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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;color:black'>THE NEW YORK TIMES – EUA – 20
-10-2007 MÚSICA POP INTERNACIONAL. NOVAS FUSÕES.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:7.5pt'><font size=6 color=black
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:22.0pt;font-family:Georgia;color:black'>Rock’s
<st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Balkanized Route</st1:address></st1:Street>
to the <st1:place w:st="on">Indies</st1:place> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
</NYT_HEADLINE>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=gray face=Arial><span style='font-size:
9.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:gray'>By WILL HERMES<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
</NYT_BYLINE>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=gray face=Arial><span style='font-size:
9.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:gray'>Published: October 21, 2007<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'><!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 --><NYT_TEXT>SURE,
the half-naked acrobat suspended by her ankles from the ceiling was remarkable.
So was the battered tuba wrapped in red Christmas lights, played by a musician
in a black cocktail dress. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><a name=secondParagraph></a><font size=4
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Yet the most
striking thing about DeVotchKa’s circuslike show at the Spiegeltent at
the South Street Seaport in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Manhattan</st1:City></st1:place>
in August was the music, a quilt of sounds from the international section of
the iTunes store. One could hear mariachi ballads, polkas, horas and Gypsy
tunes played on accordion, bouzouki, violins. But those sounds informed songs
that also echoed the rhythmic bluster and vocal drama of 1980s alternative-rock
acts like the Smiths and Talking Heads. The band’s cross-cultural recipe
was made explicit when the young crowd began sloshing its beers to a bouncy,
Balkanized version of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in
Furs.” <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>On any given night in an American rock club you can
hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place>
and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern
European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing
on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like
Diplo spinning <b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Brazilian funk</span></b>. On
the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting
pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from <st1:place
w:st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>, draws on Indian, African and West Indian
sounds. <b><span style='font-weight:bold'>The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart
creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD,</span></b>
“<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Smokey</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Rolls</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Down</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Thunder</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Canyon</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.”
And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African
percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Increasingly the back-to-basics movement that has
characterized cutting-edge rock this century, from the blues-based hard rock of
the White Stripes to the new wave-postpunk revivalism of Interpol, is giving
way to music that looks further afield for its influences. And one result is a
clutch of acts, many of them from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:State w:st="on">New
York</st1:State></st1:place>, that are internationalizing rock’s
Anglo-American vernacular. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>This is not the first time. Artists like <a
href="http://movies.nytimes.com/person/111574/Paul-Simon?inline=nyt-per"
title=""><font color="#004276"><span style='color:#004276'>Paul Simon</span></font></a>,
Peter Gabriel, the Clash and Talking Heads drew polyglot styles into their mix
back in the 1980s, often with politics in tow. (Mr. Simon and Mr. Gabriel were
exploring African pop during the Apartheid era.) But the impulse has been
largely missing from rock’s bag of tricks for a while. And in the case of
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place> and
Vampire Weekend, it is producing some of the year’s most buzzed-about new
music — music that often feels less studied and less overtly political
than that of these groups’ fusion-minded forebears. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Why now? Partly it seems the natural cycle of
genres; every back-to-basics art movement dead-ends and requires an infusion of
new ideas. And certainly the Internet has made even the most obscure global
music easily available. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Access is key,” said Bill Bragin,
director of the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Manhattan</st1:City></st1:place>
club Joe’s Pub, which books a large number of international acts.
