More than half a decade ago, under the regime of Bush The First (he who became CIA Director just three years after the coup cooked up by that organisation installed the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile), fRoots declared the following in an editorial:


"When I was an early teenager, the world was a lot larger and further away. To people of my age in the monochrome post-war horizons of the small seaside town where I grew up, America seemed alluring and romantic. We were dazzled by it. Blues, jazz, American folk, the still-fresh roots of rock'n'roll, the writings of Kerouac, the language of Lord Buckley, Bob Dylan! - all these things were hip, sophisticated, attractively different, had a depth of secret culture that we wanted to find a way into.

It's all different now, of course. America has dumbed beyond belief, and the secret cultures are our own and those of all the other local communities around the world who have undergone cultural ethnic cleansing. Your children can hardly turn on any channel of TV without having American soaps, news, adverts, cartoons and films pounding at them. You can't turn on the radio without hearing American music or local copies of it. Put on Top Of The Pops and every single song will be sung in an American accent, regardless of where the artist comes from. Go to most parts of the globe and turn on the radio and you'll hear the same thing. Walk down the streets in most places on the planet and the same American corporate advertising will lure identically dressed zombies in backwards-facing American baseball caps into American chains to eat American junk food."

Things have to change".


Thus the partial cultural boycott was born. And this is the rationale behind exhorting artists to examine their OWN cultural heritages, to perform local and regional musics with a sense of roots, place and community. In the case of this band from Latin America, there can be little point for them to dish up in their performances in Britain a 'Celtic' mish-mash/fusion, call it what you will, that is all-too-readily available from proliferating Flook clones everywhere. This is in no way 'telling them what they should play' but pointing out the obvious: that it would be of infinitely greater value for audiences on an overseas tour to hear the band's indigenous music rather than that which is all around them, polluting and diluting those still-extant traditions. It ill behoves the 'anything goes', 'good-enough-for-f*lk' brigade to shriek ignorantly that this is prescriptive. Were they to check back it might just register with them that a band with its roots on display would, in fact, be the OP's preference.