The Social Implications of World Music

Sometimes I revisit my World Music period in the 90s. It was a period of musical discovery and became a life-long inspiration. What is also interesting about world music is that in many cases joyful music is produced under the most oppressive circumstances and becomes a form of liberation and escape. When you experience music as a “one world” phenomenon, as naive as it sounds now, you get the essence of music to have the capacity to be unifying, at least in the times it is created, performed and listened to. The commemoration of Queen Elizabeth is one of these rare "one world" moments.

I was also thinking about this a while back after I had re-listened to Peter Gabriel’s score to the film The Last Temptation of Christ. Through WOMAD he has a huge network of musicians from around the globe. While I truly believe music can create unity, there are lots of cultural traditions and politics that get secularized (silenced) within that framework. We may think secularization is a panacea, or even music as a panacea, but those musicians have very different traditions that they bring to the table. For example Ugandan musicians bring with them family traditions that may have been supporters of Idi Amin. We hear the cool 70s African vibe, but there is a subtext to it as well. Perhaps knowing the cultural histories makes the music more relevant rather than commingling it with all other Western culture. It’s also interesting that when we use the same instruments (guitar, bass, drums, keys, saxes) that can also ‘secularize’ music, as opposed to using indigenous instruments.

It's like the celebratory Hawaiian monarchical traditions compartmentalized with the general negative opinion of monarchies. These rituals aren't really about the things westerners celebrate on their vacations; they are profound expressions of tribal rites--and might be about things that we normally would militate against such as making garments that involves the killing of thousands of birds.

In the 50s viewers of I Love Lucy, and the signature theme of the show performed by Ricky Ricardo, never realized its roots in voodoo and the Santeria religion, a sect of Catholicism ("The Way Of the Saints"), conjuring the spirit of the Yoruban Gods, the Orishas.

Western culture typically takes what it needs from other cultures and ignores the rest. But nonetheless people have done it with sincere intentions, as Peter Gabriel did with WOMAD.