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I'd be really interested to... hear of World Music ... that [functions as a music of protest and emancipation] - which hardly seems unlikely - considering the histories of a lot of the nations concerned...
Which nations are those, now? By which I mean to ask: when you say World Music, how much of the world are you talking about?
While music is often co-opted for politics and protest, it even more often comes out of celebration and religious devotion: that is, people in the rest of the world make music mostly forthe same reasons that people in the West do...
The definition of the whole genre as such also seems fatuous - trying to capture the cultural traditions of half the world under one umbrella - also seems surreal.
I agree with your point—but it seems surreal as much for what it leaves out as for what it tries to include.
What is "world music," anyway? How much of the world are we talking about?
I mean, are traditional Irish fiddle tunes "world music"? Are they "roots"? I would argue so: but for many people, world music ain't world music unless it's made by black folk—which seems unnecessarily limiting to me, given the mindblowing traditional musics I hear coming out of Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Pacific Islands, the Celtic countries...
So maybe you need to narrow down what you're you looking for, exactly. Non-Western popular music, or ethnographic recordings? Traditional songs, or composed songs?
I mean, I could recommend Indonesian gamelan, Pakistani devotional songs, Hungarian wedding bands, Norwegian hardanger fiddle tunes, Mongolian throat-singing... but if what you're looking for is just good Afropop and Afro-Cuban dance music, that's all rather beside the point. |
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