29 July 2008
World Music Collaborations: Crossing Cultural Boundaries
A cross-fertilization of musical styles produces a new and diverse sound
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
During the 1980s the boundary between mainstream and marginal music became ever fuzzier, and pressures to expand the global market for American popular music and create new alternative genres and audiences within the American market grew ever stronger. One result of these processes was the emergence of a category called world music. The term was adopted in the late 1980s by independent record label owners and concert promoters, entering the marketplace as a replacement for longer-standing categories such as “traditional music,” “international music,” and “ethnic music.”
What, then, is world music? In a strictly musical sense, it is a pseudo-genre, taking into its sweep styles as diverse as African urban pop (juju), Pakistani dance club music (bhangara), Australian Aboriginal rock music (the band Yothu Yindi), and even the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, whose 1987 release Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices) reached Number 165 on the Billboard album chart in 1988. Bestselling albums on Billboard’s world music chart have featured the Celtic group Clannad, Spanish flamenco music, Tibetan Buddhist chant, and diverse collaborations between American and English rock stars and musicians from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.
