World music is a funny thing. There are some really great world music groups that manage to take the particularity of different local music traditions and integrate them together to create something genuinely fresh. There are other groups, however, that take local music traditions and utterly destroy them by attempting to give them global "sensibility". The listener is left with something that is neither local nor sensitive; the listener ends up with a CD like this one.
It is worthy of intellectual engagement, really. At the very least, it reflects a tension that has long existed between the West - (self-proclaimed) enlightened (= secular), forward moving and universal - and the non-West - supersitious, primitive and particular. Why do African musicians need electronic samples, loops and/or techno beats? Because no one in the West will pay them any attention if they don't speak our language - or, in this case, play our music.
1. Tengo Sed - Batidos
2. Rafiki - Bob Holroyd
3. Yambu Rock - Bobi Cespedes
4. Dama - Issa Bagayogo
5. Gulshan Paak - DJ Cheb I Sabbat
6. Soy Callejero - Los Mocosos
7. Le Le Lengwe - Hawke
8. Jah Has Kool Girl - Karsh Kale
9. Smile - dZihan & Kamien
10. Stay Human - Michael Franti & Spearhead