Anglophones are notoriously insular when it comes to consuming foreign culture. We’re picky, limited, and disinterested in straying from our comfort zone. There are logistical reasons for this; we have a functionally infinite amount of English-language culture and an education system that has only started taking foreign language instruction seriously in the past decade or so. But as the tentacles of Anglophone culture reach into increasingly isolated areas of the world, it’s difficult to ignore that the opposite is also happening.
So, what is it about listening to foreign music that English speakers find desirable?
To say it’s to “better understand other cultures,” while perhaps true, rings stale and disingenuous in the age of voluntourism and debates over cultural appropriation. Perhaps we listen to foreign music not to better understand other cultures, but for better access to emotions and ideas that have atrophied under the ever-expanding umbrella of Anglophone cultural life. There are myriad emotions our acute sense of collective irony has muted, and earnestness may be chief among them.
Sometimes, the desire to reach a “world” audience is deliberate. That Spanish-language artists like the Colombian band Bomba Estéreo or the French-Spanish singer-songwriter Manu Chao have found audiences in the US is…
