In 1999, David Byrne wrote an article for the New York Times provocatively entitled I Hate World Music . It isn’t the music itself that the ex-Talking Head hates but the media label that lumps everything which is not English-language pop/rock into the same category.
He wrote that “the use of the term world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one’s own life. It’s a way of relegating this “thing” into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us”.
Byrne noted that by virtue of record sales alone some artists escaped such lazy pigeon-holing. No one refers to Ricky Martin or Sigur Ròs as world music artists even though most of their best known songs are sung in Spanish or Icelandic (or Hopelandic!) respectively.
Instead, this genre name is reserved for the kind of artists who festival curators Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost (aka A Hawk And A Hacksaw) assembled for a unique concert at Ravenna last night. The performers flown in from Balkan countries are the kind that have most western listeners (myself included) automatically reaching for glib adjectives like ‘authentic’, ‘traditional’ and ‘exotic’. Continue reading
