Zeitgeist Gone Global

One of this practice's four ambitions is to live as global citizens — to treat the human condition as common ground, expressed through the culture, ritual and shared challenges that make each of us particular. To take part in the global world at all is to accept being reshaped by its influences as much as we reshape the things we build. This research begins with a decade that, if you press on it, turns out to be the great rehearsal of that idea in twentieth-century popular culture: a ten-year window between 1965 and 1975 when Western rock, soul, funk and the new mass-market keyboards — the Hammond, the Wurlitzer, the Farfisa, the Fender Rhodes, the Moog — reached every commercial port at once, and almost every port answered back.

To call it global pop before the term existed would be anachronistic. The young musicians in Saigon, Bamako, Lagos, Phnom Penh, Addis Ababa, Istanbul, Tehran, Seoul, Surabaya and Beirut were not making world music in the late-1980s record-store sense. They were making local pop — local in language, local in rhythm, local in subject — and in their hands the Hammond organ became the new bağlama, the Fender Rhodes the new kora, the wah-wah pedal the new saung. The tool was borrowed; the sentence built with it was entirely their own.

That is what we mean by zeitgeist gone global: the same audio technology landing on docks in a dozen languages and being made to adapt, evolve and combat with a dozen melodic traditions, all within ten years. It is the single most multilingual decade of popular music ever recorded — and, as the pages that follow try to show, it happened without any of the machinery we now assume such a moment requires. There was no internet, no global news cycle, no streaming, barely any affordable air travel; the influence moved slowly, along physical channels — radio signals, pressing plants, cassettes, touring bands, hotel lobbies, returning students — and was remade at every stop. In a present defined by the instant, frictionless spread of influence, and by a zeitgeist we experience as permanently fleeting, retracing this slower moment grounds an understanding of how culture once formed, and stands in striking contrast to the momentum of cultural consumption today.

How the wave actually moved

The transmission infrastructure of the borrowed decade is, in some ways, the more interesting story than the music itself. In a world without the internet, without global news cycles, without satellite television widely available, without mass affordable air travel — how did a teenager in Surabaya in 1968 hear, learn, and recombine a Cream guitar solo and a Hammond organ riff inside the same year they were recorded in London? To understand the means through which information, influence and inspiration flowed in this era is to understand how the slow speed of innovation launched an exponential growth towards a new era of global zeitgeist production.

American military radio → The fastest channel of all was one the music's makers never built and never intended: the US military's own entertainment network, beaming home to homesick soldiers and leaking, inevitably, to everyone within range. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service ran stations off bases at Yokota, Subic Bay, Okinawa, Frankfurt and a dozen other sites, but its purest case was Vietnam. There the Armed Forces Vietnam Network broadcast from six in the morning to midnight on 820 kHz AM out of the Rex Hotel in Saigon, and though the signal was technically aimed only at GIs, it went out over a Vietnamese transmitter that no border could contain — reaching five hundred thousand service personnel and an unknown but enormous civilian audience listening in on the same dial. What they heard was Black American music at full strength: the morning show was Dawn Buster, the late-night slot was Orient Express, and a program called Soul 70 carried James Brown straight into Saigon and across the entire delta. The pipeline back to the source was astonishingly short — stateside DJs like Wolfman Jack, Casey Kasem and Tony Pigg cut transcription discs in Los Angeles that were flown into theater within days, so that a civilian musician in Saigon, Manila or Tokyo could be playing "Cold Sweat" by ear within months of its New York release. And where there was no base to broadcast from, the State Department did the same work on purpose: Voice of America ran the parallel service in Persian, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and a dozen other languages — the one channel that needed no soldiers nearby to reach the people it was aimed at.[25]

The multinational pressing plant → By 1965 the major labels — EMI, Decca, Polygram, Philips, CBS — had ringed the developing world with regional plants, in Lagos, Dakar, Beirut, Bombay, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Manila. The logic was mostly economic. Finished records were heavy and broke easily, so shipping them from Europe or America was expensive and wasteful; import duties in newly independent states made it costlier still, and postwar currency controls made it hard to move the profits home anyway. A plant built inside the market sidestepped all of that — and because a pressing line cost more than any local independent could raise, owning one meant owning the market. What the plants pressed was Western catalogue, licensed locally and stamped onto cheap 45s: in most of the developing world the long-playing record was a luxury, and the seven-inch was simply what you could afford. But once a line was running, the marginal cost of pressing a local act was almost nothing — so the same machines that pressed Cliff Richard pressed the Lijadu Sisters, sometimes off the same Lagos line in the same week.[4, 20, 29]

