God blessed me with a prison
2026 Mix 27: Shanty house and COVID jams reluctantly revisited, K-pop in Poland, and the challenge of compiling in the age of abundance
I came back from vacation to an overstuffed playlist brimming with good songs. We’re in an age of musical abundance — in about three hours I was able to put together the next three mixes, with 5,500 songs still to try out.
My longstanding argument through this newsletter is that you can only really understand today’s abundance by understanding the ways in which the world has opened up multilaterally—I go into it more in this essay, about the “celestial jukebox” and its delayed reality.
One way to experience this is just to throw yourself into an ocean of great art and horrible noise and cloying junk, with blurry lines between all three categories, and figure out a lot of what’s going on after the fact, in a piecemeal way often lacking key context. I don’t think it’s impossible for someone to develop some kind of expertise somewhere in this landscape, I just think it’s basically impossible for me to do that, given what I’m actually doing (which, for the record, I think is worth doing). I’m monolingual, physically unadventurous, and have a hopelessly frayed attention span.
Still, upon reflection, my entry point into “omnivorous global music” at the dawn of mass internet access 20 years ago was probably much worse than what I have now, regardless of how chaotic things can seem. The framings I most frequently encountered were far too pessimistic and patronizing even when they claimed a nominally progressive view of the situation.
I’m thinking especially about the concept of “shanty house,” which Simon Reynolds described this way in 2005:
Brit blogger Woebot coined the witty term “shanty house” as a catchall for all these world-is-a-ghetto musics: impurist genres (see also: kwaito, desi) that typically suture bastardized vestiges of indigenous folk forms to pirated elements of rap, rave, and bass ‘n’ booty. Locally rooted but plugged into the global media sphere, these scenes don’t bother overmuch with sample clearances, and vibe-wise they typically project ruffneck raucousness leavened with party-up calls to shake dat ass. They also speak, vividly if obliquely, of a new world disorder where Tupac Shakur vies with Bin Laden as a T-shirt icon and terrorists keep in touch via text messaging.
Seeing relative global poverty as a vast network of ghettos ripe for political or artistic activation was a framing that I also received from professors in college. The excitement in these conversations—about music, film, and culture—usually came from imagining “indigenous folk forms” in some dramatic collision with millennial futurism.
The actual “folk” imagined in these conversations were said to be engaged in contemporary culture enough to create visionary art or spark political revolution, but also most valuable (and most cool) in having some meaningful orientation outside of Western contemporary culture that didn’t afford them plain aspirations of fame or comfort. Guerilla films and no-budget microcinemas were more exciting than burgeoning regional entertainment industries or international blockbuster collaborations. Recording favela funk vocalists and plugging them into hip mash-ups with futurist-minded rap and electronic beats was more exciting than just putting out the albums of the extant popular Brazilian funk music in a well-curated way.
I think today’s reality of musical abundance comes not from a foundational clash between haves and have-nots, but from the gradual decline of global attentional power of assumed “haves” and the simultaneous formation—or maybe more accurately amplification—of aspirational artists in regions, diasporas, and immigrant populations across the world who have more potential audiences and more routes to success.
How to describe this landscape instead is difficult—it’s so diffuse, and there’s so much of it. I think a stronger regional understanding of the world’s music does important basic educative work: it probably doesn’t hurt to at least tap maps, musically speaking. The core argument of the A-pop series is that when American pop itself is conceived as regional, the people using it as their lodestar need to start getting used to their own version of a comparative existence: feeling the need to keep up with something unfamiliar to you, and not always having important cultural tools to help like language, convention, context, while also understanding that this just puts you at a disadvantage you can’t ignore but also can’t easily change.
But I also think regionality only gets you so far. Artists don’t respect regional boundaries with any more rigidity than they might respect genre boundaries (that is to say, they might or might not respect them as boundaries, and don’t have to). Understanding how culture moves globally inside and outside of regions, especially in ways that seem to bypass English-lanugage pop music from the US almost entirely, seems like an important part of accessing today’s abundance. And there’s always abundance locally, too, I guess. There’s music all over the damn place.
1. i-dle: Crow
South Korea
I’ve long been meaning to focus more on producers when I write about music here—I know some people have shifted to a convention of listing artist and primary producer in every song credit. The detective work on this is much easier than it once might have been. But I still see some value in listing the lead artist as synecdoche for the team.
Sometimes you miss something important this way, like crediting lead singer Soyeon as a producer responsible for the sound of lots of i-dle/(G)ID-LE’s singles. This was the first one that made me sit up and take notice of the production: from its arresting use of a First Nations vocal chant sample to its glorious schaffel-stomp.
2. ALMAS, NXNNI: Dumb Boy
Mexico
Exhibit A in K-pop replacing US and Anglosphere pop as a template for variation if you want to be a Pop Star in capital letters: a Mexican girl group that leans heavily on K-pop, including being totally fine with using the “nanny nanny boo boo” nursery rhyme melody for their chorus. Also maybe some evidence that I was on to something in thinking that “Say So” was Dr. Luke’s attempt to write a K-pop song. (Apparently he’s actually started producing K-pop songs, too. It’s a good song, but c’mon, call someone else!)
3. Yseult: Freak
France
French star goes new jack swing in a way that nods to Bruno Mars’s “Finesse,” with JT playing the Cardi B role on the remix.
