world music is an oddity. It is a multi-million- dollar global business, whose stars are becoming as well known in Britain as our home-grown ones. It has its own fanzines, reference books and experts. And yet in a fundamental sense it does not exist. Although there are many "world music" performers, there are no performers of world music; there are only performers of Algerian rai, Genoese tra-la-lero, Peruvian chica or whatever. This reflects the fact that world music is not a musical category, but a commercial one. Its birth can be precisely dated to July 1987, when 11 independent record producers of "international pop" met at the Empress of Russia pub in London to figure out how to help buyers find their music. The phrase world music was dreamed up "to make it easier to find that Malian kora record, the music of Bulgaria, Zairean soukous or Indian ghazal." They guilelessly admitted that it meant "any music that isn't at present catered for by its own category: reggae, jazz, blues, folk." This was how Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita and Celia Cruz reached us-in a bin marked "unclassifiable."
It was very different when I first encountered non-western music as a schoolboy in the late 1960s. In those days it was a sober affair, utterly free of anything popular, exuding an atmosphere of unfathomable antiquity or courtly sophistication. Browsing through the school's LP collection, I found "Music of Mali," one of the series of non-western music recordings produced by Unesco in the 1950s and 1960s. I was tempted by the cover, which showed ranks of interestingly curved Malian women swathed in gorgeous fabrics. But what really gripped me was the sound, which was thrilling even before the music started. What I heard first was snatches of conversation in some unknown language, and all kinds of odd background noises. It was the grainy, slightly disorganised and "authentic" sound of the field recording. Then came the soft wayward sounds of those hammock-style xylophones, so wonderful to look at as well as to hear. Finally the flat, penetrating, oddly plaintive sound of the massed women's voices sealed the spell. I was hooked. But more than that, I felt that at some level this was now my music as well as theirs.
I was too young to know any better, and at that time not many people did. Edward Said was years away from writing Orientalism and world music had not yet been invented. I wasn't to know that the "noises off" could easily have been expunged, and were kept only to augment the illusion of authenticity. Nor could I see that the cover photograph looks hammy and posed, as if just off camera there was a Malian ministry of culture official, anxious for his ladies to present an image of drilled efficiency to the western buyer.
The Unesco project was launched partly to preserve a record of rural and traditional music that might disappear. The irony is that while the threatened music still thrives, the attitude that prompted its preservation has fallen into disrepute. The Unesco project was the climax of the west's age of innocence. Its unreflective enjoyment of the thrill of the other, and its high-minded determination to measure, weigh, analyse and explain non-western music in a quasi-scientific manner belongs to a time untroubled by ideological scruples, with a belief-perhaps na?ve, certainly somewhat colonial, but not altogether bad-that understanding was possible.
That age had started at least two centuries previously, with the west's colonial adventures in the east and the Caribbean. Most traders and colonial administrators were content to send back hookahs and silks as trophies; music was too slippery to lay one's hands on. But a few tried. Sir William Jones took time off from his duties as a high court judge to investigate Indian religion, languages and music. His book On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos of 1792 was the first serious attempt by a westerner to understand Indian music, but it was compromised by Jones's determination to force Indian melodies into the procrustean bed of western notation.
Here, already, is a recurring dilemma of "ethnomusicology." What criteria of notation and analysis are appropriate? Another dilemma is the relation of scholarship to commercial music- making. It was not long before volumes of "Hindoo airs" went on sale to the public, complete with anodyne piano accompaniments. These were the ancestors of In a Persian Garden and all those other musical fantasies of the east purveyed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. More musically sophisticated, but no less patronising in its portrayal of oriental music, are the "orientalising" works from Bizet's Pearl Fishers to Verdi's Aida and Rimsky-Korsakov's Invisible City of Kitezh.
The inaccessibility of non-western music at that time might excuse these composers' ignorance of the real thing. But misunderstanding is not cured by close acquaintance with reality, and it was a misunderstanding that of course ran both ways. The recipients of western attention were at first puzzled by it, and didn't know how to respond. In October 1902, Fred Gaisberg of the Gramophone & Typewriter Company Ltd (later to become EMI), set off to Calcutta to seek out and record Indian musicians. Knowing nothing of Indian music, he relied on a local theatre entrepreneur who led him to a performance of Romeo and Juliet, with sung interludes from "a chorus of young Nautch girls heavily bleached with rice powder and dressed in transparent gauze. They sang 'And her golden hair was hanging down her back' accompanied by 14 brass instruments playing in unison." The exasperated Gaisberg soon left, no doubt to the hurt bewilderment of his hosts, who had struggled to master the curious ways of western music for his benefit.
