World Music

Broadly speaking, music of the world's cultures. In the 1980s the term was adopted to characterize non-English recordings that were released in Great Britain and the United States. Employed primarily by the media and record stores, this controversial category amalgamated the music of such diverse sources as Tuvan throat singers, Zimbabwean guitar bands, and Pakistani qawwalī (Sufi-music) singers, as well as nonmainstream Western folk musicians such as Cajun fiddlers and Hawaiian slack-key guitarists. Previously, international music had limited currency as a catchall term that ranged from tourist souvenir records to field recordings made by ethnomusicologists in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Although purists argued that no musical style could be identified as “world music,” the term was coined to bring “foreign” music closer to the mainstream of Western popular music. In many ways the history of world music is the story of the marketing of foreign music by Western record companies. Despite these commercial origins, by the early 1990s the term had precipitated a change in the consciousness of musicians and producers, and world music had become a bona fide musical genre.

The birth of world music can be dated to 1982–83, when British and American promoters, record companies, distributors, and stores, as well as some journalists and broadcasters, began to promote music from other countries, especially African music, which for a time was virtually synonymous with world music. The clearest sign of the growing interest in African music was the success of Nigerian juju bandleader King Sunny Ade, whose first two internationally released albums for
sold more than 100,000 copies each in the United States in 1983–84. This figure—less than half of Ade's sales in Nigeria and much less than the millions in sales that defined success for Western popular performers—established a benchmark for the many new companies that emerged in response to the attention attracted by world music. The phrase world music was adopted by a group of British independent labels who believed they would get better access to record stores and more media recognition if they could agree to formalize one generic description. Their hope was to bring together the diverse strands that included music from not only all areas of Africa but also eastern Europe, Asia, South and Central America, and the Caribbean.

Paradoxically, world music was often synonymous with local or regional music, and interpretations of what fitted tended to shift from one country to the next. Although some artists from countries on the margins of the Western popular music market could now aspire to a worldwide audience, those who took superstars such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Bob Marley as their role models were usually frustrated by the idiosyncratic tastes of world music mediators. World music was welcomed for its “authenticity,” as a counterpoint to the increasingly synthetic and robotic sounds favoured by Western pop producers during the 1980s.

Among the few exceptions to this rule were several local stars from Francophone West Africa and North Africa, some of whom achieved international success with records made for labels based in France. In 1982 the independent Celluloid label was among the first to bridge the gap between immigrant and indigenous European markets, selling more than 300,000 albums by the Senegalese group Touré Kunda and following through with Senegalese bandleader Youssou N'Dour's groundbreaking Immigrés album in 1984. Barclay Records had a long history of making commercial pop records with artists from Africa and the French Antilles and sold more than a million singles in Europe by world music artists Mory Kanté from Guinea (“Yé ké yé ké” [1987]) and Khaled from Algeria (“Didi” [1992] and “Aisha” [1996]).

Most of the world music labels launched in Britain between 1983 and 1986 had much lower sales horizons and only a few survived, notably Hannibal, Stern's Africa, World Circuit, and rock singer Peter Gabriel's Real World Records. Gabriel's support had been instrumental in the formation and survival of the annual World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festivals, which began in 1982 and played a vital role in introducing many artists who later became leading world music figures, including Youssou N'Dour and Pakistani qawwalī singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Several American labels—notably Rounder, Rykodisc, and Shanachie—initiated or extended their world music repertoires during this period, when three established American rock artists—Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Ry Cooder—played a vital role in helping to expand the world music market. Simon's Grammy Award-winning album Graceland (1986) featured black South African musicians who controversially recorded and toured with him despite a widespread trade boycott of South Africa. The album proved quite popular. In the wake of its success, record stores became more willing to stock world music, including the a cappella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the mbaqanga group Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens.

Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, hired Latin American musicians to play on his solo albums and launched his Luaka Bop label with a series of well-conceived compilations of music from Brazil, Cuba, Cape Verde, and Peru. Slide guitarist Ry Cooder relaunched his recording career in the 1990s with collaborations with the Indian musician V.M. Bhatt, the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and a group of veteran Cuban musicians in Havana collectively called the Buena Vista Social Club.

Industry recognition of world music came in 1990, when the influential American trade magazine Billboard introduced a world music chart. A year later the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences added a world music category to its Grammy Awards. Among the artists who benefited most from this new visibility were the Gipsy Kings, the French pop-flamenco group that sweetened strong vocals with strummed guitars, catchy songs, and a neo-disco beat; an avalanche of Irish-related artists, many featuring the word Celtic in their album titles, that included 1997 Grammy winners the Chieftains; Cesaria Evora, a smoky-voiced nightclub singer from Cape Verde; and several “ambient-global,” or “ethnotechno,” projects, including Enigma (from Germany) and Deep Forest (1995 Grammy winners from France), who merged so-called ethnic voice samples with state-of-the-art rhythm programming.

Charlie Gillett

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