The fusion of world music with more conventional pop, Latin and hip-hop rhythms isn’t new. Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” was the summer song of 1999, and Polish chanteuse Kayah’s blend of Gypsy and folk music had people all over Central and Southern Europe dancing in 2000. But now, so-called world-fusion songs are growing in both number and popularity–and a genre that not long ago was derided by some in the music industry for its hippy-dippy beats is being viewed as a refreshing change from bland pop music. Former popsters Ricky Martin and Britney Spears are including world fusion on their latest CDs. Nihal, a DJ for BBC Radio One, jokes that “when [hip-hop producer] Puffy started sampling Duran Duran… at that point, people thought, ‘Damn, we must have really run out of samples. So where can we go?’ "
To an untapped trove of local musical styles, that’s where. In world-fusion, DJs and producers take samples of traditional world music (African drums, tango and the like) and mix it with dance or hip-hop beats. The genre was born in 1987, say some DJs, when a group named Cold Cut mixed the song “Paid in Full.” The result was an odd combination of dance beats with Israeli vocalist Ofra Haza’s interpretation of a 16th-century Yemenite prayer. Strange, yes, but it caught on. “In dance music, people just got bored with the fall-to-the-floor beat and they started looking for something with a bit of an edge,” says British music writer Nigel Williamson. DJs and producers started waking up to the fact that there was a vast universe of music out there. Charlie Gillett, a world-music broadcaster and producer, credits Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” (2001), which sold over 200,000 copies in Britain and mainstreamed bhangra samples, for popularizing the new sound.
Bhangra, in fact, is the most popular fusion source of the moment. It’s a drum-based folk northern Indian music that also uses the accordion-like sounds of the baaja (an Indian musical instrument) and, sometimes, vocals by Punjabi singers. American and European hip-hop artists have embraced bhangra with a vengeance, often boosting the rhythm with rock guitars and bass. Rapper Jay-Z’s song “Beware of the Boys” (Mundian to Bach Ke) with Panjabi MC has been a global chart-topper. “Producers like Dr. Dre and Timbaland are music scientists who are constantly searching for new sounds,” says Nihal. “This music is not the preserve of loads of hippies in a commune outside Malmo. This is what people on the street are listening to.”
And it is on the street that these sounds are found. Refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers have raised their musical traditions to prominence in Western countries. “It’s been coming through the integration of certain communities into this multicultural melting pot that is Western Europe,” says Williamson.
Danish hip-hop trio Outlandish exemplify the phenomenon. All three members grew up in Copenhagen, the children of immigrants from Honduras, Pakistan and Morocco. Those varied musical influences can be heard in their music–they rap in Urdu, Spanish, Arabic and English. With seamless mixing, the ethnic melodies and hip-hop elements are surprisingly compatible. “I believe this type of music represents a new wave of European music, an expression of the transition from first-generation immigrants to a second generation who want something of their own,” says Isam Bachiri of Outlandish.
As with so many things these days, the Internet has played a major role in the emergence of this new genre. Thanks to the Web, music catalogs are a PC click away, and beats that were rarely heard outside native confines are now easily downloaded. Some purists are concerned that the fusion of different musical styles only results in brown soup, with everything too radically altered to be interesting. Williamson disagrees, saying, “In fact, you probably preserve the music better by opening it up to modern forms of expression; otherwise it just becomes a museum piece.” David Field, head of A&R with BMG U.K. & Ireland, believes the future of world-music fusion will continue to parallel the changing face of the world: “I think the [genre] lines are going to blur and you are going to hear blends that are hard to track down unless you are a musical train-spotter.” In other words, someday soon we could not only be listening to a polka-Polynesian mix, but happily dancing to it as well.