They soon learned that what the west really wanted was their own music, but they assumed that this must be tailored to western appetites and preconceptions. In fact western audiences and scholars of non-western music wanted the unadulterated, pure thing itself-but had no idea what that was. This led, through the 20th century, to a curious and often comical dance of mutual misunderstanding, a misunderstanding which is in a strange way desired by the west.
With the arrival of modernism, a profound change took place in attitudes towards non-western music. It began to be prized not so much for its erotic allure as its raw vital energy, an energy which western art, enervated by romanticism and symbolism, was sorely in need of. (This idea of non-western music as a spring of uncorrupted energy that can revivify the west survived into 1980s pop with Paul Simon's Graceland album.)
From the 1930s onward came the urge to draw a constructive principle from non-western music, rather than simply imitating its sounds. The surface of John Cage's Construction I in Metal and Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time may not sound Indian, but working away underneath are rhythmic patterns drawn from Indian musical treatises. This trend in post-war music marks the high-water mark of the west's encounter with non-western music, in the sense that it respects the music's essential opacity, and refuses to fetishise its otherness or dress it up in western harmonies. It was a trend spurred in part by the burgeoning science of ethnomusicology, with the newly invented tape recorder allowing a proper analysis of tiny details of music-making beyond the reach of musical notation. The scientific attitude of the ethnomusicologist was mirrored by the analytic, constructivist method of composers like John Cage, Steve Reich and Gy?rgy Ligeti.
But this was soon to be overwhelmed by impulses from pop. The mutation in attitudes began-as usual-with a misunderstanding. When Ravi Shankar visited Britain and the US in the late 1960s, he assumed his audiences wanted to hear and listen to the subtleties of north Indian classical music. What he found were several thousand hippies who thought that he was a prophet of free love. Shankar was appalled. However, Indian classical music left little influence on pop, apart from a sitar flavour on a handful of songs, including George Harrison's Within You, Without You on the Sergeant Pepper album.
The real herald of world music was the arrival in the 1980s on the British and American pop scene of African and Latin American pop musics. And it was the success of a dozen or so pioneering labels that led to that fateful meeting in a London pub in 1987. Since then the industry has exploded in size and sophistication. There is now no corner of the world so obscure that a recording company won't find its music and market it as the latest sensational flavour.
As Simon Frith notes, the rhetoric of "authenticity" present from the start in world music was borrowed from pop. World music was marketed not as "global pop" but as "roots rock." The question, though, must be: authentic for and to whom? Roots R&B has a good claim to be "rooted" in Britain; people don't just listen to it, they also play it, and allow its attitudes and dress codes to inform their lives, which is surely an acid test of authenticity. But what about "roots rai?" How does the Anglo-Saxon buyer share in this? Some people say they don't, because they can't. World music simply redefines the authentic as the exotic, and is therefore nothing more than old-style orientalism in a new guise. The world music industry is sensitive to this accusation that it is just pandering to cultural tourism. But by loading its sleeve-notes with ethnomusicological information and publishing authoritative guides is the industry simply substituting its own integrity for the inevitable lack of it in its consumers?
World music is aimed always at two markets-the global one, and the local one. Seen in the local context, world music loses that ghostly, consumerist feel and becomes real. It is real not because it sounds different-west African musicians do not leave their samplers and synths behind when they play to the home crowd. (Rather the reverse, in fact, the home crowd wants the modern sound, and western tunes, and the western audience wants something more purely African and authentic.) The music becomes real because it forms part of an authentically lived experience. Music in third-world countries is not only a commodity-it is also a vital identity-forming medium, where the indigenous and global elements collide. To embrace pop idioms and technology does not have to mean "selling out" to globalisation-it might mean resisting a state-imposed "authenticity" which has stifled innovation for years. Or it might reflect a desire to lead a kind of double life, with one foot in the local culture, and one in that enticing world beyond. (This double life exists in reverse form in the metropolitan centres of the west in the contemporary dance fusions of performers like Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation and Talvin Singh, who mix Indian and pop themes.)
In any case, non-western musicians are no longer the passive creatures of the western scientific gaze, or western fantasy, or western money. They fight back-they seize hold of global pop idioms and "naturalise" them, they go back to their own traditions and "globalise" them. They do this with an insouciant unselfconsciousness that contrasts with many of the anxious apologists for world music in the west, who are always restlessly searching for the next authentic experience, but condemned always to be outsiders, peering in at a musical experience that can never be truly theirs.
