SINGING ACROSS THE STREETS

In a different era, the night of September 14, 2007 on Boston’s Lansdowne Street might have felt more like a rumble between the Jets and Sharks. Or maybe a meeting of rap rivals like Nas and Jay-Z, or LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, or—well, insert your favorite beef here.

A little after midnight that evening, a crowd from the Yankees-Red Sox game belched out of Fenway Park. Whether the game had finished, who had won or lost—I did not know the answers to these questions, and still do not. All that I knew was that I was one of dozens of sweat-drenched college kids skittering out of the Girl Talk show at the nearby Avalon.

An adolescence’s worth of experience had taught me that music like Girl Talk’s blog-approved dancehall indie mashups—which mix every song known to the teenage girl—tend not to go over well with the MLB set that was thronging the opposite side of the street. Certainly the tight jacket I was sporting was cause to walk home a bit faster. At the very least, I expected a shout of “Pansy!” or “Queeah!” At worst, I foresaw someone from my side getting the day-glow kicked out of them, right there in front of me. And it wasn’t until a football-playing friend of mine, with whom I attended the concert, asked me if I knew the score of the game that I remembered: the beef’s been squashed. The street divided us from the fans, but culture didn’t.

By the time I got to the T stop, I couldn’t tell with confidence who had come from the concert and who had come from the ball game. Now sure, that’s partially a function of Boston being (relatively) cosmopolitan, but the intermixture also says something important about what’s happening in music today. Musical purity died a long time ago, and the mutual exclusivity of genres is a relic of an age when nonchalance was still believable, and being famous was synonymous with having enviable class and dignity.

It is my firm belief, however, that culture is not dead. New forms of expression are always waiting to be discovered. Call me an optimist; I’ll call you something far worse. I’m just hopeful for what’s to come.

In justification of what may seem like youth-fueled naïveté, I present to you an artist you might have heard of: M.I.A. The British-born artist’s latest album, “Kala,” is an ode to modern originality. Each song is a tenuous marriage of world sounds—Baile Funk, hip hop, rock, and many more. To some, these tracks may sound like no more than an amalgamation of other people’s prefab music.

What M.I.A. creates, however, isn’t simply an amalgamation or a composite; it’s synthesis, and a personal kind of synthesis at that. It’s innovative music.

You might not be as familiar with Santogold, née Santi White. A former punk band singer, she’s opened for Björk and mixes Reggae sounds with rock, producing a sound that’s right at home in her adopted city, fresh-capital-of-the-world Brooklyn. If that is indeed her voice over the opening of “Creator,” well, then I’m in love. She doesn’t have a record out yet, but be sure to download “Shove It,” or “Pretty Green” with British wunderkind Marc Ronson. And if you think she’s a little too stylin’ and lacks substance, listen to “L.E.S. Artistes,” a sardonic, on-point criticism of bullshit hipsters that nonetheless manages to be hip.

To round it all out, Jacksonville, Florida group Black Kids have put out a remarkable demo entitled “Wizards of Ahhhs.” Available for free at blackkidsmusic.com, the four tracks on the EP are bright and impassioned, the kind you want to shout along to at an outdoor festival.

Their songs instantly recall The Smiths, yet are written with an intelligence and grace (listen to “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You”) that prove that songs can have roots in the past and still sound new and significant.

Influence is unavoidable. Not everything will be groundbreaking, just as not everything that’s groundbreaking will immediately sound groundbreaking. The past 80 years have seen unparalleled strides in music, the pace of which is unlikely to be matched in our time. To give some perspective, the classical Baroque period (yes, the whole thing) lasted about 160 years. The current breakneck speed makes it difficult to recognize the new, especially since it’s often couched in the language of the past. But the cross-pollination of different genres has proved profitable for a number of artists, not least of which is the universally-appreciated Girl Talk.

In short, we just need to breathe, let things happen, and embrace the fact that musical hybridization has leveled social divisions and squashed the jock/nerd beef. It’s a new era.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.