What in the name of shaven Shiva is World Music?
This term is generally understood, but it is also generally understood to be an egregious misnomer. It suffers from poor semantic vision and lacks usefulness, largely because it has no antipode. Nobody listens to music which qualifies as non-world. We have yet to receive melodic, rhythmic, or lyrical transmissions from alien races or species. No Martian jazz, Plotonian hip hop, or back-country bluegrass from Betelgeuse. This is lamentable, but undeniable. After this blog, it is conceivable that my next project will be to write a science fiction novel about an interplanetary musical interchange (IMI), and how music eventually defeats the human specie's knee-jerk xenophobia . O, someday... But for now, all music is literally world, or rather planetary. And, because it is planetary and distinctly human, it is all generally comprehensible.
We like our art to fit into the comfortable boundaries of our aesthetic experience, but we appreciate it when it toes the line of convention. There is a safe band of space between bland, craven convention and weird, envelope-shredding experimentation. Societal and personal change occur gradually; innovative mutation is a lengthy process. One does not generally go from the Beatles to the Swedish thrash, death, and prog metal band Meshuggah in one revolutionary leap.
Where, then, does world music fit in on the all-musical spectrum? First, we must reject the cheeky, buffoonish “All music is world” thesis, because it negates even the conventional social value of the term world music. We then move on to a new theory. Perhaps, only music which is unadulterated, indigenous and traditional should be called world music. This is a radical and untenable position. A more moderate perspective is that the mix of modern and traditional constitutes world. From that perspective, world music occupies a space between generally well-known Western modern music and generally unknown indigenous folk and traditional musical trends.
I choose the latter, because I consider purity to be a fiction. The unadulterated is sullied everywhere, especially now given pervasive globalization. Modern cultural mishmashing makes delineating useful boundaries around potential sanctuaries of pure indigenous music or art difficult and or impossible. If that sanctuary is out there, it is buried beneath the slow, drifting sands, or crouched with a spear in its hand, in some tropical jungle. From my perspective, the indigenous flavor worldizes, and the modern flavor dilutes, if you will. Creative destruction rules, and the synthetic production is our lot, and it is valuable. We live in an age of univerally worldized, slightly-othered, and obviously commercialized music.
The international hodgepodge leads to my argument about why I believe that any individual can like any kind of music. One must only put one's mind to the task. There is only the single human musical family, and human beings should be open to its widest range and scope. I am one non-discriminatory soul, with wide open acceptance for the potentiality of universal musical enjoyment. Therefore, the sonorous sounds of African or Japanese percussion, Andean folk, Brazilian bossa nova, European lo-fi electronica, and American pop-rock soothe me or excite me in ways that are completely analogous.
The underlying concerns to this discourse are the inequality of global power structures and the purported Westernization of the world. One thing can change another without itself being changed, but power differentials make meaningful cultural imperialism a real possibility. We want a variegated hybrid, not a monochrome blob.
(taken from a WERW Radio Blog posting, by me, found here).
