World

As ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Steven Feld says, the term World Music was formerly coined by Robert Brown in the 1960s to celebrate and encourage scholarly studies of musical diversity in the world and the multiple contexts in which music, any music, is created, performed and enjoyed. However, since the 1980s this term has come to represent “the triumph of global sonic industrialization”, which has increasingly debased and trivialised otherness and difference by deterritorialising “ethnicities” and cultures, turning them merely into trade commodities instead.

Bearing in mind the ambiguity, blurriness, possible misuse and/or the sheer complexity of the term nowadays, our ‘World Music’ category here brings songs from different geographies and musical cultures together, which are not included  elsewhere, by which we mean in other categories.