Amanda Marcotte writes about today's multicultural music:
The urge to borrow and take inspiration from the music of other cultures is nothing new, of course. The Beatles famously helped introduce the sitar to American and British pop music after they gained an interest in India. The band Santana made a splash bringing Latin American rhythms to American rock music in the late 1960s. Musicians in the 1950s, mostly African American at first, borrowed some of the sounds from country-western music and injected them into R&B to create what became known as rock ?n' roll. R&B itself developed from two separate arms of black musical tradition, combining upbeat jazz riffs with blues rhythms. In the Caribbean, musicians were hearing R&B and rock ?n' roll and manipulating them into the local sounds that became ska, rocksteady, and reggae.
But the concept of blending the music of various cultures kicked into high gear in the 1970s. Punk musicians in the U.K. like The Clash, The Specials, and The Slits began to borrow not just a sound here or a sound there from Caribbean music but to lift entire genres like reggae and ska and put a punk spin on them. In the U.S., the jazz fusion band Mind Power decided it would rather be a punk band and ended up combining punk with reggae to create a distinctive and widely copied sound called hardcore. In the late 1970s, bands like the Talking Heads began to borrow heavily from traditional African music for their rhythms, creating hits like "Life During Wartime."
Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.
--The Editors
