Artists, record labels and even this month’s Womad festival agree
that the term is outdated. Is there a better way to market music from
across the globe?
Ask
most musicians what genre they play and you’ll likely get a prickly
response. As one well-known, and slightly tipsy, jazz musician once told
me: “If you all stopped obsessing about me playing ‘jazz’, maybe I
would be playing festival stages rather than tiny clubs by now.” But
while there have been meandering debates about jazz during its long
history, another genre has become far more contentious in recent years:
world music.
Dreamed up in a London pub in 1987 by DJs, record producers and music
writers, it was conceived as a marketing term for the greater
visibility of newly popularised African bands, following the success of https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/apr/19/paul-simon-graceland-acclaim-outrage" rel="nofollow - Paul Simon’s Johannesburg-recorded Graceland
the year before. “It was all geared to record shops. That was the only
thing we were thinking about,” DJ Charlie Gillett, one of the pub-goers,
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/jun/29/popandrock1" rel="nofollow - told the Guardian in 2004 .
The group raised £3,500 from 11 independent labels to begin marketing
“world music”to record stores. “It was the most cost-effective thing you
could imagine,” said record producer Joe Boyd. “£3,500 and you get a
whole genre – and a whole section of record stores today.”
Founders of the term provided vague justifications for lumping
together anything that wasn’t deemed to be from a European or American
tradition – “looking at what artists do rather than what they sound
like”, as editor of fRoots magazine Ian Anderson said. The World of
Music, Arts and Dance Festival, AKA https://www.theguardian.com/culture/womad" rel="nofollow - Womad ,
which was founded seven years before the term gained prominence,
similarly used it as a catch-all for its roster of international
artists. “There were no other festivals like ours at the time,” artistic
programmer Paula Henderson says. “We weren’t pop or rock, so we were
happy to advertise it as world when we began.”
But the term soon faced opposition. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne founded the label https://luakabop.com/" rel="nofollow - Luaka Bop ,
which has released artists who might be placed in the “world” category,
including William Onyeabor and Susana Baca. In 1999, he wrote a
scathing op-ed in the New York Times called https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9901EED8163EF930A35753C1A96F958260.html" rel="nofollow - I Hate World Music
in which he argued that listening to music from other cultures,
“letting it in”, allows for it to change our world view and to reduce
what was once exotic into part of ourselves. World music meant the
opposite: a distancing between “us” and “them”: “It’s a none too subtle
way of reasserting the hegemony of western pop culture,” Byrne wrote.
“It ghettoises most of the world’s music. A bold and audacious move,
White Man!”
The current president of Luaka Bop, Yale Evelev says: “We always
considered it a pop music label. When people said we were a ‘world
music’ label, we wanted to crawl into a hole. Instead of signifying a
certain emotional honesty, it is a marketing rubric.” A rubric that is
seemingly none too successful, either. The world category falls at the
bottom of year-end streaming and sales figures lists, accounting for https://www.buzzanglemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/BuzzAngle-Music-2018-US-Report-Industry.pdf" rel="nofollow - 0.8% of album sales in the US and 1.6% of total streams in 2018.
So why has the term persisted? Strut Records manager Quinton Scott,
who releases a range of artists, including soul singer Patrice Rushen, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/01/the-comet-is-coming-psych-jazz-sun-ra-legacy" rel="nofollow - spiritual-jazz icon Sun Ra and https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/12/seun-kute-and-egypt-80-review-afrobeat-style-but-not-substance" rel="nofollow - Seun Kuti , son of https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/may/05/fela-kuti-10-best-songs" rel="nofollow - Afrobeat pioneer Fela ,
says: “As labels we need to guide buyers to the right place to find the
music as quickly as possible, especially in the chaotic digital
marketplace. For that reason, a general term or genre still does work as
an in-point for music buyers.”
Yet as a general term, he admits, “it does feel dated”. “Musicians
have successfully cross-pollinated styles much more in recent years, to
complicate matters further, so it could be changed to something that
sounds more contemporary. But I don’t think there can ever be a
catch-all phrase that avoids overgeneralisation.” As Womad’s Henderson
puts it: “If the consumer wants to class it as world music, as long as
they buy the ticket or the music, that’s fine by me.”
Other industry heads are less equivocal. “It’s the antithesis of
art,” says Pete Buckenham, founder of the independent label On the
Corner. “At its best, it’s bad culture, dialled-down and made safe for a
generic, mostly western consumer as imagined by a marketing department.
At worst, the term is out-and-out racist.” For Buckenham, “world” must
be abolished and the industry should lead the way. “When the term is so
flawed and ideologically problematic there is no alternative.”
