The Promise of World Music: Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening (excerpt)
Bob W.White
“Sound is the same for all the world
Everybody has a heart
Everybody gets a feeling
Let’s play! Sound box!
Rock, reggae, jazz, mbalax
All around the world…the same
Pachanga, soul music, rhythm and blues…the same
La samba, la rumba, cha-cha-cha…the same
Sound is the same for all the world
Everybody has a heart
Everybody gets a feeling
Mbaqanga, ziglibiti, high life music…the same
Merengue, funk, Chinese music…the same
Bossa nova, soul makossa, rap music…the same
Come on people, dance
Everybody in the world has a culture
Believe what you believe
Respect your customs
Everybody must do what the heart says
Don’t cause trouble; Treat people well
Be sociable; Exchange ideas
Music is the same the world over
Musicians, too, are cut from the same cloth
We’re aiming to entertain you
(Youssou N’dour, “The Same”, Sony/Columbia, 1992)
There is one question that has yet to be asked with regards to the relatively recent phenomenon of world music: What can music teach us about other cultures? If we take Youssou N’dour’s sing songy text at face value, the answer would be “not very much”, since for some time now we have known that “everybody has a culture”. In this chapter, I will show that the promotion and consumption of world music is a series of essentializing practices that actually hide behind a rhetoric of non-essentialism. For those who consume or promote this type of cultural commodity, world music represents a promise made in the name of humanity, a promise that comes from the desire to heal the wounds of a colonial past and increasingly so, a neo-liberal present. Unfortunately, however, the cosmopolitanism in the consumption of world music is often one step away from essentialism, since Western consumers identify with a musical culture that is either poorly defined or not defined at all. In the first part of this text, I will present an analysis of essentialist strategies in the promotion and consumption of this emergent genre of music. The second part of my analysis will focus on the relationship between world music and the expression of a cosmopolitan lifestyle that seeks to increase the social status of the Self by consuming the music of the Other. Finally I will discuss several important moments of anti-essentialist critique and propose a series of listening strategies whose main objective is to complexify the encounter with other peoples’ music by going beyond the simple act of listening.
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