The Philips compact cassette → Where the pressing plant was a fixed, expensive thing that only a major label could own, the cassette was the opposite in every respect. Philips introduced it in Berlin in August 1963, and by 1968 it was cheap enough to be everywhere. It did three things the LP simply could not: you could copy it at home, you could carry it in a pocket, and — crucially for anyone outside the majors' orbit — you could manufacture it profitably in runs of a hundred rather than thousands. That combination took the means of distribution out of the plants' hands, and the scale of what followed is hard to overstate: more than a hundred billion cassettes have been sold to date.

Its deeper importance, though, is archival. Because the format was cheap, portable and endlessly copyable, it kept circulating in private hands long after the official record survived — so most of what remains of Cambodian music, much of what we have from Lebanon, nearly all of the early Algerian raï catalogue, and a large share of Anatolian rock reaches us only because cassettes outlasted the wars and upheavals that destroyed the master tapes. The margins that history runs on are thin: almost every Habibi Funk reissue is sourced from a single surviving cassette. And the tape carried more than music. Across the Arab world it doubled as the medium of religious sermons, political speeches and spoken family letters, passed hand to hand along the oil-boom migration routes that linked the Gulf, the Maghreb and Europe — the same human traffic that, in the next section, would carry the music itself across borders.[2, 12, 21]

Touring artists → If the pressing plants moved records, and cassettes amplified content mobility, it was the touring musicians who moved the actual feel of the music — and their visits tended to detonate rather than simply entertain. When the Beatles played three shows at Tokyo's Budokan in June and July 1966, Nippon TV broadcast them across the country, and the sight and sound of an amplified guitar group reaching a national audience became the catalyst for Japan's Group Sounds boom. The same thing happened as a kind of apprenticeship in Lagos: James Brown's 1970 concert at Onikan Stadium put Fela Kuti in the front row, and afterward JB's bandleader David Matthews found himself at Fela's club at four in the morning, taking notes on how the rhythm section locked together.

That transmission could travel by way of a single relocating musician, too — Geraldo Pino arrived from Freetown in 1966 with a James-Brown-schooled Heartbeats, and by Fela's own admission it was Pino's example that made Afrobeat necessary, a rival worth answering. Exile pushed the current in other directions: Hugh Masekela, Letta Mbulu and Miriam Makeba, cut off from South Africa, toured West Africa out of their American exile, carrying one continent's sound back toward another. And the traffic ran both ways. The Sadistic Mika Band toured Britain alongside Roxy Music in 1975 for the unglamorous reason that the British producer Chris Thomas had happened to hear them playing a Tokyo hotel — proof that the exchange was no longer moving in only one direction.[26, 30]

The international hotel circuit → The grand international hotel turned out to be one of the least obvious but most important pieces of the whole circuit. Hailu Mergia's Walias Band held the residency at the Addis Ababa Hilton straight through the Derg years, when a nighttime curfew emptied the streets — which meant the Hilton was one of the few places left where anyone gathered after dark, and where international guests, embassy staff and jazz musicians passing through from New York all ended up hearing one another. The pattern repeated across the map: the Saigon Continental, the Beirut Phoenicia, the Royal Tehran Hilton, the Manila Hotel — every major international hotel kept a house band playing Western standards for its foreign clientele. But those same players spent the rest of the week working in their own idioms and their own languages, so the musicians who smoothed out The Girl from Ipanema for the dinner crowd were also the ones carrying local styles back into the city's clubs and studios. The hotel sat at the intersection of the two worlds, and its lobby — foreign money and local talent passing through the same room, night after night — became the network node where they met.[6]

