Stanley Rashid, owner of Rashid Sales Co., a Brooklyn Arab-music distributorship founded by his father in 1934, says he sees steadily increasing demand from non-Arab listeners for pop music from the Arab world. In the United States, mainstream pop audiences have enthusiastically followed the lead of world-beat explorers such as Paul Simon (Graceland, 1986 and Rhythm of the Saints, 1990) and David Byrne (Rei Momo, 1989), and of collaborationists such as Ry Cooder. Today, however, listeners are more sophisticated and diverse, and the music itself is changing as well. It was simple, really: raditional Arab meters and modes can be difficult to grasp, even for well-trained western musicians. Immigrant-based audiences have been small, in marketing terms, and there have been few producers interested in trying to bridge the cultural gap. That the West has largely neglected Arab popular music is not very surprising. And many of the non-penta-tonic chord changes of West Africa originated in the scales and pitch slides that came there in the Middle Ages with the Arabs. Latin music fed interest in the purer polyrhythms of Afro-Brazilian styles, especially bossa nova, which in turn stimulated attention, by the late 1960's, in West Africa. It began with the jazzy cross-beats of Latin music brought to New York clubs largely by Puerto Ricans, who gave the post-World War II generation its first lesson in the modern sounds of the less-industrialized world. In that sense, Arab music is the latest link in a chain of musical trends that since the 1950's have crossed borders and oceans to increasingly enthusiastic receptions among western listeners. Richard Gehr of New York's Village Voice is one of the critics who think that within the world-beat genre-if it can be called that-Arab music is notably up-and-coming. "Afropop Worldwide," one of the shows with the largest audience, airs weekly on 120 stations in the United States and 15 in Europe. Throughout the West, world-beat programs have become staples of public radio stations. The recording industry added it as a Grammy Awards category in 1992, and music-store bins and web pages now fairly burst with new releases from all over, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Since the mid-1980's, world beat has gone from an exotic, marginal business to the big bucks of mainstream niche marketing. The resulting mixes are an ever-expanding aural banquet of unfamiliar ingredients, rich flavors and unexpected spices, and they are landing on western hit charts with more and more regularity. The hybridized styles of "world beat" music, that loosely international fusion of rhythms or melodies from here with instruments or vocal styles from there, is audible everywhere.
You can hear the global village coming closer.
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