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Shawn Reynaldo, "The Trouble with 'Tribal'"
https://firstfloor.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-tribal

"An artist might use a preset called 'Sleng Teng' or pull a few drum sounds out of a sample pack that’s been branded as 'dembow', but doing so doesn’t require any real engagement with the genre, its history or those who represent its current brain trust. In that context, who knows where the sounds even came from in the first place? It’s not like there’s some internationally recognized certification of musical authenticity
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Using a catch-all word like 'tribal' may not be fashionable at the moment, but more politically and culturally palatable alternatives with a similar level of utility have yet to emerge. (Saying something like 'global rhythms' might be more socially acceptable, but it’s still patronizing and offers little in the way of additional accuracy.) Encouraging listeners to increase their knowledge levels and be more exact in their descriptions is admirable, but who’s going to do that teaching? The music press once would have been the obvious candidate, but it’s steadily losing relevance and actively struggling to survive.

Considering the frequency with which all of dance music is still described as 'EDM' or just 'techno', the chances of the average punter learning to distinguish between the drum patterns of batida, singeli and merengue are not great."