Things didn’t go too swimmingly when the United States started trying in earnest, toward the turn of the 20th century, to join the old-world superpowers in the colonialism game. Traditional colonialism had already begun its long, slow decline even as we were trying to lay claim to the Philippines. But in the era of soft colonialism that’s followed, we’ve excelled—as American pop culture has gone international, foreign countries have been Westernized through movies, music, and consumer products instead of at the end of a gun.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Rock still has that kind of power in some parts of the world: Vice Films’ recent documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad follows the travails of Acrassicauda, allegedly the only metal band in Iraq. They speak to the way acts like Metallica and Slipknot offer a release from the pressures of living in a war zone; they practice between bombings, endure death threats from anti-Western Islamic militants, and occasionally play a show that brings together what’s probably the entirety of the tiny Baghdad metal scene. Somehow they’ve even managed to keep the band going in exile, first in Syria and now in Istanbul. Their story is a testament to pop music’s transformative power and a welcome antidote to the pervasive, cynical notion that people only play music in the first place because they’re trying to get rich, famous, or laid.
High-speed Internet and satellite TV have changed all that, making the exchange of musical ideas easier and swifter than ever before. We’re still far from a global music culture, though. For one thing, plenty of foreign styles have been evolving independently for long enough that even their heavy reliance on Western pop doesn’t make them sound familiar: mind-bogglingly sugary stuff like Serbian turbo-folk, Cantonese pop, or Bulgarian chalga, for instance, is too slick for “world music” enthusiasts but too foreign to cut it in the mainstream over here. For a while it seemed like bhangra might be the exception to the rule, especially after Jay-Z spat a verse over Panjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke,” but in retrospect that looks more like a fluke.
“World music” has never been much more than a marketing term, and it’s always implied a one-way transaction—after all, your favorite rock bands don’t turn into “world music” just because someone in Dakar is listening to them. And now that so much of the planet is hooked up to the same grid as America, it’s a totally bankrupt concept. It’s ridiculous to call African hip-hop world music but not Western hip-hop, especially when artists like Missy Elliott, M.I.A., and even Fergie are borrowing sounds from abroad as liberally as the Africans do. The exchange of musical ideas between the West and the rest of the world is evolving into a genuine conversation, and that can only be an improvement. The Internet may be giving the music industry all kinds of fits, but it’s pretty great for the health of music itself.v
