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Mixing up the world's beat: a new generation of border-crossing, genre-fusing musicians are remaking the soundtrack for our globalized world - global music

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the Tuvan musician Albert Kuvezin had little experience with rock music: His knowledge came from a few heavy-metal reel-to-reels that had been smuggled into his remote homeland--part of southern Siberia--through the black market. Today, Kuvezin downloads what he wants from the Internet and lets a variety of influences seep into his music. His band, Yat-Kha, plays horsehair fiddles and sings throaty tunes about riding the steppes and chasing girls on stallions, all with an unmistakable hard-rock feel.

Where "world music" once represented the timeless and the unadulterated, there are now hundreds of bands across the globe taking what they want from rock, dance music, and hip hop, and mixing it with the sounds of their own cultures, creating new hybrids that are hard to classify--and often harder to resist.

This isn't about Paul Simon using Ladysmith Black Mambazo as backing vocalists. "We've graduated from the experiments of American producers taking snippets of ethnic exotica," says Bob Duskis, president of Six Degrees Records, whose San Francisco label specializes in "genre-bending" world music. Duskis sees a wave of young international artists, steeped in Western pop forms, reinterpreting the music on their own terms. From Brazilian DJs mixing hip hop and bossa nova to Indians in the U.K. blending sitars with electronica, says Duskis, "you've got a new generation with a foot in two worlds, and an ear in two worlds."

This globalization of music, sometimes dubbed "world fusion," is about the free trade of ideas, as well as sounds. It's about kids in Texas learning that the oil industry is bankrolling corruption in Nigeria because they heard Femi Kuti sing about it over the funkiest of Afrobeats. It's a trip for the passportless, a newspaper for the illiterate, a rallying cry for the dispossessed. Protesters from Genoa, Quebec City, and Seattle will tell you it's better than their parents' finger-pointing folk songs because--as evidenced by the music of Mexico's Zapatista-inspired, ska-funk-mariachi merchants, Los de Abajo--you can dance to it.

It's not entirely new, of course. Music has been crossing geographical boundaries since the days of slavery and the spice routes. Elvis Presley did it when he fused blues with country. Ravi Shankar became a godfather of psychedelia through his tutelage of George Harrison. Salif Keita, "the golden voice of Mali," remembers his youth in Bamako, where tourists exposed him to the sounds of the '70s: "I was listening to Anglo-Saxon music," he says, "the Eagles, Bad Company, but my favorites were Pink Floyd."

Yet in those days, either the musicians or their music had to physically cross the frontiers: Bob Marley had to play for Jamaicans in London; vinyl had to be, literally, shipped. Today, if it's easy for you to download an MP3 of Ozomatli--L.A.'s ultrapolitical cumbia-rap-rockers--it's just as simple for someone in Thailand.

"Technology has been huge" in accelerating world fusion, argues Duskis. "Previously, you'd have a kid in Delhi with great ideas in his head, but unless he had access to a $100-an-hour. studio, he had no way to articulate that. Now, with a modest investment and a bit of computer savvy, you can make an entire record in your bedroom--and people do."

The phenomenon truly is global. In Tijuana, the Nortec Collective is making techno beats out of the brass and country sounds of norteno (see page 80). In Havana, bands like Azucar Negra are taking the samba, ragga, and hip hop they hear on foreign radio stations and adding it to salsa to create "timba." In Africa, homegrown rap rules--in 100 different languages--with bands such as Gelongal (Dakar) and Prophets of Da City (Cape Town) adding a new sound to the streets. In China, rocker Cui Jian fuses Oriental zithers with the sounds of punk, jazz, and Afrobeat. While in Europe, everything goes, as shifting boundaries and people leave a trail of experiments winding from Sarajevo to Madrid to Stockholm.

Such cross-pollination, naturally, upsets world music's purists, who fear the loss of the traditional forms. But what distinguishes many of these new musicians is the pride they have in their roots; they aren't throwing anything away or shamelessly copying rock. The Cuban Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, for example, admits to a suspect youth--"As a student in Havana, I was playing songs by Yes, Procol Harum, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson"--yet he is also the mastermind behind the landmark Cuban son album Buena Vista Social Club.

What unites these musicians is not where they come from but where they are going. Listen to any of the bands profiled here and it's hard not to hear the future. Our globalized world may be getting smaller, but, hey, the soundtrack is great.

David Hutcheon covers world music for MOJO, the British music magazine.