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What Is World Music?

The production, circulation and consumption of "world music" in the west has provoked controversy regarding the commercial exploitation of musics from non-western expressive traditions. Some critics fault the global music industry's appetite for exotic and therefore profitable Third-World forms. They argue that the process undermines musicians' vital connections with their artistic heritage and their home communities, the foundations that make their traditions and societies unique. In this "cultural imperialist" reading, "world music" by its very nature appropriates its object as an exhibitionary curio. In doing so it endangers the cultural survival of non-western traditions and reinforces the assertion of western distinction and cultural superiority. Is the critique of world music an open-and-shut case? Other kinds of questions need to be answered first.

Unlike most popular genres, "world music's" diversity and hybrid character make it more an umbrella category than a singular, identifiable style. Nonetheless, the most popular forms of "world music" tend to be the heavily percussive, eminently danceable musics of Africa and the African diaspora, such as West African highlife, Jamaican reggae, Dominican merengue, and the many forms of Cuban-inspired salsa. A quick glance at what's hot on the European world music charts confirms this (see links at the end of the article). Unlike the more diffuse history of other popular genres, world music's genesis is relatively recent and well documented, making it easier to evaluate the cultural-imperialist indictment.

The baptism of "world music" reflected the desire of independent English record labels to distinguish their eclectic inventory of international roots music from mainstream tastes. In mid-1987, label owners, DJs, promoters and writers met to discuss how they could foster "a greater awareness of their music in the retail trade, in the press, and among the public". As the transcripts relate, "the main aim [was] to broaden the appeal of our repertoire", and to establish "the short-term marketing plan that resulted in World Music becoming a 'genre'" identifiable by audiences, the press and industry types alike.

Collaborators sought a coherent, coordinated strategy to promote "music from 'outside' western pop culture" to an emerging western audience. A community of knowledgeable and engaged enthusiasts--independent record label heads, DJs, concert and tour promoters, journalists and musicians--wanted to invite listeners to explore unfamiliar sounds and differentiate their tastes from pop sensibilities. Ian Anderson, editor of FolkRoots, the world-music trade journal of record, says that he and his fellow tastemakers sought "an established, unified generic name [to] give retailers a place where they could confidently rack otherwise unstockable releases, and where customers might both search out items they'd heard on the radio... and browse through a wider catalogue. Various titles were discussed... 'World Music' seemed to include the most and omit the least... Nobody thought of defining it or pretending there was such a beast: it was just to be a box, like jazz, classical or rock" (see links).

So what is world music? As the phrases "international roots", "world beat" and "music from 'outside' Western pop culture" suggest, the "world" in question is an inclusive one of traditional communities and their artistic envoys struggling to express their cultural identities somewhere on the western periphery. The global intersection of music, culture and commerce speaks to the dynamic social character of an emergent transnational phenomenon, but the cultural and aesthetic meanings produced in the process are hardly self-evident.

Anderson wrote in response to attacks on world music's "inventors" as romantics and paternalistic exploiters of the "rudimentary, exotic and inaccessible qualities" of non-western musics and musicians, seeking to enthrall jaded western audiences. Of course, there is no denying the commercial relationship, as Anderson himself readily admits. "Yes, [inventing world music] was good for business, but by being so it was automatically good for the incomes of the artists too".

Anderson offers no apology in assessing the overall outcome. "It's not all positive, but World Music . . . sells large quantities of records that you couldn't find for love or money two decades ago. It has let many musicians in quite poor countries get new respect (and houses, cars and food for their families), and it turns out massive audiences for festivals and concerts. It has greatly helped international understanding and provoked cultural exchanges -- people who've found themselves neighbors in the same box have listened to each other and ended up making amazing music together . . . I call it a Good Thing".

Some critical issues arise here. The pessimism of the cultural-imperialist critique reflects a spectral view of late modernity as an inexorable, cold-blooded derailment of democratic human history, a moral horror chargeable to the brutal structural adjustments of late global capitalism. In this view, world music's product -- as a deliberate marketing category -- is simply an opportunistic hybrid, a depthless pastiche, an eclectic, seductive Babel of accidental sounds whose power to appropriate, mediate and distort cultural identities tends to leave traditional societies in ruins.

