World Music is such an amorphous concept that pretty much any writer could take a subjective snapshot of what it means today and present that as the ‘essential’ or ‘definitive’ guide to the genre and the title of this slim volume could mislead us into thinking that the author has indeed attempted just that kind of approach. Instead, this book is not so much a guide or a work of reference as a series of short essays wherein New Internationalist magazine’s music correspondent takes a thematic approach to “locat[ing] several manifestations of world music within a larger context” (as she puts it), with in-depth chapters on European genres rembetika and fado, and music as political catalyst, before tackling (perceived) authenticity in music and asking whether (and how) the outsider – ie the world music consumer - can engage with music that is essentially community-based. There’s a brief run-down of the oft-recounted early history of the term “world music”, but other than that no real attempt to map out a chronology of events or sketch out biographies of the major artists involved. Nor indeed are there descriptions or playlists of landmark albums or songs (although there is a decent, if far from comprehensive, discography and list of DVDs and books at the end). Mention of artists is dependent on their relevance to the essay in hand; contrasting examples of this - Pakistani Sufi great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan gets mentioned as part of the essay on Sufism, gnawa and trance music, but the former Zaire’s superstar guitarist and bandleader Franco isn’t anywhere to be seen. No surprise that, when you consider that African music is addressed mainly in contemporary geopolitical terms, through the mention of bands such as Tinariwen (who are described a few times as ‘proto-blues’, with no real explanation as to what that term might actually mean). In the section on music as political motivator, the author drifts off the whole idea of music’s engagement with the rest of the world (surely the whole point of “world music”, if indeed it has one) by focusing on the controversial role (and subsequent conviction) of singer-songwriter Simon Bikindi in encouraging the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in
Saturday, July 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: THE NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO WORLD MUSIC - Louise Gray (ISBN: 978-1-906523-12-1) £7.99
World Music is such an amorphous concept that pretty much any writer could take a subjective snapshot of what it means today and present that as the ‘essential’ or ‘definitive’ guide to the genre and the title of this slim volume could mislead us into thinking that the author has indeed attempted just that kind of approach. Instead, this book is not so much a guide or a work of reference as a series of short essays wherein New Internationalist magazine’s music correspondent takes a thematic approach to “locat[ing] several manifestations of world music within a larger context” (as she puts it), with in-depth chapters on European genres rembetika and fado, and music as political catalyst, before tackling (perceived) authenticity in music and asking whether (and how) the outsider – ie the world music consumer - can engage with music that is essentially community-based. There’s a brief run-down of the oft-recounted early history of the term “world music”, but other than that no real attempt to map out a chronology of events or sketch out biographies of the major artists involved. Nor indeed are there descriptions or playlists of landmark albums or songs (although there is a decent, if far from comprehensive, discography and list of DVDs and books at the end). Mention of artists is dependent on their relevance to the essay in hand; contrasting examples of this - Pakistani Sufi great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan gets mentioned as part of the essay on Sufism, gnawa and trance music, but the former Zaire’s superstar guitarist and bandleader Franco isn’t anywhere to be seen. No surprise that, when you consider that African music is addressed mainly in contemporary geopolitical terms, through the mention of bands such as Tinariwen (who are described a few times as ‘proto-blues’, with no real explanation as to what that term might actually mean). In the section on music as political motivator, the author drifts off the whole idea of music’s engagement with the rest of the world (surely the whole point of “world music”, if indeed it has one) by focusing on the controversial role (and subsequent conviction) of singer-songwriter Simon Bikindi in encouraging the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in
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