By the time he recorded "Sweet Jamaica," in 1952, Trinidadian calypso star Lord Kitchener had been in London long enough to know that he wanted out. "I regret the day I leave sweet Jamaica," he sang of the Caribbean he’d left for London. "If I had wings like an airplane, I would fly to that blessed country again." Lord Kitchener worried about dying of starvation, complained about the winter, and railed against unemployment and government food rations — he was ready to surrender the immigrant dream.

When he first took a ship to London, in 1948, Kitchener was brimming with optimism. His arrival put a face on the first big wave of British Caribbean immigration: Kitchener on the docks, fresh from Kingston, singing "London Is the Place for Me" for newsreel cameras. "I’ve been traveling to places years ago," he serenaded, as black West Indians carrying suitcases walked into London’s future, "but this is the place I want to know." The song was his giddy tribute to a city he had never lived in before (he beams about how "sociable," "pretty," and "comfortable" it is), a city he’d eventually leave when he returned, disillusioned, to Trinidad in 1962.

These two musical poles of Kitchener’s London stay bookend London Is the Place for Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (Honest Jon’s Records), a new compilation that tells the story of West Indians in Britain through the songs of displaced calypsonians, Kitchener and colleagues like Lord Beginner, Mighty Terror, and the Lion, Trinidadians who may have lived in London but never fully became Londoners. In many cases they sing not of landing and staying but of being stuck, of wanting to go, of being nostalgic for homelands that are worlds away. Lord Beginner’s "Jamaica Hurricane" plays like a news bulletin about a disaster back home; Kitchener’s "Birth of Ghana" — where he’s backed by musicians from Guyana, Jamaica, Panama, and Barbados — celebrates Ghanaian independence as if it meant the creation of a new destination for him, a place where after leaving London his generation of migratory Trinidadians might settle.

The compilation’s most revealing songs are those in which Trinidadians strike cultural and racial deals with their new home — negotiating their Caribbean heritage with a British crown that’s intent on excluding them from the Anglo whiteness of Union Jack national pride. Young Tiger may have been one of the thousands of Londoners watching and cheering the coronation of the Queen (he was "looking rapturously," he sings on "I Was There (at the Coronation)"), but actual racial integration into British culture was still enough of an issue that Beginner and Kitchener both sang about it. Beginner’s "Mix Up Matrimony" is a manifesto against racial segregation and an affirmation that West Indians are Britons too.

Although London Is the Place for Me covers just six years in the musical history of black Britain, its view of a racially divided England uneasy about its dark immigrants remains relevant to British cultural politics. Whereas British calypsonians had the independent Melodisc and Parlophone labels, their contemporary counterparts — the West Indians, Asians, and Arabs of post-Thatcherite England — have labels like Nation Records that were founded to give voice and distribution to the international breakbeat fusions of second- and third-generation immigrant Brit noisemakers.

Select Cuts from Nation (Select Cuts) looks back on Nation’s 14-year history with artists who replace the jazzy elegance and staid social commentary of their Trinidadian predecessors with militant post-colonial anger and then add bhangra, industrial, jungle, and hip hop to the mix. The sample from an anti-immigrant British politician that begins Urban South’s hip-hop diatribe "Brain Damage" — we hear the man advocating the repatriation of black Britons to save England from the terrors of a multi-racial society — is what Nation artists like Asian Dub Foundation, Transglobal Foundation, and Fun Da Mental have all been making music to combat.

In that sense, Select Cuts is an inadvertent second-generation sequel to the fresh-off-the-boat ambivalence (and cool confidence) of London Is the Place for Me. Instead of songs that never leave the homeland too far behind and never stop imagining the next stop on the diaspora tour, we get songs that hail Britain as home, songs that are determined to make London the place whether London likes it or not.