We wrap musical genres around us as personal identifiers, like the plastic bracelets folded around newborns’ wrists. Their grooves become as familiar to us as our own heartbeat. So, to some steeped in the revolutionary associations of Jamaican music, hearing the one drop riddim blast out of regular old pop radio on a song like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” meant betrayal; dancehall had been hijacked and given a bizarre transplant in order to sound like some new entity called “tropical house.”

Hence the shock of seeing the bespectacled singer-songwriter beaming amidst the inner circle of today’s Caribbean musicians—Damian and Stephen Marley, Wyclef Jean, Chronixx, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Sizzla, and more—on the cover of the 2017 anthology Tropical House Cruises to Jamaica. A conceptual compilation, it set out to remind listeners of the original identity of tropical house by pulling together the style’s forebears alongside those they had influenced, like Sheeran.

Whether despite or because of the pop star’s contributions, the disc became surprisingly successful, especially considering it was the first release on a new indie label, Contractor/Amada Records. The buzz led to its founder, a Jamaican marketer, producer, and entrepreneur named Sean “Contractor” Edwards, releasing a thematic companion piece, Hip Hop Cruises to Jamaica. Try hearing the two compilations together with another recent anthology, Step Forward Youth, on the venerable reggae label VP, which unites tracks that inspired the scrappy mid-1970s alliance between British punks and Rastas. These three collections clinch the significance of one Caribbean island in altering the evolution of pop. They also function as a focus for debate: Who gets to reap the rewards when creativity spreads and mutates? Do cultural leaps forward come down to individual Great Originators, or can they “belong” to the communities they have built, as well as to their place of origin? And, above all, who should—and does—get paid when an underground sound rages around the world?

“We had a lot of negative feedback from hardcore reggae fans in regard to having Ed Sheeran on a reggae album,” label head Contractor tells me when we discuss some of these questions. “Most of the charts are dominated by American reggae bands; some Jamaicans worry about us losing reggae.”

But was seeing Sheeran in a Caribbean context really that big of a detour? The Jamaican national motto is “Out of Many, One People,” and though dominated by the African-derived drum—or its digital version—since Rasta’s 1970s rise, island music has always had a global strain. Since the late 15th century genocide of their indigenous people, the island’s inhabitants basically came there to work, whether forced or voluntarily. End result: Though essentially the product of African descendants, the house of reggae was also built by islanders of European, Lebanese, or Chinese extraction, and by the Indians who may well have worn the isle’s first locks—the traditional presentation of their ascetic holy men. The tribes that expat Jamaicans went on to create are even more outernational, all linked by the old Jamaican phrase that the Wailers once sang: “who feels it, knows it.” That group even cut a 1965 single, “Rude Boy,” with a soaring hook that named and reclaimed the 18th century European quadrille line dance, which was evidently still held in some affection despite dating from hellish plantation days.

But the problem arises when creators don’t reap the benefits financially, as has all too often been the case. Sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican DJ Big Youth, who appears with singer Dennis Brown on Step Forward Youth, forcefully exclaims, “Historically, Jamaican artists have been defrauded and disrespected from every angle and in every way. Since I began in the 1970s, people have claimed they own the rights to my music, when they never wrote a line, and I never signed anything with them.” In that knowledge, reclamation is foundational for the Cruises albums—a spirit that also motivated contributor Damian Marley, the founder of the real-life cruises that inspired Contractor’s theme.