The circuitous world of bootlegging

In the grotty youth hostel in Salamanca I talked to a guy from Saudi Arabia, and he wanted to know if I liked Tupac Shakir. Sure, I said. And so he had his stereo set up and his buds from Morocco and Algeria grooved to Tupac Shakir. And they had me come over and sit on the bunk with them listening to their music. They asked if I liked n----r music. Excuse me? I asked. You know, n----r music, and the Saudi Arabian guy, who told me to call him Nas, did a hip hop maneuver with his hands. We don´t use that word in the US, I said. We also call it Negro music, he said. That´s better, I said. Then they played me a song they said was Eminem. It was a guy rapping about Slim Shady, but I couldn´t quite recognize the voice. Then they played Hey Ya by Outkast, but the guy singing Hey Ya wasn´t the guy from Outkast, it was just some guy singing. And the background music didn´t quite match the original. I tried to explain to him that these weren´t the original tunes, but his English wasn´t very good and my Spanish is worthless, and so I think I may have just offended him. But where the hell does this music come from? Who makes this music? Is there some basement in Kuala Lampur where second-rate rappers migrate to to make third-rate knock offs of rap hits from the United States? Do they sell these in Arabic countries? Why not just sell bootleg copies of the originals? Or is there some vast bootlegged infastructure, whereby a copier of Eminem can pass his music off as the original, and then tour and promote his copied self from the United Emirates to Jordan to Egypt and who knows where else? I can´t wrap my mind around it. Has anyone else heard of this?