The long cargo of returning students → The slowest channel was also the deepest, because it carried the music inside people rather than on any medium. Students and travelers went abroad and came home changed, and what they brought back reshaped whole scenes. African students returned from Paris, London and Moscow with crates of LPs under their arms. Mulatu Astatke trained at Trinity College in London and then at Berklee in Boston, absorbing a full jazz vocabulary before carrying it home to Addis and building something new out of it. Vietnamese students coming back from France brought yé-yé with them; Iranian elites who traveled to London returned with Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell in their luggage; Pepe Smith crossed from Manila to Tokyo and cut Speed, Glue & Shinki for Atlantic Japan. The thing being carried was never fixed — sometimes it was the records themselves, sometimes sheet music, sometimes a single Hammond organ riding in the hold of a ship, and sometimes nothing more physical than the memory of how a chord progression went, reconstructed by ear once the traveler was back home. That last kind of cargo left no trace in any archive, which is exactly why it mattered most: it moved the music the way nothing else could.[6, 7]

Television → It would be a mistake to skip past television, which in these years was still a young mass medium and was doing something none of the other channels could. By the late 1960s national broadcast TV had reached most of these capitals — Saigon, Phnom Penh, Manila, Lagos, Tehran, Beirut, Cairo, Addis — and almost everywhere it arrived it brought the same format with it: the local variety show, which imported Western acts and manufactured home-grown pop stars on the very same studio sets, side by side. Cambodian national television built weekly variety around Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea; Soul Train, syndicated from 1971, eventually reached nearly every African-diasporic community within satellite range; Japanese music television pushed Western imports and domestic Group Sounds across the archipelago at once. What made television different from a record or a touring band was that it transmitted the image as much as the sound — how a pop musician stood, dressed, moved and held a microphone. It taught an entire generation not just what pop was supposed to sound like, but what it was supposed to look like.[16, 18]

What this means

Taken together, these channels did more than move songs from one place to another. Each carried a different dimension of the same moment: military radio and the pressing plants moved the sound, television moved the image, the touring circuits and hotel bandstands moved the lifestyle — the posture, the fashion, the sense of how a modern musician was supposed to live — and the returning students carried all three at once, folded into memory. What emerged was not a set of local imitations trailing a Western original, but a genuine zeitgeist: a shared vocabulary of audio, image and attitude that surfaced in dozens of cities at nearly the same time.

And because everyone worked from the same limited toolkit — the same handful of imported instruments, the same thin supply of records, the same unreliable signal, the same political weather of decolonization and Cold War patronage — the results rhymed without ever repeating. That is the real subject of what follows. The next five studies leave the infrastructure behind and go down to street level, into specific rooms and specific lives: the cabarets of Tự Do Street, a Phnom Penh studio, a Lagos club at four in the morning. They are stories of astonishing invention, and often of astonishing loss — scenes that flared for a few years and were then scattered by war, censorship or exile, surviving now only because a cassette outlasted the people who made it, or because someone, decades later, went looking. What each city did with the same borrowed decade is best understood not as a trend but as a set of individual answers — sung, for a moment, by name.

Saigon, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Surabaya & Manila → Across mainland and maritime Southeast Asia the borrowed decade produced not one scene but a cluster of them, each city bending the same imported sounds toward its own language and temperament. In Saigon it became Nhạc Trẻ — literally "youth music" — a fast, cosmopolitan scene built on Carol Kim's soul vocals, on the giddy Twist-Agogo-Mashed-Potatoes duets of Hùng Cường and Mai Lệ Huyền, and on bands like CBC and The Strawberry Four working the cabarets of Tự Do Street. Singers like Phương Tâm, only recently rediscovered, laid surf and twist over Vietnamese lyrics right up until the war ended in 1975 — after which the whole catalogue nearly vanished, until the German DJ and producer Jan Hagenkoetter reassembled it decades later into the three-volume Saigon Supersound series (2017–2019), the most fully reconstructed Asian scene of the era.

The same few years in Phnom Penh produced something just as astonishing and far more cruelly cut short: the Khmer rock of Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron, Yol Aularong and Liev Tuk — most of whom are believed to have been murdered by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, so that the music now survives its own makers. Elsewhere the mood was lighter but no less inventive. In Bangkok, Sroeng Santi was covering Black Sabbath in Thai while Plearn Promdan and Dao Bandon pushed luk thung toward its funkier edge. In Surabaya, Dara Puspita played their own instruments as one of Indonesia's first all-female rock bands, and across the strait in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, M. Osman, Adnan Othman and Roziah Latiff & The Jayhawkers spun the Pop Yeh Yeh scene directly out of the Beatles' "yeah-yeah-yeah." And in Manila, Joey "Pepe" Smith and the Juan de la Cruz Band gave the whole impulse a name and a manifesto at once, inventing Pinoy rock with Himig Natin in 1973 — "Our Hymn."[3, 8, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 30]

