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The sound of the strange

Since the 1960s European bands have been using musical styles from other cultures to produce a type of European world music. A search for acoustic influences.

World music is a difficult genre. Difficult to encompass, but even more difficult to define. A collective term for everything that cannot be put in any other box, world music above all demonstrates regional idiosyncrasies: instruments that sound exotic to Western ears (such as the sitar or the saz), shifts in harmonic patterns and unusual rhythmic figures diverging from the familiar four-four beat. The term world music emerged in the 1980s. A key moment was when Peter Gabriel – with the album "One World, One Voice" – and Paul Simon turned their attention to "non-European" and "non-North American" music, going to places like Southern and Western Africa and Brazil to find new ideas.

The Indian musician Ravi Shankar playing the sitar at a concert in New Delhi in 2006.

Photo: AP

The term world music has now become discredited, however, accused of being Euro-centric and reflecting cultural clichés. World music is only world music, critics argue, because until now it has been absent from Anglo-American pop music cultures and only succeeded in becoming part of these cultures under this guise; yet this category also has something excluding about it, for by continuing to be called "world music” and not simply "music” it never becomes truly integrated or accepted in its own right.

Regional and Westernised

Since the 1960s Western pop music has dominated the whole world, rather in the manner of a hegemonial power, increasingly infiltrating non-Western musical traditions. This has led both to the commercialisation of local music and to its adaptation to Western standards, while its influence has remained to a large extent local. A good example is Turkish pop. Tarkan is perhaps the sole artist known in the West. Born in West Germany to Turkish migrant workers, he travelled to Turkey in the 1980s before returning to Germany in the 1990s, where he recorded his international hit "Kiss Kiss". Turkish pop music in Turkey is considerably more elaborate, integrating Arab sounds as well as Western influences like rock and hip hop. Musical migration does not work so well in the opposite direction. While there is now considerable exchange in global pop music, especially in hip hop – Arab hip hop, rappers like M.I.A. who have absorbed a variety of influences, and also US hip hop producers with Arab backgrounds like Fred Wreck – nowhere has Turkish music been able to make its mark, not even in Germany.

Hippies discover India

Indian music is different. With a huge pop culture, India's influence was already felt in the 1960s, when no less a person than the Beatle George Harrison became the first to feature a non-Western instrument on a pop album, with the sitar in "Norwegian Wood". In 1971 Harrison invented the benefit concert (for Bangladesh), inviting the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar onto the stage. The event set off a wave of hype that continues unabated until today. Hippies discovered India, but India did not necessarily return the favour. Nevertheless, because of its status as a former crown colony, India has always been influenced by the West.

The Beatles' guitarist George Harrison with a sitar (Bombay,1968).

Photo: AP

And in recent years with its cinema and the Bollywood dance films, India has managed to export its culture and music worldwide. Today the Indian film star Shah Rukh Khan purportedly has more female fans than Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Tom Cruise put together.

The augur of authenticity

In principle, each region on earth is responsible for a part of world music. "Genuine African music" comes from Africa, for example. Strictly speaking, world music has a hint of authenticity, of regionalism, of purism and resistance to commercialism. World music is not pop music, and it doesn't want to be. As different as the individual musical traditions are – and there is no end to them – take Jewish klezmer, Ethopian jazz, Arabian rai, electric hi-fi, polka and Portuguese fado to name just a few – what they all have in common is that they are more or less distinguished from the American-influenced pop culture by their traditional, original character. The boundary between world music and more established music genres is often fluid (Canjun, for example, is a sub-form of the blues). Other genres such as reggae and its offshoots, have meanwhile – because of the criteria defined above – been grouped together with world music although they have long been established in their own right. Calypso, too (from Trinidad), and Bossa Nova (from Brazil) started out locally before being acclaimed around the world.

Afro-pop modernises Indie

Again and again, Western musicians have not only been influenced by world music, they have also built "exotic" elements into their own creations. Paul Simon's hit album "Graceland" (1986) is unthinkable without South African influences. And now a second generation has been inspired by African music and "Afro-pop", which it discovered through Paul Simon. These groups include the New York campus band Vampire Weekend and the American-Kenyan band Extra Golden, while Zach Condon's "Beirut" project uses klezmer elements and music from Eastern Europe.

In England Damon Albarn, the lead singer of the Indie band Blur, has rendered great service to Malian music and also provoked many fellow pop artists by saying that while they can learn from African music, it has nothing to learn from them. The focus today is no longer on organising multi-cultural feel-good projects to highlight the afflictions of the world and its age-old structures of exploitation, but to engage in cultural cooperation at eye level and allow artists their own personal musical development. One example is the Californian jazz singer Erika Stucky, who works Swiss yodelling and gutteral sounds into many of her numbers. And that's a first.

René Hamann

René Hamann, born in 1971 in Solingen, is an author and freelance journalist living in Berlin. He contributes to die tageszeitung and Spex, among other ...
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