Street Beats and Ghetto Thrills From Jakarta to Milan

Imagine the media as a hydraulic system: broadband has dramatically expanded the pipes and channels through which cultural data, including music, passes. The result has been a monstrous increase in the volume and range of music that the average listener can access. Before file-sharing, a music fan’s ability to explore the wide world of sound was restricted: the cost of buying records inhibited one’s willingness to risk checking out unfamiliar sounds.

All those Analogue Era deterrents and blockages have now been swept aside by the torrential every-which-way data flows of Web 2.0. The Internet is a gigantic archive, a collectively assembled and chaotic audio-video library that contains every form of popular (and unpopular) culture imaginable. Thanks to “whole album” blogs and YouTube, there is no financial disincentive to trying out stuff, and precious little exertion required beyond  the expenditure of one’s time and attention.

Infinite choice + infinitesimal cost = nomadic eclecticism as the default mode for today’s music fan.

My book Retromania is primarily concerned with digital technology’s effect on our sense of time: because the entire past of pop music is splayed out as this instant-access archive, older styles of music feel as “present” as contemporary music, and this has the knock-on effect of encouraging music-makers to mix-and-match influences from all across the historical spectrum.

But the Internet’s effect on space has been just as profound. A new generation of listeners and musicians is emerging whose consciousness is post-geographical as well as post-historical. There’s a thirst for fresh musical stimuli that slips easily past geographical borders and cultural boundaries.

At once satisfied and stoked by album-sharing blogs, deposits of esoteric and outlandish treasure on YouTube, and a new breed of pan-global crate-digger label, this appetite for the alien could be called xenomania, a play on the term “xenophobia” and its less well-known sister-word “xenophilia.”

RISE OF THE GLOBE-TROTTING BEAT GEEKS

Xenomania and retromania are both forms of exoticism. The difference is that xenomania is about geographical remoteness, whereas retromania is about distance in time (as in L.P. Hartley’s famous maxim, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”).  Sometimes the two fascinations converge: while one contingent of Western hipsters are feverishly tracking contemporary sounds from far-flung corners of the globe, another bunch are investigating the musical pasts of all these non-Western countries.

The first kind of globe-trotting xenomania comes out of dance culture, in the form of early-adopter beat-geeks who compete to find exciting new rhythms from all over the world. I say “new” but often the dance subcultures in question have actually been in existence for decades, it’s just that Western deejays and producers have only just discovered them. The first of these “global ghetto grooves” to become trendy was carioca funk, which was spawned in slums of Brazil. Next came kwaito house (South Africa), which was soon followed by kuduro (Angola), cumbia (originally from Central America but spreading in mutated forms through Peru, Chile and Argentina), coupé-décalé (Ivory Coast), and more. Recently there’s been a smatter of hipster chatter about the Egyptian dance music that gets played at Cairo street weddings.

There’s also bubblin’, an example of a related but slightly different phenomenon: a musical hybrid that hatched in the West but in the bosom of an immigrant community. The story goes that bubblin’ sprang into existence when immigrants from the Dutch Antilles to the Netherlands responded with unexpected fervor to a Den Haag deejay who accidentally accelerated a dancehall track (or in some accounts, a reggaeton track) by playing it at 45 bpm. Bubblin’ has subsequently gone on to spawn another hybrid dance sound called moombahton whose genesis is even more tangled and confusingly post-geographical.

Whether they’re spawned in European cities or the ghettos of the Southern Hemisphere, what all these exotic dance genres share is impurity: they are bastard and creole children based in the soundclash of folk forms with Western styles like hip hop, house, and techno. Ethnic vibes (traditional instrumental textures such as accordions, unusual polyrhythms) mesh with American/European staples like the booming 808 bassline or the house synth-vamp. Rowdy chanted MC vocals influenced by gangsta rap and dancehall are offset by cheesily tuneful choruses invariably given the cheap gloss of AutoTune.

Inspired by the circa-2005 fad for carioca funk, the writer Matthew Ingram coined the playful term “shanty house” to pinpoint both the common sonic traits these styles share and how they are rooted in social conditions that are sadly similar all over the world.

Made quick and cheap using pirated software, laced with unlicensed samples from mainstream pop songs, this is party-hard music for ruffneck youth from the urban areas that nobody wants to go (“favelas,” they call them in Brazil, which is roughly equivalent to “projects” in America, “estates” in the U.K., and “garrisons” in Jamaica). Despite growing up amidst poverty, when these kids go out to dance they dress “rich.” Style-wise they’re fluent in the international language of bling: gold jewelry, flashy man-made fabrics, name-brand sneakers.

Often there’s a link between this music and gangs: the lyrics tend to celebrate the fast-money lifestyle of criminality, when they’re not addressing perennial topics like the female rump and the urgent necessity of shaking it. The Angolan version of shanty house, “kuduro” actually translates as “hard ass”, although whether that means “tight buttocks” or “tough guy” I’ve yet been unable to establish.

FROM THE GHETTO TO THE HIPSTERS

All these global ghetto sounds have much in common with the bass-heavy street beats of America (local hip hop offshoots such as hyphy, footwork, Baltimore breaks, jerk, bounce), the U.K. (grime, bassline, funky, donk) and the Caribbean (dancehall, soca, reggaeton). And all face condescension and sometimes repression in their native context: feared by the political and cultural establishments for their underclass uncouthness and links to a shady nightlife underworld, they are typically scorned by more liberal-minded progressives and sophisticates too, who regard the music as cheap trash and object to the aggression, sexism, and hyper-materialism of the lyrics.

Divorced from the local context and its class antagonisms, it’s these very qualities of gritty menace and rude-boy raucousness that appeal to Western hipsters. That and the jagged inventiveness of the beats, which are often wilder and weirder than the self-consciously arty experimentalists of left-field dance music. The earliest of the early-adopting beat-geeks were deejays like Diplo (M.I.A.’s producer partner early on and someone wont to boast about how his quest for rare beats took him to Latin American urban danger-zones where no other “gringo” dared go) and DJ/Rupture (responsible for globe-roaming mix-CDs like Gold Teeth Thief and the blogs Mudd Up and Dutty Artz).  Lately they’ve been joined by figures like Mosca, who emerged from the U.K.’s dubstep scene but as a deejay draws for super-obscure styles like Guadeloupe’s gwoka.

CRATE-DIGGING THRILLS ONLINE

Recently the interest in non-Western sounds has moved beyond pure dance forms to include plaintively melodic music that is roughly equivalent to mainstream pop, perhaps even the local equivalents of Celine Dion for all anyone really knows. The Seattle-based label Sublime Frequencies has released a series of CDs documenting the ultra-sweet pop fare of countries like Java, Sumatra, Algeria, Burma, Palestine, Thailand and Niger. Some, like Radio Myanmar, were taped directly off the radio, while  others draw from cassettes picked up in street markets.

In nearby Portland, the Sublime Frequencies concept was taken to the next level by Chris Kirkley and his label Sahelsounds. His two Music From Saharan Cellphones compilations (initially distributed for free on the internet but set to be issued in vinyl form through a crowd-funding scheme) gather up songs by artists from Nigeria, Algeria, Niger, Morocco, Mali, Ivory Coast, and the Sahel region of Mauritania that circulate promiscuously throughout North Africa when cellphone users transfer and trade them in MP3 form.

NEXT: The future-hunger, the quest for the unknown, that used to be the motor driving Western pop