World Music

Musical fusion is not new since jazz, rock, salsa or even raï were already the sonorous fruit of the common fate of peoples that different kinds of colonisation forced to live together. Today, musical mixes are no longer the consequence of a painful colonial history. Thus, for the English critic David Toop, the birth of modern music was Debussy’s discovery of Javanese music at the Paris’ Universal exhibition in 1900.

However, the expression world music only became a generic concept at the beginning of the 1980s. It was then taken up by the disc companies and music shops anxious to collect under the same label types of music which often had very little in common. This musical fusion was presented in such a way that the consumers perceive it as new and positive, or even friendly, face of economic globalisation, under the guise of cultural industries.

A priori, ‘world music’ should group together discs of contemporary and traditional music from countries foreign to the place of sale. However, popular Anglo-Saxon music is generally found in the ‘pop-rock’ or ‘international variety’ (in non-English speaking countries) sections, whatever country you are in. Such a classification equally suggests that Tibetan chants, Algerian raï, Argentinian tango and Congolese soukous are only varieties of the same musical genre, just as punk is a variety of rock, or bee-bop a variety of jazz. The hegemony of Anglo-Saxon musical culture thus finds itself reinforced. All the more so as musicians such as Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel are often presented as initiators of a mixing without whom music, sometimes thousands of years old, would be cast into obscurity and disappear forever.

Whatever it might be, despite its lack of musicological foundation, the expression world music has come into present day language. It represents a growing economic sector, measured by disc sales, concerts and media space. But if it is possible to rejoice that it gives a global audience to musicians who, without it, would not have come to notoriety, the biased vision of globalisation of cultures that it induces and its tendency to reinforce stereotypes must be denounced. Indeed, it is only under the condition that such perverse effects and motivations must not be ignored that meant that world music could truly promote the discovery of other peoples and cultures, or even a better mutual understanding between peoples who know nothing of each other.