Many years ago, I went to Bolivia to help a friend with some field research. We stayed on a remote ranch in the Gran Chaco, an arid grassland in the southern part of the country. One night, as we were sitting and drinking beers with the rancher, he shared that he liked Mexican music. Being a young white American from the exact center of the country and only beginning to shed the cultural myopia which that entails, I found this eye-opening. It’s not like I didn’t know Latin America contained many countries, but I’d never really thought of them as being different from each other, you know? The idea that this rancher in southern Bolivia was a fan of Mexican music kind of slapped me and opened up my worldview in a most charming way.
I was thinking of this when I wrote a scene in which my Chinese protagonist shares Isan music from northern Thailand with his American friend.
Excerpt:
“Jun pulled out his tablet and touched it several times to cast music to the room’s sound system. Something like a guitar began noodling out an arrhythmic introductory riff that eventually settled into a repetitive pattern. This became more complex with each measure, building intensity until finally, drum and bass joined. Jun saw Keiron’s head begin to bop subtly up and down when the beat dropped.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four
Pretty sure this was the track I described.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VXJ-Gyle4
https://open.spotify.com/track/4KKOeMWgKcHEle0chfj8hd?si=46c975d01b5548c6