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What Is World Music?: Zap Mama Provides One Answer
| Article
# : |
11411 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
1,478 Words |
| Author
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William Ruhlmann
William Ruhlmann is a critic based in New York. His seventh
book, The Rolling Stones, was published last September. |
Of all the terms coined by musicians, critics, journalists, or advertisers to describe a genre of music, from ragtime to hip hop, the phrase world music, which has come into common usage in the last five years or so, must be the vaguest and most generalized. Though within the American music industry world music has come to describe a specific group of musical styles, the name itself seems to encompass all styles--what music is not of the world?
Many have been dismissive of the phrase. Critic John Storm Roberts derisively calls it "other people's music," scorning the ignorance of Western audiences about "at least 85 percent of the world's music." Publicist Andrew Seidenfeld of No Problem Productions, and formerly of world music-oriented independent label Shanachie Records, flatly calls world music "a marketing term."
There is something to both opinions, but to better understand what world music is today, it may help to describe briefly its development over the last twenty years and then to explore the career of one of the most popular current world music groups, Zap Mama, which combines many of the main elements that make up world music.
The music referred to as world music by the Western music industry generally comes from the Third World and combines local styles with Western styles for a hybrid that has the potential for appealing to the ears of Western listeners. Probably the prototype world music artist was Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley.
Marley, the leader of a vocal trio called the Wailers, emerged from the Trenchtown ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1960s with a musical style that combined Caribbean rhythms with the influence of American soul music heard over the radio from New Orleans and Miami. The Wailers became local stars in Jamaica and were taken up by British/Jamaican record executive Chris Blackwell, who signed them to his Island Records label in 1973 and treated them to the kinds of recording budgets and promotional muscle common to rock groups.
The original Wailers broke up soon after, with Marley retaining the name for his backup group. He then went on to score international successes through the rest of the decade, getting, for example, eight albums on the U.K. charts through 1980, three of them on the Top Ten. In the United States, Marley was less successful, remaining a cult favorite among whites and failing to attract a following among blacks, though one of his albums, Rastaman Vibration (1976), did reach the
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