Joe Boyd: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, some of my friends will argue that what is called world music — it’s a bad name, but you know what I mean — that maybe it peaked between the 1960s and 1990s. That the initial impetus of commercialization gave a lot of people market access or the ability to buy a guitar, but at some point, it becomes over-commercialized, and we’ve exhausted or mined out the sources of creativity in other countries, and that today is less interesting. Do you agree or disagree? I would try and change the question a little bit. I think the time that you’re talking about — 1960s through the ’90s — was definitely a time when . . . You could go back to the 1930s, a time when urbanization happened in a lot of previously un-urban countries. When urbanization happens anywhere in the world — from the Mississippi Delta going to Chicago, from the Cuban cane fields going to Havana, from the countryside coming into Leopoldville, which became Kinshasa — the same thing happens. It’s no different. This is not the so-called developing world as it was once called. It’s no different from America or England or anywhere else. The same process happens. Music became modernized when it became urbanized. I would say that the so-called world music movement that began in the ’80s, which was, in my view, a response to a vacuum or a decline in the kind of music that many music fans, music buffs, collectors had once loved about blues, about jazz, about folk music, and about rock, was no longer quite so available within the Western culture. People began looking and realizing that a lot of those same qualities were available in African music, Latin music, Eastern European music, and people began discovering what great music there was out there. The term world music — I don’t think it’s such a bad term. It was a term applied not to the music, but to an audience in Western, Northern Europe and North America that was looking for the same customer. A customer going into a record store looking for a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan record was a prime candidate to buy a Susana Baca record, a Peruvian singer on David Burns label, or a Flamenco record, or a Scottish piping record. These customers were more interested in what was going on outside the borders of Anglo-American culture than what was inside those borders. Independent record labels just said, “Let’s put those records all together in a corner of the record store so people can find that stuff.” It turned into something that then had people. . . It was such a startlingly successful marketing tactic that it became a thing. There were concert series. There were review sections in newspapers. There were all kinds of things. Like anything that gets popular, you’re going to have pushback from people who don’t like it. But I would say to people who complain about the term, are you complaining about the term but you like the idea of a wealthy Western audience buying tickets and giving, essentially, money to the great artists from cultures from far away? Or do you dislike that whole idea? Or do you just dislike the term world music? Which do you dislike? That would be my question to anyone complaining about it. Then we can have two different discussions about following that choice. Now, you’ve heard more world music than just about anyone. Do you at current margins feel that you’re no longer very surprised? Or do you come across fresh styles all the time?…

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