What has changed on the site, newest first — the scenes and names that were added, what moved, and the day each of it went in.
11 entries · 30 August 2026 – 30 September 2026
Shorter city entries, the map region by region, a page for every city, and a faster first load
Every city entry now opens on just its station sign, its sound and Ride the roster. The story, the bloodline, the crews and the roster sit behind one Story, bloodline and names toggle, so an entry is a fraction of the height. Jumping to a city from the map, or a ride reaching it, opens it for you.
Each artist in a roster is one row: the year they came in, their name, one line on why they matter, and the play, YouTube and Wikipedia buttons. Deep cuts sit in order among everyone else, tagged, instead of behind an expander.
The Arrivals list beside the map is gone: it rebuilt itself as each city landed and competed with the map. The map now takes the full width.
The introduction under the map is one sentence instead of three paragraphs.
Let's connect and chat: a link to @mikogptsidequests on Instagram, at the end of the top bar — just the glyph on a narrow screen.
Tap a city on the map and the card is now just its name and two buttons: Ride the line, or Read about it, which takes you down to its entry.
Phones no longer turn city names into Google Maps links.
The map now plays region by region, in the same order as the page: New York and the East Coast, then the West Coast, the South, the Midwest and the rest of the world. The camera stays on each region while its cities land one at a time, then pauses before the next. Before, a whole year's cities landed at once, often on different continents. A full play takes about 48 seconds.
The page is ready sooner, especially on phones: the entries further down are only laid out as you scroll towards them, and Google Analytics now loads once the page has finished loading instead of alongside the map.
Every city now has a page of its own, with its whole story, bloodline and roster unfolded, the cities either side of it, and every other city a tap away. Click a city's name on its station sign to open it. Its play buttons take you back here to ride.
A quicker map, and analytics
The map draws sooner: its outlines are worked out once when the site is built, instead of on your device every time the page loads.
The site now uses Google Analytics to count visits and what visitors choose on the page. This loads Google's analytics script, which can set cookies, on the published site only.
Ride the line, on the main page
The wordmark picks out Line in the A train's blue, with Hip Hop and age in the same colour as the text around them, on the title, the change log, the 404 page and the tab icon.
Ride the line is now part of the page instead of a preview of its own. Press it in the title strip and every roster plays as a train ride: twenty seconds from each artist, oldest first, with the door chime between stops, then on to the next city — from the Bronx all the way to Sydney.
Start anywhere: a city's card on the map, Ride the roster over any entry, or the play button beside a name, which plays that record and rides on from there. The player stays at the foot of the screen while you read, lights the name playing, and follows the train from entry to entry if you are following along.
Every artist still links out to YouTube, now under YT, and to Wikipedia. Names Spotify will not play keep their YouTube link and an empty, dashed play button: the train runs through them.
Links to the old preview at /listen/ now land on the same city here.
The map, and every city as a subway stop
The page now opens on the map: watch hip hop spread from a Bronx rec room to 43 cities, year by year. Each city lands at its founding year, an arc travels in from every scene it came out of, and the camera follows wherever it is arriving: into the boroughs in 1979, across America in 1984, over the Pacific when Tokyo lands in 1986. It starts playing on its own.
Drag the timeline to any year, or tap a city for its sound, its bloodline and a link down to its entry. Every entry links back up to the map, opened on that city. Follow and World switch between chasing the action and seeing all of it.
The circular fan-out chart is gone: the map tells the same story, in the places it happened.
Fixed the colours in the city entries: the dot on the timeline, the region name, the bloodline box and the First wave years had been showing up blank.
The line now starts where hip hop did, in the Bronx in 1973. Kingston is off the map: the Jamaican sound-system roots are still told where they show up — London, Toronto, Miami and San Juan — but not as a city of their own. That leaves 299 names.
Added Ludacris to the Atlanta roster, and Disturbing tha Peace to its crews — 300 names in all.
Every city entry is now an ode to the New York subway: its name on a black station sign with a route bullet and a band of tile, and its bloodline drawn as the strip map over a car's doors — every stop from the Bronx to here, with the other scenes that fed in as transfers and the ones it went on to seed as next stops.
On a phone, a city's card on the map now keeps its link to the entry — Full story, artists and songs — pinned in view, and tells how the music got there in one sentence instead of a paragraph.
The scroll now reads by place instead of by span of years, in five chapters, one per region: New York and the East Coast, the West Coast, the South, the Midwest, and around the world. Inside each, the cities follow the way the music moved across that part of the map — the boroughs then down the coast, LA then up it, the world continent by continent — rather than strict founding order. The old year headings could not be named without mislabelling half of what was under them: Golden age sat over London, Lagos and Atlanta. The map still runs year by year, and now says under the year which region the newest city is in.
The Sugarhill Gang, and New Jersey moves to 1979
Added the Sugarhill Gang, Sylvia Robinson and the Sugar Hill house band to the New Jersey roster. Rapper's Delight was the record that put rap on vinyl, and the site did not have it.
New Jersey is now filed at 1979 rather than 1989, under The first records, and its bloodline runs straight from the Bronx: Big Bank Hank was rhyming out of a Cold Crush Brother's notebook behind the counter of an Englewood pizzeria. Queen Latifah, the Fugees and the rest of the second wave stay where they were, further down the same roster.
The counts move with the data: 303 names across the same 44 cities.
Added this change log, linked from the foot of the page.
Less chrome around the chart
Dropped the region key and the "Start in 1967" line from the first screen — the wedges are lettered with their own city names, so neither was doing any work.
Renamed to Hip Hop Lineage, and moved
The site is now Hip Hop Lineage, published at /hiphoplineage/.
The deck under the headline closes on "one shared lineage", which is the argument the page is actually making.
Said plainly in the footer how the entries were made: curated with the help of AI, reviewed by a human.
The whole page now ships in the HTML
Every city entry and every name is prerendered into the served HTML, so the page reads with JavaScript off and crawlers see its substance instead of an empty shell.
The client stopped rebuilding a scroll the page already has.
A chart that fits a phone, and a site that stays up
Added the zoomable dial below 720px, keeping the sunburst for the web, and lettered every wedge with its city name rather than a number.
Every entry got a link back up to the chart.
Fixed the published page arriving with no styles and no script, and pinned the asset filenames so a cached page can never 404 its own bundle again.
The built site is published from the repository root, and the deploy is verified in a real browser instead of trusted.
A first screen worth sharing
Gave the page its headline, its tally and its link-preview card.
Took the year out of the centre of the circle.
The first version
44 scenes from a Bronx rec room in 1973 outward, each with its sound, its bloodline and a roster — on one page, published to GitHub Pages.