Friday 4th June 2004
It's so familiar, that accent which sprung from the milieu of random Europeans who went west to colonise the Americas. In Britain, it's been on our TVs and cinema screens and our radios and stereos since each of these things existed. American culture is a strange, massive globe that we're stuck in, locked in by our language and economics. In this context, 'World Music' and 'World Cinema' are valid genres, even when the former covers music as diverse as Latin folk and, say, African drumming. The fact that I can only think of one or two genres of 'world' music only emphasises this point.
We in the Anglo-American sphere are unforgivably isolated and ignorant of culture outside Europe and North America, and music is a particularly illustrative example. The vast majority of the music on my playlists and in my CD collection originates in the United States, and the same can be said for the bands I cite in my articles. What am I missing out on? What are we all missing?
I can give a couple of examples of excellent music from outside our cultural bubble. Mad Capsule Markets are a Japanese band snatching influences from punk, techno and hardcore. Manu Chao is a Latin folk singer who writes songs in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. There must be more!
But what are the reasons for this artistic void, this rift in global culture? Is it a language barrier? Is it economic? Or is the language barrier a component of the economic barrier, or a wider cultural barrier? These are questions requiring investigation and debate; but meanwhile, I just can't help thinking that I must be missing out on so much.
Variety isn't the impression you get from MTV and Clear Channel, but when you start investigating, you might just start thinking “So much music, so little time....”