one scene at a time. Leave an email and we will write once — when the next atlas opens.
06 / Sobre
About MusicScene
MusicScene is a research probe by Vin Busquet: an experiment in telling music history as a cartography of evidence. We believe a movement is best understood as a shape on a map and a span on a timeline — a network of named people, real places and dated works. The atlas charts eighteen movements across six continents, 1917–2000, fully bilingual, fully cited. If a sourced historical atlas is something you'd teach with or learn from, we'd like to hear from you.