Part of your World

The term "world music" is both tricky, and rather silly, to define. After all, isn't all music from this world? I'm not sure about everyone else but I for one don't listen to Martian jazz. Record stores would call it music that isn't an Anglo-American genre, or the rather hard to categorize kind of music. Hesmondhalgh points out that this distinction between indigenous and Western music is symptomatic of cultural imperialism. The way we define music itself is cantered on the West. When a song doesn’t fit into the Western idea of a genre due to style, artist, language, it gets shoved into this “other” category – World Music. However, globalization is shrinking the world. Shrinking the world won’t mean a reduction in styles though, as Manual’s experiment in India proved. When genres meet, they do not annihilate each other, but create a new sound. As musicians incorporate more sounds and influences perhaps the very idea of “world music” will change as well.