The World Is PhatReggaeton, grime, baile funk, and the globalization of hip-hop.

Hip-hop has always been obsessed with geography. Coming from the streets may give a rapper credibility, but coming from particular streets—or, for that matter, a particular hood, side, city, region, or coast—gives him an identity and situates him within the larger hip-hop culture. But this obsession with the local has produced a kind of isolationism: While the world devours American hip-hop, America ignores the hip-hop of the rest of the world. The recent influx of three international styles—reggaeton from Puerto Rico, grime from Britain, and baile funk from Brazil—suggests that this situation may finally be changing. Taken together, they dispel the notion that globalization breeds homogeneity. Each is the product of a country importing American hip-hop, blending it with native traditions, and refashioning it in its own image.

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Reggaeton (pronounced reggae-tone) emerged from the barrios of Puerto Rico (and, to a lesser extent, Latin American countries) back in the mid-1990s. The sound is an amalgam of foreign and domestic styles: hip-hop, reggae, merengue, and the Puerto Rican dance music bomba. It has succeeded in America due to some clever viral marketing: DJs began remixing popular American hip-hop songs with reggaeton beats, interspersing Spanish verses with the original English ones. The songs spread throughout the American mixtape underground and eventually found their way onto the playlists of trendsetting urban radio stations like Hot 97 in New York City. (For more on reggaeton's sound and artists, click here.)

Reggaeton is now in the curious spot of being both ubiquitous (in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami) and totally unknown (everywhere else). It won't remain that way for long—all the major labels set up Latin urban imprints last year, and P. Diddy just threw his hat in the ring, announcing the formation of Bad Boy Latino. Other top American MCs and producers—Lil Jon, 50 Cent, The Game, and Fat Joe among them—are now working with established reggaeton stars, appearing on and remixing their tracks.

British grime is also enjoying a vogue in America, though of a less mainstream sort. Instead of bubbling up through the streets in America, as reggaeton did, grime was handed down by a community of MP3 bloggers and music tastemakers like the Fader magazine and Pitchfork. First came Mercury Prize-winner Dizzee Rascal, riding a trans-Atlantic wave of adulation in early 2004. Now the rest of the U.K. grime scene is trying to make the leap, targeting a flurry of compilations and solo albums at American listeners. The style grew out of London's mostly black projects, called council estates, sometime around 2002, and spread via pirate radio, which functions in Britain essentially as mixtapes do here. The name originated as an adjective for the sound: a spare, gritty mix of depth-charge bass, pinging synth notes, retro video-game effects, and paper-thin drum beats that owe as much to the British traditions of garage and jungle as to American hip-hop. The lyrics are dense and percussive—so much so that they almost serve as a second drum track to many of the songs. (For more on grime's sound and artists, click here.)

Brazilian baile funk, perhaps the unlikeliest candidate for import, originated as the sound track for weekend block parties in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro—the drug-infested, hillside slums depicted in the film City of God. It might never have been heard outside their walls if not for the American DJ Diplo (aka Wesley Pentz), who, like some kind of postmodern folk-song hunter, traveled to Rio to investigate the music he first heard on a scratchy tape given to him at a party. Composed in makeshift studios on vintage equipment with bootlegged computer programs, baile funk is hip-hop as it might sound in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max. The songs are a choppy bricolage of hip-hop, electro-funk, Carnaval rhythms, Miami bass, and samba. The vocalists—many of whom sound about 12 years old—shout flat, repetitive lines in squeaky Portuguese.

Diplo emerged from Rio with material for his first baile funk mixtape, Favela On Blast: Rio Baile Funk 04, which served up 30-plus minutes of jittery, anonymous, booty-shake music. But it was another mix that really broke the sound in America: Piracy Funds Terrorism, co-produced with future Internet darling M.I.A. (née Maya Arulpragasam), interspersed and blended baile funk clips with unreleased M.I.A. tracks. The sound suits her sassy, polyglot hip-pop perfectly, so it's no surprise that baile funk elements and samples also found their way onto her official release, Arular (XL). (For more on baile funk's sound and artists, click here.)

The success of all three foreign styles in America parallels, in many respects, the emergence of new scenes within America. Throughout the 1990s, U.S. hip-hop was all about the East Coast/West Coast divide; everything else was the rap suburbs. But in the last five years, the map has been redrawn to include Atlanta and the Dirty South, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Houston. Each new locale announced itself with a distinctive sound, slang, and set of personalities.

Foreign hip-hop has followed a similar model. Reggaeton, grime, and baile funk—like Jamaican dancehall before them—arrived on America's doorstep as complete packages, with their own identities and sounds. They succeeded simply by innovating, not imitating. The U.K., for instance, has been churning out ersatz American hip-hop for decades, but it is only now—with a sound as aggressively original as grime—that America has taken notice.

The incorporation of new domestic scenes in the last five years has reinvigorated American hip-hop, saving it from the doldrums of P. Diddy party rap and taking it in startling new directions—Lil Jon's popularization of crunk, and, more recently, the breakthrough of Houston's chopped and screwed sound. In a similar way, the internationalization of hip-hop will continue the rebirth. Consider the creative explosion rock 'n' roll experienced when it collided with Britain's talents beginning in the 1960s, producing the British Invasion, glam, punk rock, shoegazer rock, and other styles.

In the case of hip-hop, however, the rate of innovation will likely be far more rapid, and the range of influences far more diverse. MP3 blogging, file-sharing, and home PC music production software has replicated, on an international scale, the culture of street mixtapes and pirate radio—a culture in which unofficial releases, alternate versions, and remixes are the coin of the realm. Already, we're witnessing a rampant cross-pollination of styles. File-sharing networks and blogs are flooded with grime versions of American hip-hop songs; chopped and screwed versions of reggaeton songs; crunk versions of grime songs; beats composed from baile funk bootlegs; and countless reggaeton remixes of American hip-hop and R&B hits.

In some cases, America's name-brand producers and artists are leading the way. Lil Jon, the Zelig of the American pop charts, has crunked-out reggaeton songs by Daddy Yankee ("Gasolina") and the Cuban-American rapper Pitbull ("Toma" and "Culo"), and he attached his name to a new crunk-meets-grime mixtape produced by U.K. DJ Semtex—stamping both styles with his all-important imprimatur. Dizzee Rascal achieved the same thing in reverse when he was asked by Beck to contribute a grime remix of the song "Hell Yes," called "Fax Machine Anthem," to the deluxe edition of his new album, Guero.

But whether foreign artists representing these styles—or just their inventive sounds—will succeed here is still an open question. Reggaeton star Daddy Yankee's 2004 album, Barrio Fiono, has sold an impressive 560,000 copies to date in the U.S. But Dizzee Rascal, grime's leading light, has sold only 58,000 copies stateside of his much-hyped debut Boy In Da Corner. His follow-up, Showtime, has sold less than half that many. Perhaps Dizzee will one day match Jay-Z, but, for now at least, the pop-chart-topping status of American hip-hop heavyweights is foreign territory for international acts.

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