Global Pop

World Music, World Markets

Timothy D Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135254155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Global Pop examines the rise of "world musics" and "world beat", and some of the musicians associated with these recent genres such as Peter Gabriel, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Johnny Clegg. Drawing on a wide range of sources - academic, popular, cyber, interviews, and the music itself - Global Pop charts an accessible path through many of the issues and contradictions surrounding the contemporary movement of people and musics worldwide. Global Pop examines the range of discourses employed in and around world music, demonstrating how the central concept of authenticity is wielded by musicians, fans, and other listeners, and looks at some of these musics in detail, examining ways they are caught up in forms of domination and resistance. The book also explores how some cross-cultural collaborations may fashion new musics and identities through innovative combinations of sounds and styles.

1

Popular Musics and Globalization

Foreign Music is where all the hipsters are.

—Stanley Goman, Head of Retail Operations,
Tower Records, 1995¹

Hasn’t World Music Been around for Thousands of Years?

One of the most notable trends in the music industry since the 1980s has been the rise in popularity of new music genres: world music, world beat, world fusion; in Germany, Weltbeat and Weltmusik²; in other parts of the world, ethnopop, Afropop, Afrobeat. Offshoots of these genres include: tribal, techno-tribal, and cybertribal, as well as ambient, trance, and new age. All of these categories overlap to some degree and with other categories I haven’t mentioned. In 1988, Tower Records’ international buyer told Newsweek that his section was “definitely the fastest growing part of the store,” more than tripling in the previous three years.³ By 1991 the market share of world music was equal to classical music and jazz,⁴ two very small categories (according to the Recording Industry Association of America, in 1995, the market share of classical music was 2.9% and for jazz, 3.0%; they had no category for world music as of this writing).⁵ A report in Forbes says that only about 2% of Tower Records’ sales are of “foreign music.⁶

Two percent isn’t much, but the visibility (audibility?) of world music is growing fast. For example, the Pakistani Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang a duet with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam for the soundtrack to Tim Robbins’s film Dead Man Walking, which raised Khan’s fame to the extent that he was recently signed by Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, an eclectic label that records, among others, Johnny Cash, Jesus and Mary Chain, Donovan, Pete Droge, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Slayer.⁷ Plans are in the works for Khan to release two traditional albums and possibly one featuring more duets. “Nusrat is a powerful and charismatic performer,” says label founder Rubin, “and in Pakistan, his singing is referred to as ‘the voice of God’. I want to try and help him make the best records he can.”⁸

So to what do these labels refer? The history of the world music designation isn’t difficult to trace, though we should tease out an early academic meaning and a more recent, popular one. As early as the late 1970s and early 1980s some ethnomusicologists were using the term world music to describe all the musics of the world’s peoples. No one then saw it as a phrase with potentially pejorative undertones; it was merely a shorthand way of separating the musics of west and the rest. So there were conferences with world music as the subject, and a book, by Bruno Nettl, examining The Western Impact on World Music.⁹

But the term did not really gain much currency until a little later. In The Virgin Directory of World Music, Philip Sweeney explains:

In the summer of 1987, a series of meetings took place in an upstairs room of a North London pub, the Empress of Russia. Present were about 25 representatives of independent record companies, concert promoters, broadcasters and other individuals active in the propagation in Britain of music from around the world. The objective was to discuss details of a modest promotional campaign for the autumn, and to boost sales of the increasing numbers of records being issued, as the boom in interest in African music continued and extended to other parts of the world. One of the obstacles to persuading record shops to stock much of the new international product was reported to be the lack of an identifying category to describe it, record shop managers didn’t know whether to call it “ethnic”, “folk”, “international”, or some other equivalent, and were inclined in the absence of an appropriate niche in their racks simply to reject it. It was decided, as part of a month-long promotion that October, to create such a tag and attempt to spread its use via one or two music press adverts, a cassette compilation of music on the various labels involved in the campaign, and the distribution to record shops of “browser cards” bearing the new appellation, to be placed in the sections it was hoped they would now create in their racks. After a good deal of discussion the term chosen was world music, other contenders such as “Tropical Music” being judged too narrow of scope.… Within months the term was cropping up in the British press, within a year it had crossed the Channel and was rivalling the existing French phrase “sono mondiale”, coined three years earlier by the fashionable Paris glossy A duel and its broadcasting subsidiary Radio Nova, and within three years it was in regular mainstream music industry use in Britain, the United States and northern Europe. [Probably less than three years, if the traditionally slow Billboard established a world music chart in 1990, the term was certainly in circulation before then.] This may be regrettable for those people, including myself, who dislike the term for its combination of a meaninglessly wide literal field of reference, with a capricious and subjective actual application, but it is also understandable. No better short phrase has yet been proposed, and thus the term World Music has taken on quite a sturdy life of its own, which is one of the reasons it forms the title of this book.¹⁰

