A Global Dance Beat.(world fusion music)

The song "Tu Es Foutu" (slang for "You're Finished") by In-Grid is a musical salad--an Italian singer, warbling in French, to a funky accordion-infused Latin-tango beat. It may read like a jarring combination but, musically, it works: the song has been a hit in European clubs over the past year. So has a remix of a 1950s mambo song called "Chihuahua." It was introduced last year in a TV commercial for Coca-Cola before making its way to radio and CDs. Now, people around Europe are singing its nonsensical lyrics.

The fusion of world music with more conventional pop, Latin and hip-hop rhythms isn't new. Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" was the summer song of 1999, and Polish chanteuse Kayah's blend of Gypsy and folk music had people all over Central and Southern Europe dancing in 2000. But now, so-called world-fusion songs are growing in both number and popularity- -and a genre that not long ago was derided by some in the music industry for its hippy-dippy beats is being viewed as a refreshing change from bland pop music. Former popsters Ricky Martin and Britney Spears are including world fusion on their latest CDs. Nihal, a DJ for BBC Radio One, jokes that "when [hip-hop producer] Puffy started sampling Duran Duran... at that point, people thought, 'Damn, we must have really run out of samples. So where can we go?' "

To an untapped trove of local musical styles, that's where. In world- fusion, DJs and producers take samples of traditional world music (African drums, tango and the like) and mix it with dance or hip-hop beats. The genre was born in 1987, say some DJs, when a group named Cold Cut mixed the song "Paid in Full." The result was an odd combination of dance beats with Israeli vocalist Ofra Haza's interpretation of a 16th-century Yemenite prayer. Strange, yes, but it caught on. "In dance music, people just got bored with the fall-to-the- floor beat and they started looking for something with a bit of an edge," says British music writer Nigel Williamson. DJs and producers started waking up to the fact that there was a vast universe of music out there. Charlie Gillett, a world-music broadcaster and producer, credits Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On" (2001), which sold over 200,000 copies in Britain and mainstreamed bhangra samples, for popularizing the new sound.

Bhangra, in fact, is the most popular fusion source of the moment. It's a drum-based folk northern Indian music that also uses the accordion- like sounds of the baaja (an Indian ...