Important Aspect Of World Music Is The Issue Of Location

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World Music
“World music” is a term that used to refer to a universal genre of music and it is celebrated as being able to bring people across the world together in musical harmony. Nevertheless, this term has raised controversies, with analysts saying that it is meaningless since it does not involve any specific category or genre of music. Frith (315) says that world music is an unusual pop genre that lacks a specific identifiable format and it may therefore bring challenges when a person wants to purchase a specific type of music. Guilbault (31) argues that world music is not a musical genre but a marketing term that describes a mixture of musical products, particularly from Africa and the Caribbean. Feld (31) holds that as American popular music continue to have a similar sound as that of African popular music, it leads to emergence of records that that are increasingly similar. The main example or aspect that is analyzed in this paper is the universality of world music as a genre.
The strange pop genre of world music is said to have started in July 1987 when 11 record companies met in London to develop an “international pop.” Therefore, world music from the start “described the commercial process in which the sounds of other people (“diverse forms of music as yet unclassifiable in Western terms”) were sold to British record buyers” (Frith 305). Therefore, since the term world music lacked a specific definition, it was agreed that it would represent any music that was not classified under any category. It is from this perspective that world music is related to the concept of universality that has been discussed in the course materials. This implies that any form of music that cannot be categorized as jazz, folk, reggae, or blues can be grouped under world music.
Another important aspect of world music is the issue of location. Guilbault (31) argues that the practices of world music tend to represent issues such as musical cultures, which are not related to any specific musical genre. This implies that world music “is used, rather, '[as] a marketing term describing the products of musical cross-fertilization between the north - the US and Western Europe - and south - primarily Africa and the Caribbean Basin” (Guilbault 31). The umbrella expanded further to encompass any form of musical cu...