Desert Rock Tinariwen brings rebel music out of the Southern Sahara. By Jeffrey Callen A slow Hendrix blues riff, deep, rough and insistent, slashes through the aural space. Broken down and repeated, the opening riff is joined by the offbeat upstrokes of a second, trebly electric guitar establishing a shuffle counterpoint. A fast rap barely [...]
Moroccan rapper Don Bigg “crosses over”
When I interviewed Don Bigg in Casablanca in 2008, he told me that his goal was for his albums to be in the rap bins at Virgin and FNAC, not the World Music bin. Steeped in the hip-hop tradition, there was no place other than the rap category where his music belonged — still, as [...]
Deciphering Watcha Clan: Interview with Jeffrey Callen
As the year wound down, I found myself thinking a lot about my favorite albums of 2009. They’re not falling into an easy categorization but there is a thread that ties them together. They all are based on crossings of musical boundaries. My runaway favorite album of 2009 is Omar Sosa’s Across the Great Divide, [...]
Genre Boundaries: World Music & the Space between Artist Self-Identification and Music Industry Categorization
A recent conversation with “Northern Roots” singer Tim Eriksen set me to thinking about the strategic nature of genre identification. Eriksen is an exception in that he has created his own genre label to identify his quirky mix of American “roots” material. For him it’s hopefullly a way-station on the way to defining his work [...]
