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Music Appreciation: Global Bass
It's midnight, early August, Toronto, 2012 in a hall on the waterfront. On the stage behind large stacks of computers and gear, three large, serene dudes that go by the name A Tribe Called Red bounce up and down as they play a ferocious remix of their track "Indigenous Power" made by Monterrey, Mexico based producer Javier Estrada, along with a stream of rap, dancehall, cumbia and miscellaneous unknown vicious
styles. The video projectors show a montage of cut ups of Hollywood Native cliches interspersed with traditional symbols and electric design. It's a
hip-hop party, it's an "Electric Pow Wow", to use the name of the group's party night in Ottawa; it's
21st century cosmopolitanism in full effect: a perfect example of the bringing together of
worlds that is Global Bass.
Global Bass (a.k.a transnational bass or sometimes tropical bass) is probably most familiar to the world via the work of UK MC of Sri Lankan descent M.I.A.
and her sometime collaborator, US DJ and producer Diplo who on tracks like "Bucky Done Gun"
created a wildly successful sonic collage of digital dancehall styles from around the world, topped off with an anti-globalization rhetoric that celebrated
the dancehall pleasures of subaltern populations around the world. While commercially and artistically successful, MIA and Diplo have also been intensely
criticized for the cultural theft of styles
which do not belong to them, and for a vacuous political rhetoric which ultimately goes no further
than a feelgood sentiment of opposition which fits neatly into the marketplace for all things alternative and independent.
Beneath that story however is a thriving scene or rather group of networked scenes which is both global and bassed in very interesting and ever evolving
ways. At its core, global bass is two different things: first, the local production of electronic/digital dance musics around the world that are
i...
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