Hands Up Guns Out: The Music of World Town

Said a speaker at a recent conference I attended: “Every nation has within it its own Global South.” Retorted my friend, “that misses the meaning of the word global.” Au contraire, friend of mine! Alter-globalization, with its many polycentric manifestations (Global Civil Society; the World Social Forum; the Third World; la Red; TSMo‘s; the Diaspora; the Developing World; the Majority World; the South) has been able to realize within and across national borders “un mundo donde caben muchos mundos” (if you’ll permit me the zapatismo). And alongside this political blossoming has sprung an international artists’ movement of analogous tone, variety, and timbre. I’ll nick a nomer for the length of this post, and refer to that musical-aesthetic movement as “World Town“.

To start, some family resemblances:

• NOISE / GRIT

Third world democracy, more records than the KGB
- MIA, “Paper Planes”

World Town is the sound of a teenager blasting hiphop in his room to drown out his parents’ old world records.  Want to make some World Town music?  “Take the improvisational character of jazz, combine it with the raunchiness of funk, flavor the mixture with African tradition.”  Yes, World Town is Afrobeat … but it is also Kuduro, and definitely Merembemamboton.  It is hiphop plus (choose one or more): highlife | gaana | Bollywood | ragga | didgeridoo. Plus cymbals | static | samples | drum machine | oud | bass.

It’s a back room/ back alley / blackout drunk kinda night where we play only new school club rap and dancehall — dudes was like this one is north argentinian folkstep gauchito cowboy cumbia! this one is psychedelic cumbia! this one is progressive minimal cumbia! this is cumbia-mash. . . the immigrants had brought it with them as it dripped down from columbia and took over latin america from the ghettos .. The sounds range from vocal melody, syncopated portugese rhymes.. 5 or 6 extremely overused Samples (pavorati organ hits, rocky theme (chopped to hell), old school miami bass vocal stabs, Dire straghts ìbrother at armsî shows up all the time, Euro techno samples.. and most importantly samba drums (tamberzao, batidao) patterned in an electro rhythm. . . melody is missing, and repetition is the key.. Dj style is similliar to a dancehall sound in Jamaica.. lyrics are blended by many artists over the same rhythm.. the tempo never changes. . ..

– Mad Decent, radio podcast of World Town.

It can perhaps be best characterized by the transgressive act of transforming noise pollution into highly danceable club music. In recent years, it has reclaimed the sound of the hoarse female voice. Put another way, World Town sounds like a village chasing a chicken.

World Town is frenetic, like a Cairo street, like a Guanzhou marketplace. The “sound” is multi-layered and uptempo, inspiring the experience of gleeful chaos. The “look” is characterized by fast movement, flashing lights, animations, collage.  The art of World Town is often marked by scenes of battle: tanks, grenades, the American colonial wars.

World Town is also kind of grimy. Its mise-en-scene is littered with images of recycled trash, stray animals, dancing cockroaches, stagnant water, and sweat. It’s set in the urban slums. Its central trope is Hustling. Some movies that can be tagged with the genre of World Town include City of God; Beijing Bicycle; Sin Nombre; City of Lost Souls; Do the Right Thing (“yo what I tell you about that noise?!).  Visually, but not sonically, George Washington by David Gordon Green. But the iconic movie of World Town is Slumdog Millionaire:

There is always a radio blaring in the background of a World Town flick; the weather is always hot and muggy. Trucks rumble by, the screeches of domestic disputes and breaking glass are faintly audible, and someone is watching a soccer – correction – football match on a crackling television. Someone is street proselytizing — or hocking (hard to tell). The stage is crowded — you might say, overpopulated. World Town is a boat, a shanty town, a refugee camp, an enclave, a crowded bus, a project yard. It’s like they say: “hiphop is Black America’s Ellis Island.” The music they play on that Island sounds like World Town. The subaltern doesn’t speak; it raps.

• COLOR / PRINT

Imagine the sleek greys and blacks of Europe; those solid color blocks; that German minimalism. Not that.

Naw, World Town bought its shit at the bodega-cum-corner store, then put a BAPE hoodie over it. See what happened was that World Town got this from a shop specializing in second-hand clothing imported from the States, and then spray-painted it red, yellow & green. This is the international gold chain in the international ghetto. This is your mother’s hand-me-down; these are the clothes she wore on her back when she fled her country. This is her country’s flag.  World Town is wearing it as a bandana.

