Setting the Scene

Part I examines the world music industry from the points of view of European and American industry personnel (e.g., booking agents, record labels personnel, tour managers). Chapter 1 contextualizes the world music industry in the larger music and culture industries. Since its birth in 1987, world music has been a vague category. It has encompassed an enormous variety of music: traditional and folk musics, newly composed traditional musics, and vintage and contemporary popular musics. What, then, is “world music”? Where did it come from? After providing a historical overview of world music through its emergence as a genre category in the 1980s and its growth in the ’90s, the chapter examines how culture industries have, in collaboration with consumers, developed a market for, and expectations of, ethnic “others” in Europe and North America.

Postlude

The Postlude examines how musicians, industry personnel, and audiences today reflect on the history of the industry and its future. New technologies and platforms offer exciting new tools for participating in the genre culture and for addressing the issues of (mis)representation and power asymmetries that world music has been grappling with for the last thirty years. New world music 2.0 actors are redefining world music and rejecting the label altogether. However, they also confront the same challenges as their predecessors. While they denounce “old” world music, power asymmetries, self-righteous attitudes, and colonialist associations, they too find themselves negotiating which sounds to record, how to sell them, and what values and identities these musics carry with them. This chapter argues that those working in world music 1.0 and 2.0 should speak with one another—collaborate—in order to productively negotiate these issues in the context of a changing genre culture.

Experiencing Pleasure

This chapter explores how audiences experience these musics and why they are drawn to them. The chapter shows how politics and pleasure intertwine for audiences at performances. Audiences find pleasure in “exotic” sounds and in the politics these musics allow them to express and experience. Festivals and concert halls offer fleeting spaces in which audiences express and experience their aesthetic and political imaginations in pleasurable ways. They create new dance moves, meet Greenpeace volunteers, and listen to musicians promote African children’s charities. Audiences’ experiences of pleasure, unconstrained by (yet made possible by) Western culture and politics, is paramount as they develop a particular kind of connoisseurship and love of world music in which the depth of their fandom does not emerge from profound knowledge of a band but rather from a commitment to the cultural and political world they see on stage and experience off stage.

Frames

Part III examines who world music audiences are and what draws them to Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism. This chapter sets the scene by offering an ethnography of world music performance venues in Europe and North America. Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism have performed at Bonaroo, Jazz à Marciac, and WOMAD. They have shared venues with Prince and fun., classic and avant-garde jazz, and Nigerian funk. Venues experiment with how performers can fit into and expand their market niche and image (e.g., cutting edge, worldly, charitable) as they look to attract the most (and right kind of) audiences. The chapter argues that heterogeneous performance frames do not just help redefine the world music genre culture. They offer a path to the label’s destruction—and the music’s reconstruction as a more mainstream genre culture.

The Art of Representing the Other

This chapter explores how industry personnel respond to audience and industry expectations by examining the negotiations behind the production of world music. The chapter looks behind and underneath world music products to analyze, not just the effects of representational decisions, but also how people make these decisions—how they negotiate the dynamics of representational and interpretive distortion. Industry personnel work with musicians and audiences to develop products that are authentic and sellable. They play with and push against markers of authenticity that intersect and parallel each other on axes of locality and globality, liveness and mediation, marginality and mainstream, purity and hybridity. Authenticity occupies different positions on these axes depending on musicians’, industry actors’, and audiences’ expectations. As they negotiate this web of expectations, industry personnel reinforce and contest the discourses of alterity, essentialist stereotypes, and unequal power dynamics that continue to be so problematic in the world music industry.

Musicians and the Industry

This chapter shows how musicians translate their musics and cultures for European and North American audiences. Acting as businesspeople and artists, musicians work with industry personnel’s and audiences’ expectations to build their images, personae, and musics in ways that are satisfying for themselves and appealing to foreign audiences. The chapter shows how these musicians are historically aware cosmopolitan artists who continually (re)position themselves as they mediate personal identities, career goals, audience (mis)understandings, and the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial nationalism to create valuable musical experiences and products for themselves and for their European and American audiences. They (re)create ideas about their cultures, Africa, and the African diaspora as they use and push against discourses of alterity and universality.

Cuban Music Is African Music

Part II examines how AfroCubism and Orchestra Baobab musicians negotiate geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries as they mix musics across the black Atlantic and bring their music into the word music industry. In so doing, this section shows how musicians’ experiences are intertwined with the commodities they create, and that many of us consume (and critique). This chapter explores how musicians creatively combine African and Cuban musics. In bringing these musics together, musicians (re)negotiate and (re)imagine cultural, historical, political, and economic ties between Africans, Cubans, Europeans, and Americans. Their ideas conflict, diverge, and intersect as they strategically combine musics and social meanings, idealistically connect peoples and musics across the Atlantic, and pragmatically address the limits of musical mixing and collaboration.

Introduction—Collaborations

The Introduction provides historical and theoretical background for the book. The chapter offers an historical overview of Cuban music in West Africa, and explains how histories and discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, Africa, the black Atlantic, and black internationalism intersect. Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences draw on these histories as they collaborate with each other to create international commodities. The chapter argues that all of these actors see their labor and its products quite differently as they move between and combine local and global markets, African and Afro-diasporic sounds, traditional and hybrid musics, and histories of slavery, colonialism, and independence. Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences work with and push against one another as they continually (re)position themselves in the world music industry.