by Meriadoc
I was thinking recently about one of my favorite articles, David Byrne's I hate world music:
In my experience, the use of the term world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one's own life. It's a way of relegating this "thing" into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us. Maybe that's why I hate the term. It groups everything and anything that isn't "us" into "them." This grouping is a convenient way of not seeing a band or artist as a creative individual, albeit from a culture somewhat different from that seen on American television. It's a label for anything at all that is not sung in English or anything that doesn't fit into the Anglo-Western pop universe this year. (So Ricky Martin is allowed out of the world music ghetto — for a while, anyway. Next year, who knows? If he makes a plena record, he might have to go back to the salsa bins and the Latin mom and pop record stores.) It's a none too subtle way of reasserting the hegemony of Western pop culture. It ghettoizes most of the world's music. A bold and audacious move, White Man!
And I've read this article a fe times sine 2004, but recently I realized that when I go to the record store, I shop almost exclusively in the 'world music' section. I was recently in Arcata, CA where I went to two great records stores with a good selection, and I was in Delaware with _refugee_ after 4th of July at a great shop called Rainbow Records, and all three times I left with at least three records, none recorded in the U.S.
So, I want to know what all of your favorite non-American records are, across the entire range of genres, from Mali guitar rock to Brazilian folk, to Finnish tradition songs, to whatever you have.