Anderson's more optimistic take sees world music as a respectful and generally beneficial project ("musicians in quite poor countries get new respect . . . houses, cars and food for their families"). World music becomes a celebration of human agency at the grassroots, a mutually fortuitous encounter between traditional and modern sounds ("international understanding . . . cultural exchanges . . . making amazing music together"). This view endorses the values of voluntary association that guide a politically progressive, engaged, socially philanthropic transnational community of culture workers, artists and their educated audiences.

This framing highlights the contingent, socially constructed nature of the world music project, whose oppositional temperament and reciprocal cultural regard anticipate alternative approaches rich with emancipatory potential. Indeed, a number of undertakings have musically championed threatened peoples' cultural survival around the world. Consider Amnesty International's collaboration with internationally touring musicians, and with the World Music Network label; the activism of Music for Change (M4C, the English charity "promoting cultural respect through music"); Putumayo Records' aid and education projects; "Refugee Voices," the recording, video and concert-tour initiative produced by Youssou N'Dour for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Earlier examples include the folk-singing activists who lent their voices to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the George Harrison-Ravi Shankar concert collaboration to aid Bangladesh.

Another illustration of music's ability to undermine ideological barriers, the acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club project, features the music of Cuba, a nation long isolated and stigmatized by a hostile U.S. government. An enthusiastic international reception has enabled Cuban musicians to perforate the U.S. economic embargo, bring their music to appreciative U.S. audiences, and -- without setting out to do so -- call into question the outmoded cold-war rationale of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

These more optimistic signs are consonant with a reading of late modernity cast in the heroic mode. Here world music becomes a valiantly creative popular response to global capital's intent to accumulate wealth as flexibly as possible. Human displacement, the creation of new transnational populations, the emergence of novel cultural hybrids, these are products of the "creative dislocations" of global financial restructuring, the relentless commodification of cultural forms, and the opportunistic interventions of global mass media.

To promote world music's egalitarian, emancipatory potential is simultaneously to court contradiction, given the inequities naturalized in the bottom-line rationale of the capitalist formation. Anderson concedes, "Small wonder that virtually all world music producers and promoters have at least one sad tale to tell of an unfortunate misunderstanding or relationship breakdown over money with a musician they'd worked so hard to help".

Consider the high-profile world-music explorations of Paul Simon and David Byrne. They have drawn particular criticism for their questionable attitude toward creative credit and compensation of traditional artists, a naïve disavowal of political intent, an indifference to past and present conditions of oppression, and a denial of how power relations drive the production process. However equitably it achieves its ends, world music cannot sidestep a fundamental tension. Its continued existence depends on the fact that it "sells large quantities of records" and "turns out massive audiences for festivals and concerts". Often enough the vicarious pleasures of trans-cultural experience remain a predominantly western privilege, rendering invisible the contentious human histories embedded in the music, entirely missing how traditional artists and audiences inscribe it with meanings distinctive from those cultivated by western audiences whose primary motivation is entertainment.

What is fundamental within traditional communities--the music's social character, as rooted in everyday communal practice -- often falls out of the equation in the music's reproduction for western audiences. Indeed, market potential determines the addition of any given style to the global canon. A process of cultural misrecognition ensues wherein non-western musical traditions must somehow resonate with the popular cultural and aesthetic expectations of western audiences. Hence "world music" invites, indeed, incites the attention of its western constituency. It provides a familiar language and aesthetic perspective, invested in a set of routinized consumer choices through which to imagine (and thus produce, in concrete material terms) a relationship with a "world" whose inequality in relation to the west -- essential to the encounter--necessarily goes unrecognized.

In a symptomatic array of western aesthetic expectations and economic practices, world-music production, circulation and consumption clearly entail the selective mediation of traditional expressive forms and cultural identities for commercial ends. Are there principled ways to proceed, to render such traditions comprehensible to Western audiences without erasing the artistic and cultural meanings its originators and audiences have invested in the music?