Someone more eloquent than me-- DJ /rupture, actually-- said that while the internet has exposed a wide audience to non-Western music, it's exposed an even wider audience to Western music. Turn on the TV in the UAE and you can watch MTV Arabia, but turn on the radio in North America and the closest you get to Cairo is "Big Pimpin'".
I don't bring this up as outcry, just context. I like "Big Pimpin'". Plenty. But in an idealized, all-inclusive, post-internet world, a record as diverse as Filastine's Dirty Bomb would feel central, and it doesn't-- it plays deep in the margins.
Part of the problem-- if that's what you want to call it-- is that Filastine, a DJ and activist who spent most of his life in Seattle before relocating to Barcelona, is a self-conscious radical. Sampled voices heralding the destruction of bourgeois society and music as the weapon of the future don't sound revolutionary, they sound quaint-- the same ** images of punk rock ** co-opted for H&M or preserved on wall at the John Varvatos boutique on the Bowery, formerly CBGB's. Culture is a nuanced thing, and for Filastine to treat it like it isn't-- a clumsiness he avoids on ** his blog**-- is a little disappointing.
Diversity isn't Filastine's strength, it's his cross to bear. He works over contemporary dance genres-- hip-hop, spiced-up rai, funk carioca, dubstep, dancehall-- like he's running down a checklist. What he might hear as global harmony I hear as forced multiculturalism. Some of his MC choices are great-- Rabah's low-pitched Arabic, for example, fits so snugly into the rumbling "B'talla" that I don't have to know the language to understand the flow. Other guests feel like obligations-- Wire MC and the Japanese ECD swing for the beat on "Hungry Ghosts" like blindfolded kids worlds away from their piñata, and it's hard to fight the feeling that Filastine didn't edit them out because then there'd be nobody to represent Japan and the bush.
But Filastine's rhythmic instinct is awesome and delicate, and when he doesn't seem to be thinking too hard, he turns out hybrids so fluent they defy classification. "Singularities", for example, draws its beat from American hip-hop and its strings from Romani and gypsy records, but its hi-hats twist through a whole series of syncopations that don't call out any genre in particular. "Hungry Ghosts", which can be found unburdened by rappers on DJ /rupture's Uproot, borrows from crunk and dubstep but doesn't sound like either or, thank heavens, both. The beats on "Fitnah" morph and contort-- it's like an object whose shape changes depending on the angle you see it from.
It embarrasses me to think that someone might hear Dirty Bomb as an ambassador for the genres it borrows from. If you like dancehall, buy a dancehall record. If you like rap, buy a rap record. While it's nice to envision Western acceptance of non-Western music, it's nicer to imagine the universe's collective ass jiggling sympathetically to the best moments on Dirty Bomb-- music so thoroughly uprooted that its traditions exist only as pivot points; fragments of sounds we know mashed together so intuitively that we barely recognize them.
