The Thousands

World music has gotten a bad rap. It’s too often associated with and passed off as music that late thirty-going-on-forty somethings are listening to, trying to seem relevant or hip. It’s as if the entire hipster collective has bought into the eternal struggle of Rob Gordon versus Ian Raymond and of course, we all want to be fucking John Cusack. Literally. Horizontally. Mmmm. Wait, hold a second John, we have to defend world music first.
 
But really, it’s silly to feel like we need to defend it. The genre of world music has some terrible shit of course, but so does every genre. And when there are extraordinary reissues popping up, people taping the local radio and releasing it as a compilation, and even contemporary afro-funk being produced, it completely smashes most twenty-somethings’ preconceptions of world music.**With Melbourne’s Public Opinion Afro Orchestra joining these contemporaries by releasing their debut of Nigerian-inspired, hip-hop influenced, afro-beat this week, we suggest you cough up the few dollars for this 12" instead of downloading it because with a twenty-member band, they’re spreading those profit margins really thin.