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The term world music has long been used by ethnomusicologists and folklorists for everything that was not Western art music—that is, ethnic music, folk music, and non-Western classical music. ... This pattern of musical dissemination changed dramatically in the wake of immigration from so-called Third World countries to cities such as London, Paris, and New York. During the 1960s, recordings (mostly imported) of a variety of non-Western musics, both traditional and contemporary popular, began to circulate within immigrant communities with little if any mediation by scholars. However, as immigrant musicians—especially those whose music was intended for dancing—began taking advantage of the sophisticated recording and broadcast technologies available in northern metropoles, their potential for appealing to audiences beyond their own ethnic communities was greatly increased. ... Since the musics didnt fit into existing marketing categories, the term world music was appropriated from ethnomusicology.
This "new" category of world music quickly differentiated itself from its highly specialized scholarly antecedent by the nature of its production and dissemination: an extensive, interlocking commercial infrastructure comprised of specialty record companies, retail and mail order outlets, radio shows, dance clubs, magazines, music festivals and the like, all dedicated to promoting exotic sounds from developing countries to consumers in the industrialized world, who on the whole were urban, affluent, well educated—and in Europe and the United States, mostly white. Some of the musics promoted via this new infrastructure were the sort of traditional and folk-oriented music that had formerly been categorized by music specialists as world music, but others were technologically sophisticated, stylistically hybridized, and commercially oriented products that fell well beyond the traditional purview of ethnomusicologists.
The marketing term world beat, which emerged about the same time as world music, referred to a subset of world music that included commercially oriented dance musics. Since the single most important element of dance music is rhythm, it is no accident that most of the musics initially categorized as world beat originated in areas where percussion has been most consistently and successfully cultivated over time—in Africa and its diaspora Indeed, even a partial listing of musics marketed as world beat confirms the importance of Africa and the diaspora: juju from Nigeria, soukous from Congo-Brazzaville/Congo-Kinshasa/Senegal, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, zouk from Martinique and Guadeloupe, soca from Trinidad and Tobago, vodou-jazz and misik raisin from Haiti, and samba from Brazil.
Taking advantage of these new musical sources as well as of the growing demand for non-Western popular music, rock musicians such as Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and David Byrne began creating pop cross-fertilizations between First and Third World styles—especially those from the diaspora. As interest in Third World popular music grew, styles from places as disparate as Yemen, Pakistan, and Australia began to be marketed as world beat as well. The ever increasing range of styles and nationalities falling under the world beat umbrella challenged scholars trying to define it; as Goodwin and Gore wrote: "World Beat might be identified as Western pop stars appropriating non-Western sounds, as third world musicians using Western rock and pop, or as the Western consumption of non-Western folk music.
Approximate Word count = 2509
Approximate Pages = 10
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