"A pleasant contamination" (Byrne 1999)
Listen to this whilst reading!
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder in
The Long Road from the film Dead Man Walking
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| Peter Gabriel |
If the naysayers of globalisation are concerned about loss of national identity, and the threat of a bland melting pot of cultures, World Music should provide reassurance of diversity. However, not everyone agrees that globalisation has been a good thing as far as music is concerned. Definition of World Music is difficult due to the ‘proliferation of styles, genres, sub-genres and cross-fertilisation’ (Shedden 2008) and ranges from ‘traditional and contemporary folk and roots music from the entire globe, as well as cross-cultural fusions and hybrids’ (World Music Central.org), and ‘an umbrella category under which various types of traditional and non-Western music are produced for Western consumption’ (White 2012, p1), and ‘anything other than Western rock and pop, generally played on traditional instruments’ (Shedden 2008) to the cynical ‘a catchall that commonly refers to non-Western music of any and all sorts, popular music, traditional music and even classical music. It's a marketing as well as a pseudomusical term’ (Byrne 1999).
Global cultural flows involve transnationalisation and deterritorialisation, and World Music is a chief example of this is: music from one or more traditional cultures is produced (not necessarily in country of origin) and disseminated throughout the world, far away from its original context and geo-location, and often in hybrid forms and mashups (Connell and Gibson 2004, p342). Klein acknowledges American ‘popular interest in many forms of Asian culture’ and her definition of Hollywoodisation, albeit based on the motion picture industry, can be extrapolated to the music industry: the knitting ‘together through the transnationalisation of audiences, labour pools, distribution networks and production capital’ as well as ‘material and stylistic integration’ (Klein 2004, p362).
What seems to be common in any analysis of World Music is that it is the presentation of non-Western music for Western audience consumption and, for all the fear of hybridity and cultural remix, the sheer variety and cultural difference in world music is evidence of individual cultural and racial authenticity (Gilroy cited in Hutnyk 1998, p401), although the whole notion of authentic in relation to cultural products is always up for grabs. Is there any such pure, unadulterated culture anywhere in the world today? The trappings of World Music presentation – ‘foreign performers in native dress’ – keeps the ‘myth of authenticity’ alive for Western audience (Byrne 1999).
WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) is an internationally established festival and foundation which brings together artists from all over the globe (womad.co.uk). It was founded in 1982 by UK artist Peter Gabriel who in 1989 also set up a recording label, Real World Records, with the aim ‘to provide talented artists from around the world with access to state-of-the-art recording facilities and audiences beyond their geographic region’ (realworldrecords.com).
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| Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan |
One of WOMAD’s most successful contributions to the world music stage has been the late Pakistani Qawwali performer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997). Tim Robbins’ 1996 film Dead Man Walking introduced me to the music and soaring vocals of this superlative Qawwali exponent who achieved international prominence in the 1980s and ‘90s through his collaborations with Western musicians, including Peter Gabriel and Eddie Vedder.
Qawwali is sacred Muslim devotional music ‘derived from ancient Sufi religious poets, with accompaniment by harmonium, tabla drums and backup singers’ (Bessman 2001, p22). Khan’s rise on the global stage was assisted by performances at WOMAD festivals in the 1980s but notably it was his contributions to the Hollywood films Dead Man Walking, The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ, and Natural Born Killers that secured his place in the global cultural sphere (Jacoviello 2011, p324; Hajari 1996, p55; Hagedorn 2006, p492).
Locally in South Asia, Khan’s identity was as a religious musician rather than ‘Qawwali star’ but his participation in the World Music arena drew secular audiences that gradually endowed him with the Hollywood concept of ‘stardom’ (Qureshi 1999, p91). Khan was an innovator amongst Qawwals (Qawwali singers), where songs can last up to 30 minutes and concerts (or Qawwali parties) can last for hours, shortening his songs and changing the rhythmic cycle to a more western sound (Jacoviello 2011, p324). There is some argument that the Westernisation of Khan’s music was a desecration and
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| Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Jeff Buckley |
Transnational production and distribution channels of the Western music industry such as collaboration with ‘consumer products companies and specialist marketing firms’ along with ‘aggressive retail marketing programs that include listening stations and prominent displays’ assisted the spread of Khan’s music to the wider world (Jeffery 1997). Real World Records has since gone on to represent, records and distribute such diverse international artists such as the Afro Celt Sound System, Papa Wemba and The Blind Boys of Alabama.
The marketing of these non-Western forms of music relies heavily on the representation of them as ‘exotic’(Taylor in White p174, Hutnyk 1998, p404). This commodification of the exotic is a trademark of the post colonial era where capitalist cultural production valorises difference; the product offered to the Western consumer is the very ‘otherness’ of the world musician (Hutnyk, 1998 p402).
It is interesting to note that it is precisely this exotic ‘otherness’ that is the attraction for Western consumers, which is ironic given that the vocals are generally incomprehensible to Western ears. It doesn’t matter how much you adhere to the concept of music as a universal language, if you don’t understand Urdu you’re not going to understand a word in any Qawwali song (Hutnyk 1998, p403). It is this perspective that causes the hackles to rise on the spine of US musician David Byrne. The relegation to the ‘realm of the exotic’ plays up to cultural difference and further reasserts the ‘hegemony of Western pop culture,’ he declares (Byrne 1999).
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| David Byrne |
Perhaps more than any other technology, music technology has fostered globalisation (Hutnyk 1998 p407). As early as 1986, Wallis and Malm identified four stages in the patterns of change when mass communication and increasing access to technology allows musicians around the globe to create hybrid forms of music ‘in the wake of cultural imperialism’. The stages are indicative of the processes of globalisation as a whole:
* cultural exchange;
* cultural dominance;
* cultural imperialism;
* growth of transnational corporations involved in transculturation (Wallis and Malm 1986, p376).
Simon Emmerson of successful UK world music group, Afro Celt Sound System, is not a fan of globalisation and he sees WOMAD as an ‘antidote to globalisation’. He sees globalisation as ‘destroying indigenous cultures and indigenous peoples. [It’s] destroying the detail in people's cultures’ (cited in Hart 2001).
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| Afro Celt Sound System |
Timothy D Taylor claims that World Music occupies a ‘noticeable niche’ in the growing sample libraries, which are essentially ‘digitized bits of…various kinds of music that can be pasted into compositions being created on a computer’ and in this way World Music is insinuating itself into ‘more mainstream kinds of pop and rock music’including ‘soundtracks for film, television and advertising’ (cited in White 2012 p173).
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| Talvin Singh |
Byrne’s disdain is for the term World Music because he sees it as belittling and ghettoising what is, in fact, the peoples creating the majority (99 per cent) of the music produced today (Byrne 1999). Yet it is the consumption by the West, and its attendant persistent hankering for the exotic, that keeps World Music from being truly global; so long as it remains under the spell of Western hegemony, World Music will continue to be seen as other and not mainstream.
References:
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Issue 11
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Buckley, J 1997, “Nusrat”, http://www.liquidgnome.com/JeffBuckley/nusrat.html
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Hart, Jonathon 2001, “It's not just the music,” Herald Sun (Melbourne), 10 February, 2001
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Real World Records
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