The musicians who have found themselves in the world record bins largely agree. Indian jazz drummer and producer https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/nov/08/sarathy-korwar-upaj-collective-my-east-is-your-west-review-seamless-genre-fusion" rel="nofollow - Sarathy Korwar
finds the term lazy. “It only helps reinforce the narrative that other
people’s music is less evolved and important than your own and doesn’t
deserve a more nuanced approach,” he says. Multimillion selling
Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour believes the label has “served its
purpose” and can only now be applied to collaborations that span across
the globe, geographically taking in the world through their mixture of
cultural traditions.
For Réunion Island musician Jérémy https://open.spotify.com/album/0eIOrsIX5gw7zpvZhltUCq" rel="nofollow - Labelle ,
the initial labelling of his amorphous electronic music as world was
enticing, allowing him to broaden his appeal to a network of world music
festivals and events. “But I quickly understood that this label was
very dangerous, especially for music like mine that seeks to create
bridges between aesthetics,” he says. Congolese funk band Bantou
Mentale, encountered similar issues. Their solution? Abolish all generic
descriptors, since “categorisation equals discrimination”.
It is a question of ethnicity as much as one of perceived
authenticity and category. London-based trio Vula Viel centre their work
around the west African xylophone, the gyil, which bandleader Bex Burch
learned when she spent three years with the Dagaaba people in Ghana.
Burch hails from Yorkshire and the other members of Vula Viel are white.
“I’ve had world music industry people say my band does not fit the
world genre because I’m not African,” she says, raising the issue of
cultural appropriation. “The sad fact is that musicians from African
countries are still refused visas and have much less access to the music
industry. So, the white ‘saviour’ tries to bring the black or brown
musicians from a village to a studio or festival stage and profits from
them. The fact I’m told I need a black member of my band to qualify is
another example of tokenism and the blatant exoticising of black skin.”
In 2018, Womad experienced https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/31/brexited-flatland-peter-gabriel-womad-stars-refused-entry-uk-visa" rel="nofollow - visa denials
for its acts, with at least three having to cancel appearances, yet
Henderson disagrees with the ‘white saviour’ term. “Visas are so
expensive and the Home Office can be so prohibitive when it comes to
bringing artists from other countries here,” she says. “Often, it’s only
with the help of western festival organisers that we can mitigate the
denials – otherwise an act will pay £6,000 for a visa, be denied, and
never see that money or a potential new audience again. We always make
sure our artists are paid fairly and aren’t exploited.”
My first experience of “world music”went unnoticed. It was the https://www.theguardian.com/film/bollywood" rel="nofollow - Bollywood
songs that played through our kitchen radio and that my grandma
listened to religiously. It was the devotional music I heard at temple,
and perhaps even the reggae records my mum put on. To me, this was
simply music – to be included with the other formative records and
artists of my childhood: Motown, hip-hop, jazz.
When the Guardian began its world music coverage, it was a reflection
of a music industry coming to terms with a new, globalised landscape –
one not only confined to the recesses of the record store. Now, with the
internet at our fingertips and streaming services providing endless
hours of musical discovery, the world has reached far beyond the meaning
of “world music”. The Guardian has therefore ceased using this tag on
its articles: only a relevant genre tag such as pop and rock, dance
music and metal will be used. Rest assured that we are more committed
than ever to telling the stories of music around the world, be it https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/21/from-bengal-to-boogie-rupa-biswas-indias-rediscovered-disco-diva" rel="nofollow - disco divas from India , https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/29/nyege-nyege-the-ugandan-dance-collective-reversing-colonial-culture" rel="nofollow - techno from Uganda , https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/14/park-jiha-philos-review" rel="nofollow - reinventions of classical Korean instrumentation , or https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/14/gaye-su-akyol-turkey-interview-psychpop-powerhouse" rel="nofollow - political Turkish psych-rock .
Our world album of the month column has, meanwhile, been renamed https://www.theguardian.com/music/series/world-album-of-the-month" rel="nofollow - global album of the month ,
which does not answer the valid complaints of the artists and record
label founders who have been plagued by catch-all terms. Yet, in the
glorious tyranny of endless internet-fuelled musical choice,
marginalised music still needs championing and signposting in the west.
The term “world music” has become toxic, so a new word for this monthly
planet-spanning roundup, however reductive, is needed. As Vula Viel’s
Birch says: “Is ‘world’ helpful? Musically, no, but as a genre to
champion and curate this fantastic world of music, sure.”
For its latest edition, Womad is also moving on from the term, simply calling itself “ https://womad.co.uk/the-womad-2019-line-up/" rel="nofollow - the world’s festival ”.
“We understand ‘world music’ is ghettoising for a lot of the artists,”
festival director Chris Smith says. “We’re respectful of the term
because it’s our heritage, but we need to evolve it because the music
has evolved. All that matters is championing new music for people to
hear and enjoy. We don’t want these artists to be held back by genre, we
want to see them at Glastonbury and beyond. We’re international, world,
whatever you want to call it – it’s just music.”
• https://womad.co.uk/" rel="nofollow - Womad festival is at Charlton Park, Wiltshire, 25-28 July .
from www.theguardian.com