(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[festival] Oslo World Music Festival kicks off from October 30 to November 4, with 27 concerts on the city's stages for underground and underground music. According to the organizers, the festival offers «world music in a broad sense….». The playlist includes Estrella Morente, Mamani Keita, Queendom and Mari Boine.
But what does the term "world music" really mean? And what does that mean as a genre? In a directly translated sense, it is quite meaningless. It means nothing more than music delimited by a boundlessness, and that it comes from somewhere in the world. Some are tempted to use other meaningless expressions – such as "ethnic music", exotic and colorful rhythms – to define this immeasurable meaninglessness. But all people have an ethnicity. And all music comes from a specific place in the world, whether it is Norway, the United States or Senegal.
In the music industry, "world music" has been marketed as "non-western music", inaccessible to the western mainstream. Gradually, shades of "world" have also been created, and we have come across terms such as cool-world, tuff-world and new-world. The term has partly replaced genres such as folk or traditional music, but only for music from the so-called non-western world. Western pop music and funk are not considered "world music", while Brazilian funk or South African pop music does.
It is precisely this that makes the concept, in addition to the undefinable, has been heavily criticized. It is pointed out that the term is defined solely from a Eurocentric perspective. And it provides a political guide to what should be considered high-end art music and what is "easy" and less advanced music. It creates a binding social divide, "the west against the rest", art music vs. the exotic. In NRK's Swedish National Board of Sound October 17, the debate was just about whether the term is ripe for the scrap heap.
Oslo World Music Festival writes that Guinean Ba Cissokos plays "music that trickles down your back, tickles you playfully under your dancing feet and lures you over to Electric Griot Land". But most artists do not like to be marginalized in this way. Youssou N'Dour is the great "world musician", but he believes that the term is worthless before it means that musicians from different parts of the world together perform a musical expression. English MIA has fallen victim to an exotic objectification and calls world music "bullshit". And isn't Sami music still being exotified? Like Mari Boine, who performs at the festival?
Musically speaking, there is nothing that unites the different genres within today's "world music". That is why it is not easy to find an alternative concept. OWMF makes a fabulous effort to create a platform for those artists that are not visible here in Norway. But to better promote the festival's purpose, the goal should be to highlight the diversity of genres that the artists represent: Show the big differences, instead of creating the impression of everything being the same bag. To name a few genres: funana, zouk, high-life, kaiso, kampa, balakadri, mazurak and gwo ka.
Curious about what kind of music this is? I hope next year's festival year can bring out the answer.
