Once the towers had fallen, simultaneously facing both the body count and the scarred city skyline was enough to realign anybody's perspectives. I was supposedly on track as a college sophomore in Virginia, but it was tough for me to justify continuing on as a student; every day for months, I thought about dropping out to enlist, feeling like a draft dodger even though there was no draft. We waited for twelve hours in a line that stretched around the basketball arena to donate at the Red Cross blood drive, and when our turns finally came, it felt like we couldn't give enough. As a teenager, I was of course unprepared for the kind of trauma that can level a nation. It was a totally new kind of distress, like I was consumed by a grief that was just too big for my body to hold. This, I think, is patriotism.

But patriotism can be a funny thing, especially in the South, where it often threatens to devolve into something much more nefarious. Local goons started throwing sandwiches at my little brother as he walked to school; we're Indian, not Arab. Out in Arizona, a gas station owner named Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered for wearing a turban; he was Sikh, not Muslim. The ignorance was as alarming as the hysteria.

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In the '60s and '70s danceable jazz-pop in foreign languages made American radio more exciting: Jorge Ben's "Mas Que Nada" charted when recorded by Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66; it was followed by Miriam Makeba's remake of "Pata Pata" in 1967, Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va" when covered by Santana in 1970, and Manu Dibango's irresistible "Soul Makossa" in 1972. Something about each single's arrangements, rhythms, and vocals allowed these crossover miracles to seduce stateside listeners who only understand English.

Don't be too surprised if it happens again with Spanish singer Concha Buika and French high-concept hip-hoppers Les Nubians; they seem uniquely positioned to win America's love, even though Buika normally sings in Spanish while Hélène and Célia Faussart record mostly in French.

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Yes, fine, there's clearly something educated and possibly even overengineered about the clicks and beeps which get woven into densely cerebral pseudo-songs by Autechre, the British duo that has been blazing so many trails in experimental electronic music since the '90s. Even the kooky name given to the genre they inadvertently defined reflects this: "intelligent dance music," it was called, which really just means songs crafted more for focused listening than for clubs and dancing, elaborate synthesizer and drum machine programming that lives and dies by nuance and subtlety instead of thunderous downbeats. We find here the difference between "technical" and merely "techno"--most musicians will fire up some audio software and use it to lay down their tunes. These guys write their own software first.

This can all seem pretty intimidating to listeners. The most common response to those sounds often seems to be fleeing in terror from the risk of emotional attachment and writing off Autechre as too brainy for their own good--architectural blueprints infused with a deeper meaning that most of us simply can't grasp. It's difficult music, sure, but it's not dead and dry--New York's city streets are grids too, as are the windows that line them, and nobody sees fit to interrogate the heart palpitations of a wide-eyed newcomer experiencing those for the first time, right? Most of us don't actually use those roads to get around so much as the convoluted, jam-packed, and occasionally dangerous network of tunnels buried beneath them, and those concrete right-angled street corners are all peppered with students, halal carts, drunkards, cops, cabbies--a blanket of humanity laid over the structure that keeps it all totally exhilarating.

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