Open World Music

Shhh. . . I don't want to burst any bubbles out there, but the United States and Great Britain aren't the only countries in the world that make great rock music.

"But Peter," you say, "I already knew that. I have the entire 5,000 volume set of Putamayo CDs, and I can sing Tajik falak music at ritual circumcisions with the best of them!"

Well, that may be so. But that's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about the whole realm of rock music (including its subsets: pop, rap, reggae, soul, R&B, and many others) that is produced around the world, often in languages other than English, that should be extremely appealing to the American consumer, but that is all but unavailable through normal consumer channels.

As a rabid lifelong fan and collector of music, much of it rather more esoteric than the usual stuff you find on Top 40 radio, I have always been at least somewhat aware that there is a whole world of great rock music out there. When traveling overseas, or while making foreign friends, I have occasionally been exposed snippets of really exciting bands. While living in Prague in the early 90s, MTV Europe was burning up with videos of Mano Negra, a band that practically invented the genre of Latin Alternative. While visiting East Asia for business school in the early 00s, Tokyo was reverberating to the sound of Pushim, a band that performs hot vibe reggae and soul in Japanese and that has a lead singer who could blow Christina Aguilera (and others of her ilk) out of the water. And yet, despite the widespread success of these bands and many others in their home countries or geographic regions, few in the United States are even aware that these bands exist.

This issue ultimately came to a head in my own mind when I enrolled my daughter in the German School of Washington, DC this past September. As she follows in her parents' footsteps in being an avid lover of raucous rock and roll music, and knowing that many of my foreign born friends first learned English through their exposure to American and British popular culture, I naturally wanted to find her good German language music. Unfortunately, if you go to your local record store and look in the "German" bin or search for "German Music" on Amazon.com or iTunes, you could be forgiven for coming away thinking that all music produced in Germany is played on accordions and tubas.

Interestingly enough, it was YouTube and then later LastFM that offered me the "in" to German rock. It was there that I first became aware of platinum selling artists that, for whatever reason - be it cultural, linguistic, or legal, you will never find in the United States through the usual distribution channels.

Since then, I have made it my personal mission first to find these exciting musicians, and second to let Americans know about them. Up to the point that my ADD kicks in, and my obsessive interests migrate to something else equally shiny, I will be posting here my commentaries on the rock music scenes of countries around the world, reviews of artists and albums, links to places you can purchase international rock, and videos of songs that I particularly like.

This is not to say that I know more on the subject than anybody else. Rather, I am hoping that I can start a conversation with other music lovers, music producers, and music marketers. Tell me about what is going on in your music scene in your part of the world. Tell me about the exciting new band that you just discovered, or tell me about your band. Alternatively, tell me why you think American or British rock has more universal appeal than what comes from elsewhere. I want to know!

Frankly, I think there is something terribly wrong when the vast majority of European Grammy Award nominees are American artists, and I hope that - in my own small way - I can do something about that for people who want to know more.