We get so much American music here in the rest of the world that we forget that entire genres of American music barely permeate our consciousness; it belongs to them, not us. Corny country singers and snappin’, jerkin’, hyphyin’, chicken-noodle-soupin’ black kids; New York icons like Dipset and New Orleans aliens beaming mixtape transmissions like Lil’ Wayne; and genuine celebrities like T.I., whose mega-hit “What You Know” only existed as an Internet record for me because, down here, King arrived in stores months after its American release. In the early ‘00s, even emo and indie rock seemed a peculiar, exotic creation of American collegiate culture, as removed from my own experience as any other world music. But through the wonder of copper wire and optical fiber, any mainstream was my mainstream. Any scene was my scene. We lived on the Internet now.

This spirit infused stuff that wasn’t even Internet music. Timbaland fell in love with Indian rhythms and rappers swiped dancehall cadences. African artists like K’Naan and Akon came to North America and released Western music, while Vampire Weekend grabbed Afro-pop rhythms for their indie pop tunes, subsequently taken back by Malawian Londoner Esau Mwamwaya. Jay-Z turned Panjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke” into a worldwide hit and used it to protest the invasion of Iraq. Maori rappers showed up on my TV, and, when I downloaded M.I.A.’s Kala I found a new version of a song by some Koori kids from out Wilcannia that had already been a novelty hit here. And back in Internetland, the online émigrés watched as the digital Nisei created a wave of sounds that existed within Mediafire links on Wordpress posts: blog house, MySpace Teenpop, mashup, shitgaze, glo-fi, and — whether Uffie or the Cool Kids — a deluge of hipster rap.