“A blogger or someone says: ‘Check out this cool record by Konono
No. 1. It’s really bizarre, super loud Congolese thumb piano
music.’ And suddenly all these people are checking them. Also, bands like
Antibalas and Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City
w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place> are very good about positioning
themselves in the context of youth culture. They’re not pigeonholed as
speaking only to the age-30-to-50 world-music crowd.”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>You might guess that current global politics have
also had a role in spurring the trend. And they have, though not always
explicitly. M.I.A. and Bjork both address politics directly on their recent
albums. Gogol Bordello and Antibalas, two of melting-pot <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:State
w:st="on">New York</st1:State></st1:place>’s fusion-minded veterans,
also make politically charged music. Fronted by the Kiev-born Eugene Hutz,
Gogol Bordello mixes Slavic and Balkan music with punk rock and plenty of other
styles, peppered with lyrics addressing the immigrant experience and
“cultural revolution.” Antibalas has revived and advanced Afrobeat,
the Africanized funk fusion pioneered by the Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti,
from whom they have also adopted a strong anti-authoritarian demeanor. Both
bands have addictively kinetic new records and are beginning to attract wider
attention. (Mr. Hutz recently performed with <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/_madonna/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More articles about Madonna."><font color="#004276"><span
style='color:#004276'>Madonna</span></font></a> at the Live Earth festival, and
he and his band have contributed to her forthcoming short film, “Filth
and Wisdom.”) <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>But a new wave of bands is using ethnic styles in
less pointed ways. One of last year’s more left-field Internet success
stories was the debut by Beirut, a project initiated by Zach Condon, a
21-year-old singer-songwriter who began a love affair with the Balkan
brass-band tradition while exploring electronic music at his parents’ home
in Albuquerque. Mr. Condon played almost everything on that album, “Gulag
Orkestar,” and its arrangements for trumpet, accordion, ukulele,
mandolin, violin and percussion conjure the image of a street-corner Gypsy band
somewhere in postwar <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. For the new <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place> record, “The
Flying Club Cup,” released this month on the tiny Ba Da Bing label, he
employs a full band to play his Eurail rock, which continues to roam. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I’m going for a style that’s
really outdated: 1940s French chanson,” Mr. Condon said over Korean
barbecue and beer at a restaurant in his neighborhood in <st1:City w:st="on">Williamsburg</st1:City>,
<st1:place w:st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>. “I’m really obsessed
with Jacques Brel, <a
href="http://movies.nytimes.com/person/80302/Charles-Aznavour?inline=nyt-per"
title=""><font color="#004276"><span style='color:#004276'>Charles Aznavour</span></font></a>
and early <a
href="http://movies.nytimes.com/person/90849/Serge-Gainsbourg?inline=nyt-per"
title=""><font color="#004276"><span style='color:#004276'>Serge Gainsbourg</span></font></a>.”
Mr. Condon, waifish and blue-eyed, was dressed in an old T-shirt with a bedhead
hairdo, and it was easy to imagine him ministering to swooning jeunesse back in
the day. Yet his dramatic, warbly vocal style also conjures ’80s rock
crooners like Morrissey and the Cure’s Robert Smith. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>While Mr. Condon, whose ethnic heritage is
primarily Irish-English, has been spending time in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City
w:st="on">Paris</st1:City></st1:place> of late, he admits his approach to
international styles is more instinctive than studied. Nick Urata, lead singer
of the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Denver</st1:City></st1:place>
band DeVotchKa, operates similarly. Speaking from a tour stop in <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
he noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern European
music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the point.
“The ‘authentic’ Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but
it’s better to leave it to the masters,” he said. “We figured
we were never going to nail it exactly, so why not just take it into our own
realm?”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Vampire Weekend, which came together while its
members were students at Columbia and has a debut CD slated for January on the
independent label XL, makes its music in the same spirit. It’s noted for using
African-flavored rhythms and guitar phrases in its upbeat pop-rock, notably on
its signature “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (<a
href="http://myspace.com/vampireweekend" target="_"><font color="#004276"><span
style='color:#004276'>myspace.com/vampireweekend</span></font></a>), whose
title refers in part to a Congolese style. But rather than replicating an
“authentic” sound (the song isn’t, in fact, kwassa kwassa),
the band is more interested in collage, understandable for a young group weaned
on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I was always a big rap fan,” said Ezra
Koenig, 23, the group’s singer and guitarist. “I’d go to that
Web site <a href="http://The-Breaks.com" target="_"><font color="#004276"><span
style='color:#004276'>The-Breaks.com</span></font></a> to find the sample
source for a song, and I was always excited when the music came from some weird
place.” <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Mr. Koenig also noted his affection for older rock
acts that experimented with reggae and/or world music. Records like
“Remain in Light” by Talking Heads and “Sandinista!” by
the Clash were cited as touchstones by nearly all the artists interviewed.
