Wringing out milestones
2026 Mix 29: Visualizing global pop, giving the US a chance, and World Cup and The State of Youth Media (two separate topics!) briefly considered
After updating my big spreadsheet of songs again, I started wondering what the easiest way might be to create a world map that tracks every song I’ve featured according to its country of origin. There are a few programs that do this pretty easily and incorporate spreadsheets without a lot of hassle. You get something that looks like this for my 2026 songs so far:1
Ideally, you’d be able to click any country and see a list of songs, maybe with
YouTube links for them. But so far the execution is a little wonky.
This is related to an idea I’ve had for a while of something like a dilettante’s guide to global pop—not really a primer, just a simple and impressionistic sense of the world’s musical ferment with links to songs and when possible reliable people and publications that tend to cover those scenes, regions, and genres. It would be a static page updated occasionally.
A regional approach is a logical way to approach it—in my own categorization I use: US, Anglosphere, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, MENAT (Middle East/North Africa/Turkey), Caribbean (+ some Francophone diaspora pop), and the nebulous “Cosmopolitan” for cross-country collaborations and other ambiguously transnational work. (I think any useful guide would have to break these large regions down further by specific countries and subregions.)
But I don’t think that a regional approach necessarily does justice to the ways in which music operates beyond or outside of regional orientation—it’s more of a starting point to get your bearings. (The more important point is that good music can come from anywhere, or maybe everywhere all at once.)
A glossary of genres and connections can be useful to a point, but such lists start to balloon and then become counter-productive. I’ve written about my qualms with too-fine genre-splicing before, in this post. Rate Your Music has an extensive list of over 1,500 regional genres (by far the most subgenres for any of their major categories), which are handy as a raw list but pretty hopeless in meaningfully organizing contemporary music.2
I think something that at least puts global publications for different types of music in one aggregated place would be helpful. Maybe someone has done something like it? It should also probably include blogs and newsletters and social media accounts. Beehype admirably tracks different regions with lots of contributors, though the collective taste there tends toward arty and the updates can be pretty sporadic. The closest I’ve found within my immediate network keeping regular tabs on few of the major international publications (Remezcla, OkayAfrica, Bandcamp Daily, international Billboard or Rolling Stone coverage or variants, etc.) is the rundown that Collin Smith regularly does at No Chambers.3
I know that the scattered and piecemeal way that I throw around various genre terms and regional scenes—often as I’m learning about something for the first time myself, and often with only a surface level understanding—can be hard to follow. (I usually encourage people I know in real life to just pick a few songs at random and see what they think.) I’d like to be able to at least present the information in different or more accessible ways.
So who or what else is out there? What kind of organization or information would be helpful for you?
1. Angela Autumn: Mountain Stream
US
Think global, act local—this week’s mix nudged overall US representation across my mixes this year up a bit because I have to do my due diligence on alt & indie. Here’s Nashville artist Angela Autumn with some alt-country that actually rips, sounds like what I wanted to hear from Waxahatchee’s countryish turn.
2. Sad13: I Am Now Completely Invisible
US
A sketchbook EP/album from Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, 13 ideas in 15 minutes, lots of good starting points that probably sound better without trying to fill out a full song. The end result is a bit cerebral and the project wavers between unfinished (good) and underbaked (less good).
3. Buffalo Daughter: Harm No More
Japan
Longtime Japanese proggish-indieish outfit that was a golden beat a few years ago in a Peoples Pop Charity Poll, with the sublime “Cyclic” from 2003. This, too, is a little cyclic, but it gains steam, and a few minutes in you realize you’ve already been rocking out for a while.
4. Portraits of Tracy: Caught in a Jam
US
LA indie wunderkind who put out a decent solo album at 18 and now at 21 has already gotten bored with regular structure and has pastiched together some early ‘80s MTV weirdo-pop for her upcoming EP (Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV! out tomorrow), part Buggles, part Supertramp, part…Billy Joel? Get her and Debbii Dawson in the studio together pronto.
5. The Fleeting Light of Love and Grief: Une excellente aventure
Canada
Montreal indie from CREEM’s playlist, often good for surfacing Real Rock torch-bearers who actually rock a little.
6. Dinamarca, emmi: Espacios.cl
Sweden/Spain
The vocals are airy, the accompaniment turgid, the combination provocatively lopsided enough to make up for the inevitable drag, though doesn’t exactly put the drag to great use, either. A drag that doesn’t race?
7. Snõõper: Recess
US
Snõõper sound bored and have decided to goof around at recess. It suits them.
8. Emei: Bloom
US
Ah, need to put together my unified theory of post-Taylor A-pop song construction, and explain why I think it’s a mistake to give Taylor all the credit for it. As usual, this doesn’t really sound like Taylor, only sounds of Taylor’s world, much of which she got from (let’s say) absorbing other singer-songwriter trends into her whole deal.
