Sometimes the best way to get a handle on a party is to think long and seriously about who’s been invited.

Consider, for example, the talent headed to the various stages of this year’s Richmond World Festival. At the top of the marquee you’ll find the Ontario-based Strumbellas, whose latest album, Rattlesnake, does a bright-eyed and entirely admirable job of bringing together gothic folk, alt-country, and classic indie pop. The key thing to note there is that the group founded by singer Simon Ward back in 2008 remains committed to the idea that there’s room for everyone on the dance floor, regardless of what section of the record store they prefer to spend their money in.

But the idea of inclusion really starts to get interesting when you look at the undercard, starting with Toronto’s long-running Bedouin Soundclash.

Hard as this might be to believe today, there was once a time when genre-mashing was something restricted to the fringes of pop music. Think the Clash’s weed-addled punk-reggae opus Sandinista!. Or Public Enemy climbing into bed with mulleted metalheads Anthrax for “Bring the Noise”. Or the Beastie Boys alienating every frat boy who loved Licensed to Ill with the everything-except-the-kitchen-sink freakout Paul’s Boutique.

Bedouin Soundclash first surfaced at the turn of the millennium, at a time when pop music was still weirdly segregated. Musical movements rose and fell every couple of years, classic grunge giving way to monochromatic alt-rock to glow-stick-lit electronica, testosterone-rage rap-rock acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn taking over the mosh pits of America only to get lost in a garage-rawk tsunami powered by the white-belted likes of the Strokes, White Stripes, and Hives.

In 2001 Bedouin Soundclash threw roots-radical reggae, Studio One–vintage ska, and white-riot punk into the same blender. And while they were hardly the first act to do so, what was unexpected was the way that it instantly took hold not in the underground, but in the mainstream, with its breakthrough single, “When the Night Feels My Song”, not only entrenching itself at No. 1 on Toronto radio, but owning MuchMusic in 2004. The message was clear: boundaries were meant to broken.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to the Richmond World Festival. The “World” part of the yearly two-day celebration is important, if for no other reason than that the programming does indeed take a global view.

Thanks to success stories like the Richmond Night Market and Aberdeen Centre, Richmond is sometimes seen these days as a Mandarin-speaking outpost. The reality is that the fast-growing onetime Vancouver suburb is as cosmopolitan as the rest of the Lower Mainland, with census figures showing that 77 languages are spoken within city limits.

The unofficial mandate of the Richmond World Festival is to make sure that, as in the worlds of the Strumbellas and Bedouin Soundclash, you don’t have to be one thing—cowboy-hat-wearing country purist, or dreadlocked reggae disciple—to sit at the table. Drilling that home is this year’s musical undercard.

Included are powerhouse genre jumper Jocelyn Alice, culture-jamming OHR Afrika Collective, world-music mixmasters John Welsh & Los Valientes, and soul-influenced siblings Sister Says.

Halifax’s Neon Dreams, meanwhile, leaves one wondering what founders Frank Kadillac and Adrian Morris love most: EDM–dusted radio pop, reggae-jacked hip-hop, or sun-baked world music, with the answer most likely being “all of the above”.

“We aren’t just giving people a bunch of different genres,” Kadillac has explained, “we are giving them a mood.”

And with that, they prove themselves the perfect musical guests for something like the Richmond World Festival, where the inclusiveness starts with the fact that the event is free. The message? That would be that, more than ever, there’s no reason that we can’t all happily coexist at the same table, at least where music is concerned. The rest of the world could learn something from that. 

The Richmond World Festival takes place Friday and Saturday (August 30 and 31) at Minoru Park in Richmond. Go to richmondworldfestival.com/ for details.