Cheb Mami, the "Prince of Rai," was sentenced today in France to five years in prison, reports the New York Times. Cheb Mami, whose real name is Ahmed Khelifati Mohammed, along with three accomplices, abducted his former lover, whose name has been withheld, in 2005. Upon learning that she was pregnant, he and his accomplices attempted to perform an abortion on the woman, though they were unsuccessful and she later had the child, who is now three years old. Cheb Mami, who is best known in the Western world for his work with Sting on the song "Desert Rose," had been on the run in Algeria for two years before he voluntarily turned himself in for his trial in France earlier this week.

Image (c) Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images, 2003

There's a certain kind of list-style memoir that seems to be pervasive on the internet, usually titled something like, "Things I wish I could go back in time to tell myself," where people, purportedly in their elder years (though realistically probably 22-year-old for-hire web writers) wax rhapsodic about how they wish they could tell their teenaged selves how beautiful they were, or to start saving money, or to spend as much time as possible rolling around in clover flowers, or things of that nature. What would I go back and tell my teenaged self? I was a totally unattractive and awkward-looking teenager, so I would never go back and tell myself how adorable I was (unless future-me is much kinder than present-me). I did save money, so no advice needed there, and my hay fever would've made rolling around in any kind of flowers ill-advised.

No, if I were to go back and give some advice to my 16-year-old self, it would've surely been "Put down the No Doubt record and go get yourself some Desmond Dekker. If you must listen to Reel Big Fish, please also listen to Prince Buster. And while you're at it, if you're going to play Bob Marley's Legend album on repeat for weeks on end, take a break for at least an hour a day and listen to some of The Wailers' early ska work. By the way, nice glasses."

Like many people my age, I was sort of ska-crazy in the early and mid-'90s, but I thought I was being really old-school if I delved into two-tone (second wave) ska. I think that 16-year-old me genuinely had almost no idea that first-wave ska even existed, let alone what it really sounded like. And that's okay - at least I got there eventually. But I'm thinkin' that if I were to go back and give myself a list of things that I "wish I'd known when I was younger," I'm thinking it would be a list of essential first-wave ska starter CDs. Oh, and also a bottle of hair gel, because I was like 22 before I got my frizzies under control, y'all, and I could've saved myself much anguish.

A new social networking site has emerged, and I'm pretty excited. First of all, I love me some social networkin'. I could Twitter for hours, spend entire days looking at Facebook, laugh about how boring and stuffy LinkedIn is (yet frequently update my page), and otherwise waste my time on the internet network. But this social networking site is particularly exciting, because it's focused solely on world music, therefore essentially combining my two favorite things in the universe. I'm all twitchy and giddy just at the very idea of it. It's called MyWorldMusicFriends.com, and I am totally signed up. It's still in beta, but there are lots of cool features - blogs, media, photo sharing, and the like - that I'm really looking forward to exploring. If you, like me, can't get enough of these sorts of sites, come sign up! You can find me there - my (very creative) user name is "meganromer" and I'd love to be YourWorldMusicFriend.

World Music Central is reporting that Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, one of the world's greatest living Classical Indian musicians, passed away at his home in California on June 18. He was 88 years old.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan was a sarod (a lute-like Indian instrument) player in the Hindustani (Northern Indian) tradition. The title "Ustad" means "Master," and the title was bestowed upon him by the Maharajah of Jodhpur in the 1940s, a rare honor for a young man. Khan was the first musician to record an LP of Indian Classical Music in the United States, and he founded a college of music in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s, where thousands of students have since studied. He won the MacArthur Genius Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship, and he had street cred in the rock and roll community, too, having performed at the fabled Concert for Bangladesh with Ravi Shankar, sharing the bill with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and most of the Beatles.

Read World Music Central's Obituary, and if you want some introductory listening, check out Then and Now: The Music of the Great Master Continues (Compare Prices) - it's a two-disc set that contains both the original ragas he recorded in 1955, as well as two that he recorded in 1995, 40 years later.

