National Geographic

Recently, National Geographic World Music approached some of our favorite world music artists and asked if they had any new music or unheard remixes they wanted to share with our audience. The response was overwhelming, and included contributions from some of the most cutting-edge artists working in world music today. From New York's Antibalas and Barcelona's Ojos de Brujo to Tijuana's Nortec Collective and London's Bombay Dub Orchestra, this project pulls together the most progressive and forward thinking artists of the new century. The result was a baker's dozen of 13 exclusive new tracks from 12 amazing artists that just may change the way you think about world music.

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If Globalization has a soundtrack, it’s definitely urban. Last year a UN report projected that sometime in 2008, more people will live in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history – and popular music around the world has kept up with the times, with sounds exported from urban America leading the way. Hip-hop culture – multi-racial, post-modern and very urban – has become the defining global youth culture of the 21st century. While rap and house music, both rooted in black urban communities in the US, have been inspiring viral, homegrown variants around the globe for decades. Thanks to hip-hop’s easily replicated “Two turntables and a microphone” formula, talented kids from Paris to Dar Es Salaam have bypassed the expense of costly instruments - and the time spent learning them – to express themselves directly to their peers. And thanks to ever-cheaper technology, the bass-heavy, sequenced and remixed electronic sound pioneered by Chicago house music has become the dominant dance music idiom around the globe. From Ibiza and Goa to Manchester and Miami, the club music of the world has its roots in Chicago, as surely as hip-hop has its roots in the Bronx. But globalization isn’t a one-way conversation. These days the sounds of urban America have traveled the globe like a boomerang, to return home with new accents, changed outlooks and novel rhythms. This is world music in the truest sense: its appeal is global but its sound and vision remains intensely, stubbornly local. These assembled tracks reflect all the weird and wild mutations that urban music has undergone on its global travels. From remixes of Romanian gypsy bear-training songs to African rappers, to German laptop salsa, this music obliterates borders and boundaries to achieve a global groove. – Tom Pryor, for NationalGeographic.com

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