In 1999, he wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times called 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. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne founded the label Luaka Bop, which has released artists who might be placed in the “world” category, including William Onyeabor and Susana Baca. “We weren’t pop or rock, so we were happy to advertise it as world when we began.”īut the term soon faced opposition. “There were no other festivals like ours at the time,” artistic programmer Paula Henderson says. The World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival, AKA Womad, which was founded seven years before the term gained prominence, similarly used it as a catch-all for its roster of international artists. “£3,500 and you get a whole genre – and a whole section of record stores today.”įounders 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. “It was the most cost-effective thing you could imagine,” said record producer Joe Boyd. The group raised £3,500 from 11 independent labels to begin marketing “world music”to record stores. That was the only thing we were thinking about,” DJ Charlie Gillett, one of the pub-goers, told the Guardian in 2004. 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.ĭreamed 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 Paul Simon’s Johannesburg-recorded Graceland the year before. A sk most musicians what genre they play and you’ll likely get a prickly response.
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