I quote this story at length because it illustrates the kinds of drives that create markets and niches, how they came to being in the margins and moved into the mainstream (sometimes), and how creating a physical space to put the products in has much to do with how the product is labeled, marketed, and bought. In one gesture the old but not quite gone “international” label (which could include anything from Clancy and Makem Irish singalongs to polkas) is supplanted by a trendier, less musty, less your-grandparents’-music category that encompasses everything from field recordings made by ethnomusicologists to the latest in pop and rock from outside Europe and North America.

Sometimes, though, if this pop originates outside Europe and America, it might be labeled world beat, which is a term used more by listeners than the music industry. Steven Feld writes of the ways that the discourses surrounding world music and world beat began as mutually distinct categories but are getting less and less differentiated as time goes on.¹¹ This is probably true; world music has become an umbrella category for the musics of the world that are folk and/or traditional. World beat musics—more identifiably popular than folk or traditional—can fall into this all-inclusive label but more often refer to musics that are oriented more to North American and British pop and rock. And the world beat label hasn’t enjoyed the success in the music industry that the more general world music has. “World beat,” when used at all, usually applies to popular musics from non-European cultures, though there is some exclusivity, as well as much overlapping.¹² The term isn’t usually applied to music by western popular musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon—their music is, generally, “rock”—but rather is reserved for nonwestern musicians like Youssou N’Dour. As Billboard’s New Age and World Music chart manager Eric Lowenhar put it in 1991, “Warner [Warner Bros., Simon’s record company] has asked why I won’t put him [Simon] on the [World Music] charts. We need to give other artists their own place.”¹³ (Simon’s music is usually on the Adult Contemporary charts).

Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore provide an excellent discussion of this term in “World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate,” in which they identify a 1983 album of that title by an Austin, Texas musician Dan Del Santo as the origin of the term.¹⁴ Del Santo’s music on this album is a kind of funk/rock/jazz; the eponymous track is an instrumental in the same vein. His 1990 album Off Your Nyash features a photo of him on the cover over the caption: “The Undisputed Originator of World Beat.”¹⁵ And World Beat is the name of his band; World Beat Music is the name of his publishing company.

Later, the American independent record label Shanachie, which had previously concentrated on African and Irish musics, began a new series called “World Beat/Ethno-Pop” in 1988. This label appeared on the cover of several of their albums, but the company seems to have dropped the series title after only a few years for the simpler “World” designation.¹⁶ In the meantime, many of the artists they introduced to American artists in this series achieved the kind of popularity most musicians dream of: they moved from this independent (“indie”) company to a bigger one, as did, for example, Ofra Haza, Sheila Chandra, Dissidenten, and others.

On Shanachie’s release of Ofra Haza’s Fifty Gates of Wisdom, the company explained their series as follows:

All around the globe new music is being made which takes the world’s myriad musical traditions, with all their power and eloquence, and injects them with the intensity and urgency of Western pop, using the full palette of contemporary instruments and state-of-the-art recording techniques…. World Beat is a fascinating new mechanism which enables traditional music to again play the prominent role it historically has had in rejuvenating the world’s popular music. Shanachie’s World Beat/Ethno-Pop series presents many of the most impressive works of this provocative new movement.¹⁷

With this statement, Shanachie taps into many of the themes I will explore in these chapters: the mythification of nonwestern musics, rejuvenation, and a distancing of their series from the more traditional ethnomusicological ones associated with labels such as Folkways and the Nonesuch Explorer Seri...