21st Century urban electronic music of Africa, Asia, and South America: Nigerian Cruisebeat, Saudi Arabian Samri, Hausa Jams, New school Brazillian Funk, Dominican Dembow, Lebanese Dabke, South African Amapiano, Jamaican Dancehall...
During all of human history, cultures have always traded goods, recipes, rhythms, ideas, and different peoples have always intermingled and intermarried. For millennia Africans, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese, and Europeans did business and partied in metropolitan centers like Zanzibar, one of many such hotspots across the most vibrant exchange routes in the Indian Ocean. Until the 1600s, when the Portugese and later French and English, etc., choked off free trade by controlling all the major pots, and spread an ideology of cultural purity and ethnic essentialism, separating people into boxes — a process which has only intensified in our neo-liberal times.
Today vast stretches of a New Silk Road has already been built, once again connecting economies of Africa, Asia, and South America, and is rapidly expanding.
And today we see amazing new ideas and methods rapidly developing and hybridizing in the Global South --- a process that will surely proliferate and accelerate in the coming years and decades.