Image (c) Ammp Records, 1995

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation via Twitter with Andrew Collins, About.com's Guide to Gay Travel, regarding modern reggae and dancehall music. If you're not familiar with dancehall, it's an upbeat genre of music based on reggae rhythms (or, more precisely, riddims) that features a deejay toasting (rapping) over the top. Musically, it's really fun. Lyrically... well, not so much. There are plenty of dancehall artists whose lyrics are socially conscious and respectful, but the majority of popular artists tend towards slackness, specifically violent homophobia. I've got a pretty decent mental filtration system, and years of practice have put me in a place where I can listen to lyrics that I disagree with and see them as indicators of socioeconomic factors and cultures that are different from my own, but even I can't take some of the more hateful lyrics that directly advocate killing gays and lesbians. It's especially true because Jamaica is one of the most dangerous places in the world for homosexuals, where violent attacks are commonplace and offenders are rarely prosecuted.

Going back to my Twitter conversation with Andrew Collins, we both agreed that throwing the baby out with the bathwater is definitely not the solution on this one. My personal strategy is one of a reverse boycott (a girlcott?) - I do buy reggae music and support Jamaican artists, but only the ones who I feel are using their lyrics for good. This is where roots reggae comes in. Roots reggae became a distinct subgenre of Jamaican music in the late 1970s, just as dancehall began to emerge. In those days, roots reggae was the thing: Bob Marley and Peter Tosh were selling massive amounts of records throughout the world, and singing about spirituality, brotherhood, love, the struggles of the oppressed, and other things that, though sometimes controversial, were not directly offensive. There are, in fact, still artists around who are rocking these sorts of lyrics - one of my favorites is Burning Spear. All the reggae rhythms you could want, and nothing hateful or hurtful, unless you're offended by religious or liturgical music - many of Burning Spear's songs are about Rastafarianism, a nonviolent religion. Burning Spear is what I think of as a "legacy artist," though - he's been around since the good old days - there are modern roots reggae artists, as well: Cocoa Tea, Junior Kelly, and Ziggy Marley, just to name a few.

What are your thoughts on homophobia in modern Jamaican music? Should people who disagree with these lyrics boycott Jamaican music (or Jamaican exports entirely)? Should we support the artists who don't sing violent lyrics? Should we just go ahead and listen to the slack lyrics and view them a valid expression of an oppressed culture, whether or not we agree? What do you think?

I don't know why I'm so inclined to ask people questions that I have a hard time answering myself, but here you go: of all of the albums that Bob Marley released, which is your very favorite? I have to say that I actually really love the early ska and rocksteady stuff that Mr. Marley performed with the Wailers... I just love that raucous Studio One sound, and the songs are so darn catchy. Most of these cuts were recorded as singles, though, and are only available in reworked modern compilation form, as opposed to albums that were originally created all at once. I think as far as official albums that were released in Bob Marley's lifetime, I'd have to go with African Herbsman, an album released shortly before the Wailers hit international superstardom, during the time frame where band members Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh were still in the band. But I also love Uprising, Burnin', Natty Dread... okay, pretty much all of them. I've managed to narrow down the scope to my ten favorite Bob Marley CDs, or at least the ones that I think are the best starter CDs for Marley beginners, but I'd love to know what you think! Tell us: what is your favorite Bob Marley CD of all time?

WorldMusicCentral.com is reporting that the Recording Academy (also known as the Grammy folks) have decided to nix the "Best Polka Album" category. According to an official press release from the Academy, "To ensure the Awards process remains representative of the current musical landscape, the Best Polka Album has been eliminated, which brings the total number of Grammy categories to 109." Ouch! C'mon, Grammy! I'd argue that polka is actually flourishing these days, with traditionalists and modernists rocking dancehalls from Texas to Minnesota, New York to California, and everywhere in between. We need more categories for subgenres, not less. In the same press release, the Academy announced that there will be some twists and shifts in the folk categories, which actually kind of confused me... all I know is that Irish Music is still homeless, another dumb move on Grammy's part. Though their big goal seems to be remaining relevant, I have to admit that decisions like these just make me think they're more and more out of touch. What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!

The man of the house recently tipped me off to a website called Folkstreams.net, which has apparently been around for quite awhile, but had somehow, very unfortunately, slipped under my radar until just now. Lemme tell ya, I'm obsessed! The website is a clearinghouse for dozens upon dozens of documentaries, available in free streaming format, all of which focus on folk and world music, and other elements of folk life. I managed to tear myself away from the site long enough to tell you about it (sharing the love and all), but I swear, as soon as I finish writing this blog post, I'm off to spend another couple of hours watching these great films. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

Rebuilding the Temple: Cambodians in America - Lawrence R. Hott and Claudia Levin. Examines the struggles of Cambodians who came to America to escape the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and how they kept their culture (including their music) alive in the United States. The soundtrack is particularly stunning.