4. Fagata, MODELKI: Facecard
Poland
5. Young Leosia, CUZCO$: Aftery Pod Blokiem
Poland
Two from Poland—the first is light hyperpop with a dash of K-pop that maybe doesn’t really come through any stronger than the resemblance between the titles “Facecard” and “Queencard” (so not “Exhibit B,” then). Then Young Leosia does her neo-hip-house thing well; she’s earned enough goodwill to appear on a mix once a year for basically any reason.
6. Muki: Girls Will Be Girls (Lucky Iris Remix)
UK
More hyperish stuff from the UK. Hm, maybe I should start theorizing B-pop (no relation to Britpop) as a twin engine for pop templates, to include Charli XCX and PinkPantheress? Can hyperpop really be claimed just for the UK? (Probably not.) There might be an interesting divergence in US/UK charts happening, though—maybe more on that later.
7. Manya: Bez słów
Poland
Ah, right, knew I had a more K-poppy Polish song in here somewhere. It’s this one! Exhibit B.
8. AVYSS, osoroshia kakumei: モテたいっ
Japan
9. TV Tairiku Ondo: 超常現象を信んじてみる。[Chōjō genshō o shin njite miru.]
Japan
Two indie rock freakouts from Japan, first osoroshia kakumei on one of two AVYSS label J-pop collections released a week apart, one seems more rock (Inner Sync) and the other seems more pop (Hollow Hype), but I only skimmed. The other song is by TV Tairiku Ondo, whom Patrick St. Michel wrote about for The Japan Times. My brain keeps defaulting to Vampire Weekend for some reason?
10. INDAKHUS, dia: Bentar lagi sayang
Indonesia
Would have guessed this was from a hipdut playlist, but can’t seem to find it there, so maybe it’s just from a general Indonesian new music list. A good sign that the light pop/R&B Indonesian underground is getting more aboveground, or that I’m noticing its abovegroundness more.
11. Vice Ganda: Talak
Philippines
Last featured Vice Ganda way back in 2020, opening a mix I made of early pandemic songs that is now so excruciating to listen to that I thought about deleting it, but decided I couldn’t for posterity’s sake. “Corona Ba-Bye Na!” is still a banger, though.
12. Safary: Senorita
Senegal
My youngest said this reminded them of Eurovision, which surprised me a little—would kill for some smooth mbalax in Eurovision.
13. OCS, Burleson, Bailey KBC, JANE, TJWAVE: Coupe
Netherlands
Dutch rap with a beat I couldn’t quite place, except that it definitely is not the “sexy drill” that its genre tag is claiming.
14. Bass Thioung: Baol
Senegal
Couldn’t place the beat in this one, either, but by that I just mean I couldn’t keep up with it (complimentary).
15. Audio Addicts: Stjwetla Revisit
South Africa
16. 015 MusiQ & Van City MusiQ f. Babes Wodumo, Jelly Babie: Thatha
South Africa
17. Virgo Deep, Ch’cco f. Zee Nxumalo, DJ Tira: Bhampa (Woza Bakzin Gqom Remix)
South Africa
Three from South Africa, all of which interested me for finding a balance between gqom sounds and amapiano structure/groove.
The first track is from a compilation from TraTraTrax, a Colombian label. I’ve been a little ambivalent about the good-natured critical hype I’ve seen about this collection, Mzansi Bass, which I’ll admit is a good one. Lord knows I don’t know how you should pick South African dance songs to introduce to someone who knows nothing about the music already—I’d have trouble narrowing it down to 80 let alone 8.
I get between twenty and fifty tracks from South African artists and producers at varying levels of fame every single week in my “to review” pile just by following playlists and not going too far out of my way to track anything. So I’ll admit it rubs me the wrong way to see claims like this from the promotional materials for this compilation: “We hand over the curatorial keys of the label to very specific artists in whom we have absolute trust and who have an almost academic knowledge of a specific rhythm or a specific region where our eyes and sensitivity cannot reach.” Academic knowledge where eyes and sensitivity can’t reach? Gqom, amapiano, and 3-step are globally popular sounds with world-famous DJs and producers associated with them, many of whom have international profiles. This is not obscure music!
This speaks to the tension I’m getting at in the essay this week about the anxieties that outsiders have had about approaching global music that seems patronizing. I think there is important work in creating primers and tour guides for “outsiders,” so long as there is some acknowledgement (which there may be here, I’m only going from a blurb on the Bandcamp) that this is a selection of eight tracks out of about eight thousand possibilities all easily available when you have even a tiny bit of information to go on. I’ve featured half of the artists on the compilation in mixes before.
18. TYTO, C’mon Tigre: Ceiling Drip Gospel
Italy
19. Pause: Doza
Morocco
20. Mitchum Yacoub, Lourdes Iri: Deseo Celestial
Egypt-US/Panama
OK, cosmo-pop to cool down from my various sources of light agita. Ending things with some silly dance music you can’t dance to from Italy, Moroccan rap, and kitchen sink cumbia that drew my attention because of its featured Panamanian singer, whom I could find almost no information about but enough to deactivate my perhaps oversensitive A.I. alarm.
That’s it! Until next time, go dive into some corner of the world and tell someone about it.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from i-dle: Crow (“God blessed me, yeah, with a 감옥”)
I wonder who the audience for MZANSI BASS is supposed to be. Anyone who'd pay to download it from Bandcamp would be interested because they already like amapiano, gqom and 3-step.