World Town is brown. In both the visual and political senses of the word. Trussed up in traditional fabrics and textiles with a digital twist, layering pixels and texture. Kitsch, but authentic. Definitely Made In China, but also handmade. Hand-me-down, but also gawdy. The vibrant colors of neon lights as seen from the cityskirts.

• HERE / THERE | I / US
  

Common territory, language and culture may in fact be present in a nation, but the existence of a nation does not necessarily imply the presence of all three. . . In some cases, only one of the three applies. A state may exist on a multi-national basis.

- Kwame Nkrumah, “Class Struggle in Africa”

The lyrical content of World Town is heavily laden with identity politics. It is adamantly territorial and regional. From the Bay to Wilcannia, Chi-town to London, Baltimore to Sri Lanka: the Hometown receives a panoply of devotions and shoutouts. Take the following bilingual ode to an East Bay barrio:

The chorus, title, and music video all forcefully assert that the song is dedicated to los Rakas’ particular neighborhood. But spliced between shots of local landmarks and regional public transit are Panamanian flags, UFW logos, and indigenous regalia. And at 3:48 please observe the pan-African flag. “This is for los paleteros” — but also, if one trusts the video, South Asian Sikh cab drivers. So when the boys call for their listeners to be “orgulloso and put your flag in the air” it begs the question: which flag?!

Another example is BBU, a group whose acronym alternately stands for “Black Brown and Ugly” or the  more inflammatory “Bin Laden Blowin Up.” This Chicago trio opens their album Fear of a Clearchannel Planet with the chant “Chi-Town throw it up! Bin Laden Blowin Up!” (sidenote: hoarse female voice!).  In the rest of the album, they present songs with titles like This is Chi-Town (Track 8), C.H.I.C.A.G.O. (Track 9), and Chi Don’t Dance (Track 12). Their pride in their city affiliation is more than evident. . . It might even be fair to refer to them as identity rap. That said, what is the explanation for the following flyer?

The explanation is, of course, World Town. For BBU and for los Rakas, their audience — and just as pertinently — their identity, is defined by the condition of being brown, colonized, urban, poor, and young in a globalized world. It is a positive identification: one of solidarity and membership in a movement. It is under this standard that los Rakas state of their song: “this one’s for you, him or her/ ghetto children that live in dirt/ that don’t study cause they need to work.” And it is under this standard that BBU produces the World Town jam: ” I Do This For My Culture”:

this is for my people of the sun
who die by the bomb/ and live by the gun
and child rebel soldiers who be sniffing gunpowder
and slumdog childrens who ain’t never seen millions

I: I, I, I  do this for my culture
word to my brothers and my sisters and my color.

LISTEN TO: “I Do This For My Culture” (prod. by Supreme Cuts)

Worldtown is the musical manifestation of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “rooted cosmpolitanism”:

The term seems oxymoronic: to have roots is to be embedded in a specific history, nation or people; to be a cosmopolitan is to declare oneself a citizen of the world. For Appiah, however, these two are inseparable. Local histories, he reminds us, have themselves been shaped by the movements of peoples and their communal practices (let’s not call them cultures) as old as human history itself.

Appiah not only allows for but celebrates the contentiousness of the conversations that are to take place in a world where multiple affiliations are increasingly becoming the norm. Yet even as he does so, he remains true to the more complex forms of affinity. Appiah asks us to remember, as we struggle to negotiate the ”global village” of the contemporary world, that without a deeply felt commitment to the local there can be no genuine sense of obligation to the universal — and vice versa.

That “local” can be as large as a nation, and as small as a youth center.

Because World Town recognizes that within larger orderings there will be marginalized groups, and that those marginalized groups will contain their own orderings, it is to the center of each series of concentric circles that World Town calls out:

London
Quiet down I need to make a sound
New York
Quiet down I need to make a sound
Kingston
Quiet down I need to make a sound
Brazil
Quiet down I need to make sound

They’re coming through the window
They’re coming through the door
They’re busting down the big wall
And sounding the horn . . .