A Sweet Lullaby for World Music?

Over lunch with Culturalist@s Kaoru Watanabe and Mari Nakano on Tuesday I started discussing some of my discomfort with the term "World Music". One of the paradoxes of the term is that while it is supposed to express an openness to the diversity of the world it simultaneously groups every "other" culture together. Are Mariachi music from Mexico or Hip-Hop from Mumbai forms of World Music or are they simply two forms of music that exist in the world, just like Jazz and Classical Western?

Sometimes World Music is a term that is given to a mashup- the coming together of traditional and contemporary music forms, or collaborations between artists from different countries. In his piece "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music" Steven Feld provides a cautionary tale of a mash-up that was more cultural appropriation that collaboration. He talks about the piece "Sweet Lullaby" by the band Deep Forest. Throughout the piece you can hear a lullaby in the Baegu language of the Solomon Islands sung by a woman called Afunakwa. This is a long story but the lullaby was recorded without consent by Afunakwa or her community and ended up being used by Deep Forest without Afunakwa ever knowing about it, or Deep Forest really knowing where it was from for that matter. Needless to say she was never compensated. If you watch the music video on Youtube you will see that it has been seen more than two million times, and many of the comments are about how this song represents visions of a united and peaceful world where respect is forged between people of all cultures. Well, frankly, the back story to this song is kinda far from this.

This is all to say that there is often more than meets the eye- or the ear- with "World Music" and in our desire to "feel good" we might sometimes overlook the very values that we espouse. Another way of looking at cultures coming together for me is that each artist I meet has his or her own sensitivity and vision for their culture. There is sometimes tension, even opposite viewpoints between cultural bearers from the same tradition, and this can only be good for it means that cultures are layered, alive and constantly in motion. There is no single representation of any culture, let alone any "World Music". As we learn more about each other, about the context in which each of us live and create, we can start to connect to the human first rather than to the category and this can only mean richer cultural experiences. This vision is really at the core of Create Culture.

Nico-