Accra, Lagos, Freetown, Bamako, Dakar & Conakry → West Africa met the borrowed decade differently from Southeast Asia, because the wave arrived into dance-band traditions that were already deep and self-assured — so the story here is less about invention from nothing than about grafting funk and soul onto roots that could take the strain. In Accra, Ebo Taylor — who died in February 2026 at ninety — did exactly that, producing Pat Thomas, C.K. Mann and Hedzoleh Soundz and pushing Ghanaian highlife into something fluent in jazz and funk; three decades on, the Soundway label's Ghana Soundz (2002) reissued that catalogue and set off a worldwide highlife revival on the strength of it.

In Lagos the current ran harder. Fela Kuti and Tony Allen forged Afrobeat through Africa 70, while a whole surrounding scene — the Lijadu Sisters, BLO, Ofege, The Funkees, MonoMono, Sonny Okosun — worked a rougher rock and soul that Strut's Nigeria 70 (2001) later recovered. The under-credited catalyst was an outsider: the Sierra Leonean Geraldo Pino, who arrived in 1966 with his James-Brown-schooled Heartbeats and, by Fela's own admission, made Afrobeat necessary by getting there first. Further inland the scenes carried the weight of the new nations themselves. In Bamako, the Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs du Motel staged a famous stadium showdown in 1974, with the young Salif Keita's voice anchoring the Ambassadeurs. In Dakar, Orchestra Baobab refined the Afro-Cuban dance music that would later mutate, through Youssou N'Dour and Étoile de Dakar, into mbalax. And in Guinea, Bembeya Jazz National was quite literally the sound of the state — the sanctioned voice of Sékou Touré's post-independence project, music as national self-definition.[5, 9, 13, 20, 26, 27]

Addis Ababa, Lusaka & Nairobi → In Addis Ababa the borrowed decade produced what the world now calls the Ethiopian Golden Era, and it sounded like nowhere else because it was built on a foundation nowhere else had: the country's five-note pentatonic modes. The Amha and Kaifa labels were its engine. Mulatu Astatke arranged Latin jazz over those Ethiopian scales; Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete gave it its voices; and Tlahoun Gèssèssè turned it political with Altchalkoum — "Can't Stand Any More" — a song pointed enough that first the Emperor and then the Derg that overthrew him both banned it. Through the military curfew that followed, Hailu Mergia kept the Walias Band's all-night residency going at the Hilton, one of the few lights left on after dark.

The entire catalogue might have stayed buried had Francis Falceto not reconstructed it for Buda Musique's Éthiopiques series, which began in 1998 and now runs to thirty volumes and counting. Far to the south, in Lusaka, the same impulse came out heavier and dirtier: Rikki Ililonga's Musi-O-Tunya and the WITCH, fronted by Emmanuel "Jagari" Chanda, built Zamrock out of psych, garage and a deep debt to Sabbath and Hendrix — a scene most of the world would never have heard without Now-Again's Welcome to Zamrock anthologies (2017). And along the coast, in Kenya and Tanzania, the current ran through guitars: D.O. Misiani's Shirati Jazz defined the modern shape of benga, while Daudi Kabaka's Helule Helule traveled far enough to be covered by The Tremeloes in London. None of these scenes were imitating. All of them were amplifying the global zeitgeist.[1, 6, 7]

Istanbul, Tehran, Beirut, Cairo, Khartoum, Algiers & Casablanca → Across the region the borrowed decade produced some of its boldest fusions and suffered some of its hardest political endings — often in the same scene. In Istanbul, Anatolian Rock welded the bağlama and saz to electric rock and wore its leftist politics openly: Erkin Koray, Selda Bağcan, Cem Karaca, Moğollar and Barış Manço made music that assumed it could change the country, until the 1980 military coup answered by exiling Karaca and jailing Bağcan. Tehran told a similar story in a different key. Before the 1979 Revolution the city ran a full pop industry — Kourosh Yaghmaei's Gol-e Yakh sold five million copies, Googoosh reigned as the queen of Persian pop, and Zia Atabay cut a Persian funk so assured that the Pomegranates compilation (Finders Keepers, 2009) would later shelve it beside The Meters and Curtis Mayfield as though it had always belonged there — and then the Revolution closed the whole thing down.

