I suppose there was a time when it made sense to describe a band or artist as "sounding like (fill-in-the-blank)." Although it was not entirely accurate, you could generalize Led Zeppelin's sound as a mix of Howlin' Wolf and the Stones. Or, you could conceivably say the Ramones were the point between Phil Spector and the Sex Pistols. However, when the likening takes the shape of "Jorge Ben/Caetano Veloso hybrid playing Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That" backwards (or maybe diagonally)," I'm not sure how much more use the comparison game has. Especially today, what makes "genre-bending" artists like M.I.A. and Santogold so much fun is how they pull seemingly incompatible or unrelated sounds together into something tangible and accessible. So, why is it so hard to market Curumin, the Japanese-Brazilian songwriter on Quannum Records who writes songs mostly in Portuguese about girls, records, and politics? Beats the hell out of me.