Column: Pop music’s global roots

People who know me well probably also know that my taste in music could, perhaps, best be described as “eccentric.” My knowledge of the latest Top 40 hits may be limited, but my music collection has grown to include tracks in well over 40 different languages, from A to Z (Albanian to Zulu), as I like to say.

While this abundance of non-English-speaking songs gives me an ample supply of words to choose from when writing this column, this week I want to focus more generally on global influences in contemporary pop music.

What’s popular here, in America, often experiences the same chart-topping popularity abroad. A cursory glance at four random countries’ top 20 charts (Chile, India, Ireland and Greece) reveals many names that are instantly recognizable to Americans: The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and many more. In fact, in three of those four countries, at least 10 songs on the latest top 20 chart either are or have been on the charts here in the United States as well.

What is, perhaps, less obvious though is that the same trend is happening in reverse, even if we don’t necessarily recognize it. For example, Jason Derulo’s 2013 hit “Talk Dirty,” a song that reached No. 1 on the U.S. Mainstream Top 40 Chart, in addition to enjoying success around the world, samples instrumentals from an Israeli band that takes their influence from the musical traditions of the Balkans and Roma people. I remember being shocked the first time I heard the distinctive saxophone sounds sampled in “Talk Dirty,” being shocked that Balkan-inspired music had suddenly made it big in the U.S.

Taken out of its original context, this use of a Balkan beat in an American pop song strikes me as odd. In the Balkans, particularly in Serbia, fusing traditional beats with modern pop music often falls under a genre called turbo-folk, which has a problematic and complicated legacy with regards to the wars of the 1990s. Turbo-folk is also targeted for more general criticism related to its perceived eroticism and cultural decadence.

Listening to “Talk Dirty,” an average American listener would have no idea of this cultural context, nor appreciate the novelty of an American performer adopting sounds from an Israeli band imitating Balkan folk music.

This is not to say that foreign influences on American pop music are bad. On the contrary, they represent one of the many positive aspects of our ever-globalizing relationship with countries around the world. But if we are going to appropriate these sounds into our music out of context, we should at least appreciate their origins.

Recognizing the foreign influences in our music not only gives us a greater understanding of other cultures, it also allows us to enjoy the syncretic nature of our own culture all the more. Even if you don’t have an A-to-Z music collection like mine, you can still find ways to perceive the A to Z that makes up much of contemporary pop music.