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About this Song
Long before the formalization of any global genre categories that would frame creative work for international audiences, Indonesia’s thousands of inhabited islands fostered centuries of interconnected creative exchange, both between the archipelago’s distinct communities and across the broader Indian Ocean’s network of trade and cultural sharing, laying the groundwork for a rich tapestry of artistic practice that would go on to shape global understandings of place-based music making. When the world music genre emerged as a formal framework in the latter half of the 20th century, it was built to center exactly this type of place-rooted creative work, pushing back against the homogenizing pressures of mainstream global music industries that often stripped recordings of their cultural and geographic context to market them to the widest possible audience.
