MUSIC

What even is ‘World Music’? 🌏

World music has always seemed the weirdest table for a genre of music; surely all music is world music? But that is not the implication when people use world music as a category. They mean something exotic, something other, something different to what Western ears are used to. Due to its purposefully vague name, world music is hard to define, and therefore hard to criticise. Many ethnomusicologists (music scholars who focus on studying music from a cultural and social perspective) have tried to define what world music actually is, and none of them entirely agree. Some of these perspectives include:

• World music comes from outside the normal Anglo-American sources (Guilbault 2001)

• World music is inseparable from globalisation (Bohlman 2002)

• World music can be folk, art or popular music, amateur or professional, secular, sacred or commercial (Bohlman 2002)

• World music doesn’t exist (Brennan 2001)

What (most) ethnomusicologists agree on is that the term world music is a product of colonialist values (the idea that the cultural values of the coloniser are superior to that of the culture they are colonising). This is due to the way it separates the terms music (meaning Western music) and world music (meaning everything else).

💡 Things to consider

• Where did the term come from?: The term world music was created in the upstairs room of a pub in North London where 25 representatives from the industry had a meeting to discuss how to boost sales (sounds crazy but it is true!) The category allowed for all non-western music to be physically separated from the rest of the music, creating a new section for customers to browse. Brennan argues that unlike all the other category bins in record shops, world music is not a specific form of music, but a place of music: ‘the music of everywhere else’.

• How did world music spread?: The Western record business pushed world music in the 90s and 2000s creating many compilation CDs. Steven Feld’s famous article A sweet lullaby for World Music uses the metaphor of a lullaby to describe the perfect conditions that globalisation and capitalism created for world music to thrive describing it as ‘blanketed in promotion…cradled and lulled on a firm mattress of stark inequities and padded mergers, and nurtured at the corporate breast.’

• What can we do to get rid of it?: Call music what it is! Name its actual location and style, and don’t just group continents together. When you say ‘African music’, do you mean the Kenyan tradition of a Kamba drum being played for a Kilumi dance, or the Akan tradition of singing with the Seperewa harp-lute? You can also try to categorise based on style rather than country. For example, if you love jazz, why don’t you also add some non-Western artists to your playlists like Ryo Fukui, alongside your existing favourites - don’t keep them separate! Try to avoid listening to music where it’s not clear who the artist is/what the tradition is - that probably means it’s a record label exploiting someone else’s art and just slapping on the label ‘world music’ ‘jungle mix’ or ‘afro-beat’ for their own profit.

🔎 Find out more

• For more on world music: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/24/guardian-world-music-outdated-global

• For an example on how to look at music from an ethnomusicologist’s perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x3nhvz_VsE

• References

  • Brennan, Timothy. 2001. World music does not exist. Discourse 23(1)

  • Feld, Steven. 2000. A sweet lullaby for world music. Public Culture 12(1)

  • Guilbault, Jocelyne. 2001. World music. In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

  • V. Bohlman, P., 2002. World music: A Very Short Introduction New York: Oxford University Press.

🍒 The cherry on top

• 🌋 Records from Pompeii: This article discusses the newly discovered inscription that sheds light on the experiences of a group who escaped the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. This discovery adds a personal touch to the historical record, but what about the stories of those who didn't survive? Check this out if you’re into History.

• 🤖 AI: Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI? Check this out if you’re into Computer Science.

• 👶 Saviour Siblings: Created as part of a BBC Two series that poses ‘ethical questions through real-life stories’, this video looks at the ethics of ‘saviour siblings’ (children who are conceived so that they might provide a transplant to an older sibling with a life-threatening illness.) Check it out if you’re into Philosophy and Bioethics.

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…

• 12th August:

  • University of West London - Applying to University Through Clearing Webinar

• 13th August:

  • Christ’s College Cambridge Personal Statement Webinar

• 15th August:

  • University of Nottingham Public Lecture - Could Bacterial Viruses Help Us Finally Crack TB?

• 17th August:

  • University of Buckingham Computing Taster Webinar

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