9. VINII: Cold
Japan
The fact that I found this song mildly pleasant and didn’t think twice about the fact that its hypertrap backing would have sounded completely alien and abrasive to me little more than 10 years ago tells you how much the sound and/or the world and/or I have changed. But then again if you’d ask me pre-hypertrap “could literally anything eventually become background music?” I’d probably have guessed yes.
10. Zae: Bomba
Philippines
Also interesting to me how quickly rap tropes from the 2010s melted into various hyphenate-pop styles across Asia, to the point that they now sound less like their original reference points and more like K-pop.
11. Kinck: Bang Bing
Denmark
I kind of like the clave with training wheels sound here, sounds like what would happen if I messed around with a DAW trying to make a Brazilian funk song, terminally dorky but not without its charms.
12. ASTAR: Dou Baayi (Hymne Sky Girls)
Senegal
Lite pop mbalax that I suppose one should expect from an empowerment anthem bankrolled by <checks notes> the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Huh, I was not expecting that.
13. Young Roddo: No Bad Grades
US
Here’s one where the artist is so young (nine) that I start to think about its relationship to youth media. I haven’t written seriously about youth media for a long time. My biggest interest in it as a form many years ago was the question of legibility, i.e., how much does youth media need to approximate professional media to become “watchable” to adult audiences? I noticed an uncanny valley in youth media where you can be so amateurish that you approach the charming but insular speaking-in-tongues feel of home movies or even experimental cinema, or on the other hand so professional that you can compete with other media without coding as “youth media” at all. But most falls in an awkward middle: corny sketches, phony attempts at newsroom tropes, clumsy short films.
But both of these sides of the valley have sort of collapsed in the intervening years. On the one side, amateurish media has become its own grammar through YouTube and TikTok, so that the terrible high school skits I used to nudge students away from are now the form most likely to get them real eyeballs. Meanwhile it has never been easier to compete with “professional media” when it has either largely de-professionalized (“man on the street” style YouTube content, say) or can be approximated with accessible effects software.
This song falls firmly on the side of accessible professionalism, so you really are face to face with performance and the content—he can’t believe he’s going to marry his crush in the sixth grade (three years older!) while he sings in a studio that’s the same as anyone else’s studio, and has afforded him the same virality as anyone else.
14. Karen y Los Remedios: Creación del Universo
Mexico
One of those songs that I’d peg as cosmo-pop even though it wouldn’t get marked as “cosmo” in my regional spreadsheet, from a longstanding Mexican alt-rock outfit led by a social scientist.
15. Alfonso Soliano: Masth Chantani [c 1972]
Malaysia
Tabla-led jam from a new collection of Malaysian jazz pianist and bandleader Alfonso Soliano on Habibi Funk sister label Audible Beauty. More info at Bandcamp, and a short video on YouTube.
16. Ndiolé Tall, Matadi: Allez Les Lions!
Senegal
I experienced most of the World Cup by scrolling through social media posts, though I did catch a game or two. The official music left quite a bit to be desired, and seemed reflective of the unsavory cloud of corruption around the World Cup industry, and how that industry only got more odious in contact with the current US government.
Most of the good music wound up happening on the periphery, and this track from Senegal (knocked out in the Group of 32 to Belgium) is no exception, the sweeter sound of a world event with less of a pall hanging over it. It all felt like a nadir of something with a few glimmers of hope for the (distant?) future, and there’s no telling when or how you’ll bounce back from something like that. I try not to count out the possibility of better things being possible in a few years.
17. Ramiz: Haram
Turkey
18. Ziynet Sali: Yeniden
Turkey
Two from Turkey! I did not do any research on them and have very little space left to write about them in this email, which is very convenient! The first video has the camels from today’s screenshot. I think they’re both good!
19. Tufic, Luis Guinea: “El beso”
Mexico
A languorous, somewhat indulgent ballad, apparently matched my mood while compiling this mix. Who am I to question my past self’s judgment?
20. Andr: 安
Taiwan
Bringing the indie full circle in a pretty coda from Taiwan.
That’s it! Until next time, let me know if a literal or figurative map of all of this music would be helpful.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Sad13: I Am Now Completely Invisible
This image represents every song I’ve put on a mix so far this year, but it does some weird groupings—several regions, including the UK and most of western Europe, are combined into a single pin. Checking the stats, Asia is in the lead with 15% of all tracks, then Europe with 14%, then Latin America and US are tied in third place with 13%, followed by Africa at 11%. But it’s worth noting that I have separate holdover lists for South African dance music (211 songs), Brazilian funk (171 songs), and Latin American and Spanish language pop (156 songs) that I don’t have space each week to put on my mixes.
On a quick skim, RYM is also missing lots of important contemporary regional genres, though they might be included in other non-regional categories.
From my personal experience, tracking publications is almost as difficult as tracking artists, with reliable sources regularly shutting down or publishing more sporadically.