World music after ‘world music’

On the face of it, the term ‘world music’ is perhaps one of the most unhelpful terms for any genre of music. While there is stylistic, lineage-based, and thematic common ground that connects the music we categorise as ‘rock’, ‘jazz’, ‘hip-hop’, or even ‘pop’ music together, there is not very much that connects ‘world’ music. 

If we go by the most liberal definition of world music, it’s simply any music released in a non-English language, or made outside the West (which is itself a very subjective geographic boundary). I like to narrow the term down to music that’s made outside the West, but heavily marketed to, if not self-consciously produced for, a Western audience. It’s still very much a ‘vibes-based’ descriptor, and I tend to associate it more with a certain language of exoticised marketing, typical of 1980s-2000s world music labels like Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records or David Byrne’s Luaka Bop. 

Byrne – formerly the frontman of the band Talking Heads – has incidentally written before about his distaste for the term world music in a 1992 article, where he called it “a label for anything at all that is not sung in English or anything that doesn’t fit into the Anglo-Western pop universe this year”. Byrne was, in my opinion, correct, and it seems like his advice has at least been somewhat heeded – even the organisers of the WOMAD festival, a yearly celebration of the genre founded by Peter Gabriel, have moved away from this term. But from an epistemological standpoint, the term has some utility – at least in the context of the late 20th century. Fela Kuti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Youssou N’Dour – all artists who were marketed as making world music at some point or the other – may have very little in common musically, but they shared one common trait for the (Western) listener: their foreignness. In an era when music from outside the Western world was a novelty, this was enough to set them apart into a category of their own. 

Much like the generic term ‘Latin music’, which could apply to everything from Andean huayño rhythms to Nuyorican salsa and modern electro-reggaetón, ‘world music’ is essentially an etic descriptor. Interestingly, ‘Latin’ music seldom is categorised as world music, perhaps because it was more familiar to American audiences, and often catered to Latino audiences in the US as much as it did to curious white Americans. 

But does the term have any utility at all today? It seems like the world is – if not politically, then at least culturally – more globalised than ever. It’s no longer odd for Westerners or (more specifically) first worlders to listen to music from other parts of the globe. These artists – BTS, Burna Boy, Anitta, Bad Bunny, and many more – are not exactly comparable to the ‘world music’ of the past. This is not only because they tend to be as popular in their home countries as abroad (which was rare among world music artists with some exceptions) but also because their music isn’t treated as a novelty, or ‘exotic’; rather, it’s treated as simply another part of the globalised pop-music ecosystem. 

At the same time, demand for ‘obscure’ music from outside the West has not disappeared – as the popularity of labels like Awesome Tapes from Africa, Sublime Frequencies, Sahel Sounds, and Habibi Funk among music aficionados can attest. Artists like Omar Souleyman, Ata Kak, and Mdou Moctar seem to fit the mould of ‘world music’ from the 1980s much more than the more well-known non-English or non-Western artists one might spot on the Billboard charts. They have reached a position of modest success, but mostly through Western audiences and labels, and have remained only somewhat known at home. 

The most tangible legacy of world music is perhaps ‘worldbeat’, a genre that refers in broad strokes to Western pop or rock music infused with various ‘exotic’ stylings from ‘world music’ (think Paul Simon’s Graceland); a genre that is much more ‘real’ and definable than ‘world music’, and also has a much clearer lineage dating back all the way to the ‘exotica’ of the 1950s. This genre isn’t the most popular today, but it’s not dead, as recent (and rather popular) releases by Gorillaz and Ed Sheeran would suggest. 

In the era of globalisation, ‘world music’ is something of an anomaly. On one hand, we are more culturally connected than ever; the internet has created opportunities for people across the world to communicate with each other.

However, globalisation is asymmetric: because Western (and particularly, Anglo-American) culture is globally hegemonic, globalisation reinforces that dominance and rarely lets artists from the Global South speak for themselves without Western interference. Moreover, even popular artists from outside the Anglo-American world have faced backlash when entering the mainstream – one needs only to look at the negative reactions from the American right-wing mediasphere to the recent Super Bowl performance by Bad Bunny. But even withholding parochialism, the view of the Global North and the West as the ‘default’ is still prevalent even among those not defined by ideological fervour. Perhaps, if we want to get rid of the ‘exoticism’ regarding music from around the world, it might be best not simply to preach about it when it relates to music, but rather to push for cultural exchange to be the norm, and not to be an oddity.