is saying "i'm into world music" a good enough reason for me to dislike someone

stelfox

Beast of Burden
is saying "i'm into world music" a good enough reason for me to dislike someone

i think it is.
there's so much baggage attached to the term "world music" that the use of it, without scare quotes and as a legitimate genre classification, immediately gets my hackles up.
mainly i consider it horribly patronising and indicative of a really wack-ass variety of cultural tourism, specifically undertaken from a kind of wholegrain elitist, paternalistic anti-pop position that grates on me something rotten when you consider that the very best in "world music" is actually simply "of the people" (actually the literal meaning of shaabi in arabic, apparently), just as much as dancehall, grime reggaeton etc.
am i being really intolerant here, or are these afro celt soundsystem types really as far beneath my contempt as i believe?
(fwiw, i have met many of these people, especially since i actually like quite a bit of music that isn't from the uk or the usa and happen to write about it now and again. very rarely have i liked any of them).
 
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Noah Baby Food

Well-known member
You're spot on. Don't even worry about it.


...like people who imbue "world music" with some automatic deep profound meaning because it's made by genuine poor foreign people (and they can't understand the words). Remember John Peel commenting on this after playing the Bundu Boys or something, saying that the words are probably as dumb as yer average Western chart pop...

World Music is as bullshit and imperialist a term as Urban, I recks.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
Noah Baby Food said:
...like people who imbue "world music" with some automatic deep profound meaning because it's made by genuine poor foreign people.

that's what i meant by saying it was patronising. i guess what i'm getting at is that these people look down on US and British street music, and by extension the people that make and listen to it, yet eulogise the same class of people and their art if they happen to be "exotic" enough. for instance, one guy i know professes to love kwaito and baile funk now, but still can't handle anything "the chavs" might like.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Jeez, I remember saying something reasonably similar to this on ILM ages ago and getting crucified for it.

To be honest I was coming at it from a different angle: as I remember, I was lamenting the fact that I found much of what I saw as the world music 'canon' to be quite dull, and wondering where I could find more genuinely exciting records by the likes of Thione Seck or Etoile 2000. My implication was that many Westerners seem to jump upon the first album from an exotic country they see and imbue it with imagined profundity, seemingly forgetting that just because a record is from Zambia or Ecuador does not mean that it automatically has any more musical ingenuity than your average Phil Collins disc.
 

bassnation

the abyss
stelfox said:
i think it is.

lol, really?

see, before this post i had you down as owning all of transglobal undergrounds lps and singles plus anything by ravi shankars son, etc. are you really telling us thats not the case? ;)
 
Noah Baby Food said:
You're spot on. Don't even worry about it.


...like people who imbue "world music" with some automatic deep profound meaning because it's made by genuine poor foreign people (and they can't understand the words). Remember John Peel commenting on this after playing the Bundu Boys or something, saying that the words are probably as dumb as yer average Western chart pop...

World Music is as bullshit and imperialist a term as Urban, I recks.


wow..bang on man..this is the best reply I've ever seen in my short time on Dissensus.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
bassnation said:
lol, really?

see, before this post i had you down as owning all of transglobal undergrounds lps and singles plus anything by ravi shankars son, etc. are you really telling us thats not the case? ;)

i do actually own a lot of indian music and that ananda shankar version of jumping jack flash is still one of the best records ever made in my book!
 

john eden

male pale and stale
John just asked me, "would you wear a patchwork quilt and go around saying, Yeah man, I'm into world music".

And I said, Yeah, I probably would.

paul.meme
 

Woebot

Well-known member
paul.meme said:
John just asked me, "would you wear a patchwork quilt and go around saying, Yeah man, I'm into world music".

And I said, Yeah, I probably would.

now i've heard everything! :D

when exactly were you going to squeeze this in your busy schedule paul? sometime before the next ruthless takeover bid?

;)
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
I'd just like to put on record that I quite like Transglobal Underground -- well, I like Temple Head an awful a lot, or at least I did ten years ago, and I seem to remember them being good at Megadog. And I'm convinced that I like Afro Celt Soundsystem, despite not being able to recall any of their music, or indeed anything at all about them.

I don't do ruthless take-overs, I do stakeholder-managed business design and launch -- never mind the blood on the floor, it's nothing, really.

(John's comment about "pathwork quilt clothes" really took me back to Stonehenge '88. Aaaahh, memories...)

PS: "world music" is just marketing shorthand to make it -- whatever "it" is -- easier to buy for people who don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge of messrs Stelfox, Woebot, Eden et al... you can look down on them for being middle class, middle brow, middle of the road...

