When I first began documenting global electronica in 2001, I'd never imagined the breadth and depth with which producers would take their craft, especially in so short a time. Since the publication of my first book in 2005, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music --...

While watching CNN on Tuesday morning, June 30, I saw two captions flash across the bottom ticker. One told me that E Coli was found in cookie dough; the other, that 380,000 lbs of beef was being recalled. These were both pretty important bits of information, and I suppose those...

The first time I really experienced the largeness of little was while watching Morphine perform at Rutgers University in 1994. The deceptively simple configuration of bass, drums, and saxophone exploded into a variety of textures and colors, so thickly entwined and sonically confident that I was hard put to believe...

"I am very hopeful about our Qawwali Gospel project," Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz told me for a National Geographic interview recently. "It has potential. I think we had improvement since June 2008, when you auditioned us in Fes."

We chatted before Faiz's arrival in New York City, Brooklyn...

"The sun people," Brooklyn-based DJ Nickodemus told me, "are in some way all of us." Wishing to create an album that expresses the general attitude of the American population after the swearing in of Barack Obama, he realized that "not that much has changed--yet." Realist more than optimist, however,...

When I turned my journalism focus from rock and hip-hop to global music in 2001, I quickly realized that the political and media-driven clichés that I was being taught by newspapers and television accounted for but a small minority of each country's population. The way to enter and embrace a...

Hey future son,

I know it's a few years before your future mother and I have planned on bringing you into this world, but I figured it's never too early to open up the lines of communication. There's a lot going on in this world; it's never too early to...

While the name of his 1994 debut, Welcome to the Cruel World, implies a melancholy mood, his steadily growing fan base has been anything but cruel to him. Even back then, he knew how to combine sadness ("Walk Away," "Waiting On An Angel") with joy ("Mama's Got A Girlfriend Now,"...

"I have to tell you," the clerk said, leaning over the counter like he was about to whisper a secret, "That's a print-on-demand title. That means it could take two weeks to arrive." He then asked me if I still wanted to place a special order for it; I replied...

While KRS-One in no way defines the new Heavyweight Dub Champion record, Rise of the Champion Nation, his contribution to three tracks deserves special consideration. The man is a pioneer in the hip-hop industry, and he continues to put forth excellent material: 2007's Hip-Hop Lives with Marley Marl but...

The 2007 Kenyan general elections did not bode well for many -- some 1,000 people died and a quarter-million were displaced due to the reportedly rigged voting process which propelled Mwai Kibaki over Raila Odinga. The intra-country effects affected both local and international travel. A year earlier, two of the...

I always reply with the same two lines when asked the question I've received numerous times over the last few months: What did I think of Slumdog Millionaire? I loved it. Until the last fifteen minutes.

I am in no way a Bollywood expert. I've seen a handful of films,...

To fill a hole in the global music scene in America, a trio of producers created globalFEST six years ago. It was launched as a one-time event; the sold-out success prompted another, and another, until this year, where it returns to New York's Webster Hall on Sunday, January 11, at...

With Fox News receiving some well-deserved bad PR of late -- from their photographic doctoring of two New York Times staffers to the backlash against their aggressive public relations techniques -- there is no better time for critiques of the machine that has taken the idea of "objective"...

On Sunday, the NY Times website listed two articles back-to-back in the Science section that, at first glance, seemed unrelated. In terms of content, that is true; in terms of how we understand and experience the world, they are too close for anyone's comfort.

The first was titled "Einstein Letter...

By the time the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March, 1959, he had gone through a steady period of disillusion with Chinese officials, who had been offering much lip service to communism -- a philosophy he thought was, in theory, practical and promising. The reality of those officials, spearheaded...

In the 1970s, Professor J. Scott Armstrong put forth a conundrum to close to 2,000 business school students and executive trainees. Intrigued by the corporatizing of the pharmaceutical industry, he created a scenario (based on an actual 1969 incident) in which a company has a new drug with a projected...

A recent series of commercials produced by MTV's youth networking website, Think MTV, poses an interesting conundrum to the modern television viewer. Using the Holocaust as the backdrop for what could befall America if we are "not careful," the 30-second spots questions the integrity of the network for using an...

I find it interesting that between two polarities being expressed regarding the role of religion in mainstream politics -- the recent over-saturation of Barack Obama's affiliations/non-affiliations with Jeremiah Wright, and the elucidating essay by Sam Harris on this site -- there has not been any discussion of religious symbols...

Remember that scenario from the first in the series of Batman remakes, when a pre-Hillary Jack Nicholson nearly killed the population of Gotham by poisoning the water? And remember just a few years ago, when the U.S. government used the same trickery to make its citizens believe that those evil...