By Jordan S. Carroll
I don’t listen to world music often, but the BulgarianWomen’s Choir this isn’t. Terry Hall andMushtaq’s The Hour of Two Lights is an ambitious and perhapseven audacious attempt at cross-cultural music fusion. It blendsGypsy, Arabic, Indian and Jewish music with hip-hop, reggae and skato make a surprisingly catchy album. The album features the oud,ney, and darabuka as well as beats, bass lines, and scratchdeejaying.
The performers range from a twelve-year-old Lebanese girl toDamon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz to a blind Algerian rapper. Thereare even multi-lingual liner notes. The Hour of Two Lights managesto pull off ethnic eclecticism without any jarring shifts ortoo-too-clever juxtaposition. This isn’t Beck’s versionof the Orient.
The album’s message is almost too clear. It argues for andembodies a unity between peoples. The lyrics ask, “Are we notall one creation?” The fact that people from so manydisparate cultures and backgrounds can get together and make musicis inspiring. I can’t help but feel a warm fuzzy when I lookat the black and white pictures of all the different musicians.
Yet the album is almost too unified and too seamless. For analbum touted as spanning three continents, it’s odd that itfeels familiar. It’s clearly produced in a very poppy andvery Western way. The fact that all but one of the songs waswritten by Terry Hall and Mushtaq is troubling.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I wonder how much of the album wasspontaneous collaboration and how much of it was premeditated andorchestrated by the two masterminds. How many of the musiciansactually met and how many of them were recorded and just shuffledtogether in a studio? The result is accessible but I feel like Ishould be challenged a little more by a project like this.It’s almost too easy to say that we’re all one whenyou’ve eliminated the differences.
If anything, it’s the lyrics that suffer from thealbum’s inclusiveness. They rail against no specific enemyand uphold no specific peace. I don’t expect them to sketchout a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or sing balladsabout Sekou Toure but some of the lyrics are vague, obvious, andeven banal. They read like something inspired by MTV News. Theproject itself is daring enough, but the lyrics should at least beunobtrusive.
Despite these caveats, The Hour of Two Lights is a satisfyingand infectious listen. Moreover, it has a worthwhile message in itsvery composition. While I won’t be singing along to it inelevators, it’ll probably remain in my CD player for the nextfew weeks. The album might even be a useful jumping off point formore conventional world music.
