The Observer’s monthly music magazine is normally pretty good, but it excelled itself this week with a focus on what it hesitates to call “World Music”.
From an in-depth piece on the fairly well known CSS, to introductions of a number of lesser known acts from the rest of the world (that is, not the UK or the USA) including Tinariwen’s southern saharan desert-blues, Chinese electronica sung in Tibetan, Sanskrit and a made-up language from Sa Dingding and the loved-by-monks indie-rock of Dengue Fever it’s fairly wide-ranging.
There’s a short but interesting article from Ian Anderson defending the “World Music” term, and explaining how it came about:
In the mid Eighties, artists like the Bhundu Boys, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Thomas Mapfumo and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares were starting to tour and get radio play. But on the high streets it was still hard to get shops to stock the albums and customers - who might misremember a foreign name, wilfully mispronounced by a DJ in the first place - didn’t know where to look.
An industry meeting and a show of hands later and “World Music” saw off ‘worldbeat’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘international pop’ as the label for the section in the record shop where “kora players from Mali, Indian slide guitarists, Bulgarian choirs and throat singers from Mongolia” could all be found.
Vampire Weekend and Foals have risen in prominence and the term ‘Afrobeat’ follows them around. Franz Ferdinand’s next album is going to have an “African feel”, their bassist Nick McCarthy is ‘getting really into [Afrobeat]’. Could this be the tipping point for the widespread appreciation of African sounds?