Medicine Fiddle - Michael Loukinen. An exploration of a particular genre of fiddling that emerged out of the melding of the Native American populations on the Midwestern U.S./Canadian border and the French fur traders and later Scottish and Irish settlers in the region. It's a fairly unknown fiddle genre, but one that's worthy of much exploration, as you'll see in this film.

The Popovich Brothers of South Chicago - Jill Godmilow, Martin Koenig, Ethel Raim. A portrait of a family tamburitza band, hugely popular among the Serbian immigrant community of Chicago in the middle of the 20th Century.

From Shore to Shore - Patrick Mullins. An examination of traditional Irish Music in both the United States and Ireland, featuring both well-known Irish musicians and lesser-known (but equally wonderful) musicians.

Cajun Country - Alan Lomax. A visit to Southwest Louisiana, documenting the vibrant music and culture of the Cajun and Creole people who live there. Especially notable are some rare pieces of footage of Canray Fontenot and Walter Mouton.

Singing Fishermen of Ghana - Toshi Seeger, Pete Seeger. A documentary from Pete Seeger's world explorations back in the 1960s, which shows a very old tradition of call-and-response singing and African work songs (the roots of many genres of African-American music as we know it today) as they were still taking place in Ghana, among groups of fishermen.

There are dozens upon dozens more, so definitely do some exploring around the Folkstream site. Leave a comment and let us know what new favorites you've found!

First of all, my apologies for the heinous pun you just read. It couldn't be helped. These things just materialize, you know? Anyway, on to business. I was listening to some funky old Cajun fiddle music burned to disc from some old round black flat thing, and it was of the traditional, pre-accordion, twin fiddle variety. A lot of the tunes that those traditional Cajun fiddlers played were reels, a tune style more commonly associated with Irish music. I couldn't help but wonder whether the reel was brought into Cajun music by the Irish settlers who assimilated with Louisiana's French settlers a hundred or so years ago, or if, in fact, the style is much, much older and came up through both the Irish Celtic tradition and the Northern French Celtic tradition.

I got sort of obsessed with finding out the answer to this question, and discovered that there was little to no definitive information on the internet (actually, I got tired of sifting through websites about fishing reels), so I asked my all-things-fiddle source. His answer? "Reels have been around forever, man. They were, like, totally popular in Europe as dance tunes for a bunch of hundred years before we even came to America, and they were popular pretty much everywhere there was Celtic fiddle action going on." So I guess it's probably likely that both things happened: the Irish who immigrated to French Louisiana brought a bunch of their own reels, which just added to the French Celtic repertoire of reels that were already happening there. It's kind of cool to think about, really... the reel may well have been the common language for those two groups of people once upon a time, and now both their shared reels and their descendants are totally intertwined.

Cumbancha Records has, as I've mentioned before, won themselves a special place in my music-loving heart, despite the fact that they've only been around for a few years. Cumbancha's founder, Jacob Edgar, used to be the A&R guy for Putumayo World Music (that is, he picked the music for the compilations - cool job, right?) and decided that he wanted to make full-length records with some of the amazing artists that he was hearing in his travels around the world, so he did. Turns out, Mr. Edgar and I have very similar taste, and as far as I'm concerned, Cumbancha Records has established themselves as not only one of the finest world music record labels in this country, but one of the finest record labels, period. Five-star record after five-star record... at this point I'm starting to think I might buy mayonnaise if Cumbancha slapped their approval on it.

Imagine my giddiness when I discovered that I could send all of my friends (including you, of course) over to the Cumbancha website to get a big ol' stack of free downloads and see what I'm actually talking about. Yes! It's very exciting! The free eight-song download sampler, called Hear Globally, contains tracks by Rupa and the April Fishes, The Idan Raichel Project, Habib Koite, Andy Palacio, and more. The only catch? You have to give them your email address, which they cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die promise they won't use for anything but awesome info about new Cumbancha releases (and you can unsubscribe any time you want). To me, it's a fair deal. So what are you waiting for? Go get free stuff!