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// Louise Gray
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The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music
World music is a slippery beast to contain in book form, let alone a two-word epithet. It’s the equivalent of trying to lasso an eel – or, as David Toop beautifully describes in his introduction to Louise Gray’s new book, it’s a genre that “draws an outline around a ghost”. So, over the course of 160 pages, Gray doesn’t attempt to give the reader chapter and verse on the planet’s non-English language music. Comprehensiveness isn’t attempted; this is not the place to find out how the last five Salif Keita records compare to each other. Instead the notion of ‘world music’ itself is dissected, that artifice originally constructed for modest commercial reasons but now recognised by record-buyers from Berlin to Bahrain.
In outlining the exotic allure of these other-worldly sounds on the Western ear, Gray asks some pertinent questions about authenticity and consumption. But, happy to undertake the occasional detour, this is never a dry, neo-academic journey. We shift from subject to subject without the gears juddering; in the course of a handful of pages, Gray’s perceptive grasp of shared experiences smoothly takes us from Tuvan throat singers to Steve Reich via Alan Lomax, Robert Johnson and Tinariwen. Contrivance is avoided.
But while investigating the western world’s fascination with the rest of the planet’s sounds, the presentation of this music in its original context is far from neglected – the passage on how music was used to mobilize Hutu extremism during the Rwandan massacres of 1994 places it a world away from the browser racks of European and American record stores. But, for all the limitations and irritations that the advent of ‘world music’ may have produced, Gray’s conclusion is uplifting – when that loose committee of record industry activists voted for the ‘world music’ name back in 1987, “it was not to supply sound as a commodity but, perhaps, to extend the idea of what humanity and its creations actually are”.
The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music by Louise Gray
Published by New Internationalist Publications
Nige Tassell
book
// ALSO
- 80s World Music Classics
- Higher Ground
- Chucho’s Steps
- New Awards for World Music
- Babel Med Music, 24-26 March
- WOMAD at the TOWER OF LONDON 19 & 20 September 2009 - win tickets!
- Darbar Festival, Darbar | Arts Culture Heritage – Book
- Tunng with Tinariwen, Tunng with Tinariwen
- World Audio Foundation, Sacred sounds
// ALL LOUISE GRAY'S REVIEWS
The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music
05/08/2009
// BIBLIOGRAPHY
The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music (Book)
New Internationalist Publications -2009
>> Read review
// LINKS
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