Which makes sense: Just as those bands were reacting to punk rock’s
creative cul-de-sac in the 1970s and ’80s, many of the current bands are
reacting to a modern retro-rock trend that has grown stale. “That was
definitely something we didn’t want to do,” Mr. Koenig said.
“And one way to do something new was to look at different sources.”
<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Some groups have gone to greater lengths to tap
these sources. Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff, who played together in the
indie-rock band Golden in the late 1990s, formed Extra Golden with local
musicians in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Kenya</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
where Mr. Eagleson was working on a doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology.
Their experience has been more challenging than that of many of their peers.
For instance there was the time <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Nairobi</st1:City></st1:place>
police showed up at a party at Mr. Eagleson’s apartment and discovered an
uninvited guest had some marijuana cigarettes, an incident that cost the band
roughly $10,000 to keep the members out of jail. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Then there was the problem of getting the
band’s Kenyan members, some of whom lacked passports, to the <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place>
for a debut tour last year. The process took months and was not complete until
an 11th-hour intervention by staff members for Senator <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More articles about Barack Obama"><font color="#004276"><span
style='color:#004276'>Barack Obama</span></font></a>, Democrat of Illinois, who
were assisting promoters of the Chicago World Music Festival, where the group
was scheduled to play. By way of a thank-you, one of the standouts on the
group’s spirited new album, “Hera Ma Nono” — a fluid
mix of American rock, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">New Orleans</st1:City></st1:place>
funk and the guitar-based Kenyan benga style on the indie-rock label Thrill
Jockey — is a traditional-style African praise song titled
“Obama.” <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>American pop musicians adopting styles of other
nations have often been accused of cultural colonialism or dismissed as
dilettantes. In the Web magazine PopMatters (<a href="http://popmatters.com"
target="_"><font color="#004276"><span style='color:#004276'>popmatters.com</span></font></a>),
one critic wondered if <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place>’s
music is simply “a tourist’s picture postcard” that devalues
its cultural source material. Vampire Weekend, perhaps hoping to pre-empt
criticism, cheekily calls its music “Upper West Side Soweto.” But
neither group is pretending to be anything but what it is: an indie-rock band
with diverse musical appetites.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Yet in an age when an Anglo-Sri Lankan pop act like
M.I.A. raps over samples of Brazilian dance music that reshapes American
electro-funk, ideas of authenticity and cultural ownership are slippery. And
there is something encouraging in the way younger acts like <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City
w:st="on">Beirut</st1:City></st1:place> and Vampire Weekend can draw on world
music styles without needing to turn the act into a political statement, an
imperative that doesn’t always serve the art in question. It’s also
worth noting, as Mr. Bragin points out, that musicians outside the
Anglo-American axis of indie rock, <b><span style='font-weight:bold'>like Nação
Zumbi and DJ Dolores from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Brazil</st1:country-region></st1:place></span></b>,
are busy making cutting-edge fusions. “There’s a lot more dialogue
lately,” he said. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>A result, in some cases, is a new breed of fusion
that keeps its politics implicit and exists in a nether region between genres.
That’s a place Jeremy Barnes is happy to be. A former member of the
influential ’90s indie-rock band Neutral Milk Hotel (which he notes was
strongly influenced by Bulgarian traditional music) and briefly a participant
in Beirut, Mr. Barnes now lives in Hungary, where he records neo-traditional
music with local musicians and his collaborator, Heather Trost, under the name
a Hawk and a Hacksaw. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Aesthetically I love indie rock,” he
said by cellphone from Tura, a small town where he was collaborating with the
cymbalon player Unger Balazs. “And I find the world-music industry
nauseating. There’s a lot of bad recordings and bad artwork. But when
people define us in either of those categories, I cringe.”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:
14.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“We love Hungarian music and think it’s
beautiful, so how can we ignore it?” he added. “You can’t lie
to yourself.”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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