I kind of have to agree with Katherine. I am definitely liking the Sri Lankan hop-hop mix, and so is my thesis :))) The way in which the CD (or at least others like it) was released as a benefit for tsunami victims, and then provided much less critical relief to me (as I was also working on my thesis) seems to be part of a fundamental pattern of ever expanding spheres of influence and possibilities via music. The choice of songs was interesting...from Tupac's "Keep Ya Head Up" to Spice Girls' "Wannabe" :) I wonder how much the content of the CD was meant to talk about the events and people, to which the CD was dedicated. Since the CD pulled pop cultural influences together from around the globe this brings up the additional question of whether you can actually talk about place-specific people and events, or if music is equally about propagating a global cultural phenomena through music which then takes on a life of its own. Music indeed has become a lot closer to a true "citizen of the world." When it is used in this context, it indeed has to be global - global problems require global solutions. The evolution of the system in which music builds reciprocity between people and cultures could be taken as a sign that music is literally much more than waveforms - more than even a common medium or an epiphenomenal similarity across cultures based on common needs - but motif of life. At the same time it's an emergent property built on little things such as "How badly does this song want to make me get out of this chair and dance?" The effect of music is indeed more than the sum of the smaller effects it has on us. While single tunes may trigger in us specific emotions (like feeling happy out of a sudden when you hear you favorite song) or make us do specific things (turn on the radio, decide to go to a club), the effect of music as a phenomena that transcends geographical and cultural bounds, could have a much larger effect on us - make us appreciate peace or express support for tsunami and terror victims. Yet this phenomenon emerges from formal and social boundaries we've seen in each individual tradition. No music is completely static, but do incremental technical changes in musical style inevitably lead to destabilization and musical globalization? True, there are obvious instances in which external traumatic human events lead to development of new styles, but I think that the Tsunami remix hints at a more sophisticated interaction in which music does not "play musicians" nor do musicians simply play music, but in which music and musicians are "equal players."
P.S. Peter and I wrote this post together after listening to the remix. He would write a line or two and then I came in with one. Just as you have different musics from different cultures forming a collusion in the remix, here you have two different commentaries forming a (kind of?) emergent harmony. (Hence the lack of paragraphs and the unusual connections between sentence topics.)