World Music Notes on World Beat Guilbault Interpreting World Music

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World Music
“World music” has been a contentious form of pop genre considering that it has an exact moment when the style began. Frith (305), who has already published a book on popular music, argues that with the increase in demand for records made by non-Western artist, the problem is that world music albums do not have an identifiable section of published charts. Guilbault (31) who argues that the musical cultures of ‘world music’ practices do not have identifiable meanings, or how these cultures construct these meanings supports similar sentiments. He argues that the term ‘world music’ is used as a marketing term to relate to products of cross-fertilization of music between the north (Western Europe and America), and the south (Caribbean Basin and Africa). Feld (31) holds that there is a duality between American and African popular music, and this musical appropriation makes it challenging to identify the genre of world music. This paper summarizes and responds to the discourse surrounding “world music” as a musical genre.
The definition of world music became highly contentious such that it was agreed that it would refer to any music that had not been categorized under any group, such as Jazz, reggae, folk, or blues. “Perhaps the common factor unifying all these WORLD MUSIC labels is the passionate commitment of all the individuals to the music itself” (Frith 306). It means that people who have a passion on a specific type of music can related to those who are committed to other music genres. I agree with the author that lack of specific categorization of music tends to affect the way it can be classified as a music genre. Moreover, since world music lacks an ideological category, it lacks the capacity of being recognized as an independent genre.
Second, since 1985, world music has expanded to become an umbrella th...