One of the great things about the world becoming an ever smaller and better-connected place is its effect on music. There was a time when it was easy to listen to a piece of music and assign it a geographical location or a cultural classification. But as Western music seeps into the East (and vice versa), digital sounds fuse with traditional instruments, as musical boundaries between genres are demolished and sounds and styles from one place and time are merged and moulded and melded and modified with another, the result is a wave of cool music that is truly global. Pozitif, the new single from Senegalese music maker Moh Dediouf, is undoubtedly that.
Built of beautiful blends of afro-beat groove and glitchy, trap-infused rhythms, the euphoric lift and positivity of the lyrics are hard to miss, not to mention that the clue is right there in the title. The groove is buoyant, the rhythms infectious, and by the time the second chorus comes around, if you are not dancing your way around your room, along the street, around the office or shop or wherever you are listening to it, then there is probably something wrong with you.
And as if to reinforce the music’s cosmopolitan and global status, it is sung only partly in English and partly in Moh’s Sengalese first language.
There was a time when certain musical traits or signature sounds would mark a piece of music out as being “world music.” That is to say, of a specific place. Positif and songs like it have changed such notions. Its deft blends and delicate fusions of music from all over the globe, from either hemisphere, from across geography and genre have redefined what world music can be. It is no longer music from a specific part of the world; it is now music that is genuinely representative of the world, the whole world…a global, holistic and all-encompassing type of music.
How great is that?