... but I prefer to indulge them patronisingly.

There but for the grace of god, and all that...
 

jimet

Active member
World Music is just such a deranged category that anyone who uses it has to be a dimwit. I mean, I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but any category that includes Mohammed Raafi, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan and Baile Funk just has to be meaningless. And the Afrocelt sound system are utterly worthless. I saw them at a WOMAD thing a couple of years back and I've never seen such a flat joyless daniel lanoisesque take on "dance" in my whole life.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
Transglobal Underground - As disturbingly redolent of smelly white dreads, the Whirl-Y-Gig parachute, and crappy incense from Camden Market as '95-era Goa Trance, but without the fun.
 

ambrose

Well-known member
hahaha if you listen to radi o4 enough you might know that they "trail" 1xtra on radio 4 (thanks new dickface radio4 controller!) loads with this sort of ad that goes "there are three new shows of world music on 1xtra" and talking about richie vibe vees show or something, it is totally sanitised and funny!

very apt for this thread.

as for world music, it is a bit irritating. i guess as a term its just bee naround along enough for people to think it means something mroe than a ridiculous catch all term. i dont think its a good enough reason to dislike anyone, co9s whos gives a flying fuck, but anwyay.

funnily enough, this phenomenon, of imbuing things from outsdie the UK or US as "intellectual" or "arthouse" in terms of film, which is the same impulse i think, really fucks me off. it shouldnt be that unusual to watch films made in different countries, but everytime you mention a film from korea, russia or wherever, you are immediately means that you think youre clever, arthouse loving film buff. but people in other countries make dumb films too!
that annoys me more, people giving me hassle just cos im going to see some azeri rom com or something
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
ambrose said:
funnily enough, this phenomenon, of imbuing things from outsdie the UK or US as "intellectual" or "arthouse" in terms of film, which is the same impulse i think, really fucks me off.
Fully. My nearest video shop has a "cult" section which includes your Troma stuff and things not in English that are probably cult films, eg. old Almodovar, but seems to just throw in all other movies not in English, including Crouching Tiger, the original version of Shaolin Soccer, etc.

But certainly, WRT world music, it's a meaningless term, and using it does suggest some kind of dumb view of the world. OTOH, maybe people who love a range of shit from outside of Western pop/folk styles are as fed up with trying to explain to numbnuts what they listen to as some of the posters on this forum?

I do remember a comment from Nitin Sawney (in a Face article I think?) that at festivals and things a bunch of non-Indian hippies would come and tell him how spiritual they found his music. He would do the reasonable thing and ask them to clarify how or why they found it spiritual, watching as they'd talk themselves into a corner. IIRC. I definitely recall he joked that if he farted into a mic they'd call it mystical.

Ambrose, don't suppose you chose your user name from Mr Lunch's side kick in a series of kids' books? :) This is where you tell me it's just your name and I feel special. :eek:
 
D

droid

Guest
Whilst Im down with all this Transglobal/Afro Celt bashing, to me all that stuff would more aptly be described as 'fusion' rather than 'world'... which to me is nothing more than a convenient MP3 genre for the various types of acoustic folk music from around the world... y'know - stuff like the Lomax 'Primitive Musics' series, the Smithsonian 'Music of indonesia' LPS, all the Nonesuch 'Explorer' LP's ('Ghana - High-Life & other Popular Music' is one that's been floating my boat recently), the 'Music of Islam' collection etc... theres tons of this stuff available, and some of it is absoloutely mind-blowingly good...

So I suppose Id have to say that (ulp) I am one of these people who would admit to 'liking' world music (though I think I have a very different defintion of what the term means). What else are you going to do? List all the music you like from every country on the planet? It would take bloody ages! :p

If world music equals the transglobal/afro celt/Sawney 'fusion' sound (which seems to be the consensus here), then wot DO you call 'real' world music? ie: indigenous folk and classical music from around the globe?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
droid said:
If world music equals the transglobal/afro celt/Sawney 'fusion' sound (which seems to be the consensus here), then wot DO you call 'real' world music? ie: indigenous folk and classical music from around the globe?

I think you call it "indigenous folk and classical music from xxxx", where xxxx = country or region.

This idea that every kind of music from everywhere except europe (etc) can be jammed into one category is completely mental.

I mean, reggae gets filed under "world music" in some shops I've been into, FFS!

Wasn't there a David Byrne piece on all this?
 
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