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The new global music doesn't exclude America. After all, America's biggest rock star, Dave Matthews, is a white African; Japan's biggest pop star, Utada Hikaru, hails from Manhattan. The old-school term world music is a joke, a wedge, a way of separating English-language performers from the rest of the planet. But there has always been crossover. In 1958 Dean Martin scored a hit with the Italian tune Volare; in 1967 Frank Sinatra recorded an album of songs by Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim. Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love is based on the 18th century French ballad Plaisir d'amour. Such music became world music only when darker-skinned folks sang it.
Pop music and global music aren't mutually exclusive categories. In the '80s Paul Simon, David Byrne and Peter Gabriel blended world beats. More recently, Sting scored a hit with Algerian rai star Cheb Mami, Lauryn Hill covered Bob Marley on MTV Unplugged, and Britney Spears has made a habit of working with Swedish songwriter Max Martin. Madonna, on her latest tour, drew from so many cultures for sonic and sartorial inspiration, it was a surprise Kofi Annan didn't join her for an encore.
Musicians performing in different languages often strike similar chords. Listen to the intense, undulant wail of Assane Ndiaye on the song Nguisstal, a track on Streets of Dakar: Generation Boul Fale, a compilation of young Senegalese acts. Boul fale is a Wolof phrase that means, loosely, "Never mind." The American punk group Nirvana's seminal album of teen angst was also titled Nevermind. Alienation, it seems, is a nation without borders.
Lyrics are important, but they don't have to matter. Even when Bob Dylan, arguably America's finest lyricist, mumbles through a number, the poetry of his words comes out in the phrasing. "How does it feel?" Dylan famously asked on Like a Rolling Stone. We may not have known exactly what he meant, but we knew how it felt. Today's musicians have taken that lesson to heart. Thom Yorke of the British band Radiohead wrote some songs for his album Kid A by cutting up lyric sheets and pulling lines out of a top hat. The Icelandic band Sigur Ros sings some songs in a made-up tongue it calls Hopelandic.
Many of today's global musicians move back and forth from their native tongues to English, on the same album, sometimes on the same song. There's a sense that geography doesn't have to equal destiny. The Tokyo-based rock trio the Brilliant Green's latest CD is almost entirely in Japanese. It was recorded in Tokyo. The CD's title? Los Angeles.
Listening to music in an unfamiliar tongue can be more thrilling than listening to a song whose lyrics are instantly intelligible. Because if you can connect with another person beyond lyrics, beyond language, then you have engaged in a kind of telepathy. You have managed to escape the mundane realm of ordinary communication and entered a place where souls communicate directly. It's cooler than instant messaging. Cherif Mbaw, 33, is a Senegalese singer-guitarist living in Paris; the songs on his brilliant CD Kham Kham are in his native Wolof. But when Mbaw, with his beatific tenor, soars into a passage of staccato vocals and jittery guitar work on Saay Saay, you know exactly what he means even if you don't know what he's saying. His intent is in his inflection; his eloquence is in his emotion. Boundaries fall away.