In Beirut the fusion got more literal still: the Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid worked out of Polysound studios on the Voice of the Orient label, running Arabic maqam scales through a wah-wah pedal and a Fender Strat on the Guitar El Chark recordings that Sublime Frequencies later reissued. Recovering the rest of this world has been the decade-long project of one label: Habibi Funk, founded by Jannis Stürtz in Berlin in 2015, which has documented Issam Hajali, Rogér Fakhr, Ferkat Al Ard, the Sudanese Sharhabil Ahmed, Algerian proto-raï and Moroccan Nass El Ghiwane. And it has done so on a principle worth stating plainly, because so little of this history was ever conducted on fair terms: in every case the label licenses directly from the artist or their surviving family, and splits the proceeds fifty-fifty.[2, 14, 21, 23, 28, 30]

Why the window closed but lives on

What ended this decade was not the music. It was politics. April 1975: Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia's musicians are sent to the rice fields or shot. That same April, Saigon falls, and the Nhạc Trẻ catalogue scatters into the Vietnamese diaspora and the back rooms of local pressing-plant warehouses. In 1974 the Derg overthrows Haile Selassie, and within two years the Ethiopian Golden Era is over. In 1979 the Iranian Revolution arrives, and Googoosh stops singing in public for twenty-one years. In September 1980 the Turkish military coup sends Selda to jail and Karaca to Munich. And then the 1980s finish the job by gentler means: the global homogenization of disco, FM radio, MTV and CD manufacture flattens whatever the coups had missed. The window is barely ten years — between Western pop arriving and global capital flattening what answered back.

And yet this is the first moment in history when a music scene could be erased at home and still survive. Every channel that carried the wave outward doubled, without anyone intending it, as a means of preservation. The cassette that made the music portable also made it copyable, so a single tape in a private collection could outlast the master reels the Khmer Rouge or the censors destroyed. The pressing plants left warehouses of forgotten 45s. The touring routes and migration paths scattered the recordings across a diaspora that kept them safe by accident. The infrastructure of transmission became, in the end, an infrastructure of memory — and the reissue economy that began around 2000, the Éthiopiques and Saigon Supersounds and Habibi Funks, has simply been racing to gather up what those innovations happened to save. For the first time, influence outran the lifespan of the scene that produced it. The music transcended its own moment.[6, 8, 21]

That is what makes the decade worth reconstructing. It was not a single sound but a single instant — the same instant — arriving in dozens of cities that had never coordinated and never needed to, each answering the same borrowed vocabulary in its own tongue. Addis in its pentatonic modes, Lagos in its polyrhythm, Istanbul on the saz, Phnom Penh in Khmer, Manila in a hymn of its own naming. It was, for one brief window, a genuinely global zeitgeist — and its genius was that becoming global cost each place nothing of what made it local. The world sang the same song at once, and every city sang it in its own accent.

Why this is the right place to listen

For a practice that thinks of itself as a global citizen, this is exactly the right place to listen. We keep returning to a single question — which generation of sound, experimentation and cultural byproduct best describes how we actually work — and this decade is one of the three answers that comes up again and again. It comes up because it is the most generous proof we know of a principle we believe in: that what travels between cultures is never a style but a vocabulary — an instrument, an amp, a tape machine, a four-on-the-floor — and that what stays local is everything that actually matters. The same Hammond organ played four different things in Lagos, Phnom Penh, Tehran and Seoul in the same week of 1972, and all four were correct.[10]

This is the second installment in the series we began with the launch of The Atlas Listening Club — a project built on curiosity and on a stubborn wish to understand the deeper, richer history of how a collective zeitgeist forms. We share it as an homage to a genuinely dynamic decade, and as a small argument about our own moment. Because what this era proves is that cultural exchange did not need the internet, or social media, or the constant barrage of information we now take for granted, to move a worldwide movement — and that its slowness may have been the very thing that let each place keep its own accent while still moving and shaking toward a more eclectic, more global future.

The zeitgeist arrived everywhere at once. It is in the answering back that we want to listen to it.