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Genre Guide 2000 · top-level style

World/Folk

The term "world music" was first used by the recording industry in the late 1980s to provide a broad umbrella that covered a new genre combining traditional from widely disparate parts of the world with Western popular music. The impetus for establishing such a category was the success of the Graceland album recorded by the American pop artist Paul Simon and the South African group "Ladysmith Black Mambazo." The definition has since been expanded beyond the purely popular and commercial realm to include all types of music that are either non-Western or combine Western and non-Western elements. Before the adoption of the term "world music" by the recording industry, the term was already used by ethnomusicologists (scholars who study music from an anthropological point of view) as a positive replacement of negative or pejorative terms, such as "non-Western" or "primitive." The explosion of interest in world music has been driven by technological developments. The advent of broadcast radio, and later (from 1966) the widespread availability of the audiocassette tape made the reproduction and circulation of all kinds of music much easier. World music is a category that is related in many ways to the older designation of folk or traditional music. The folk category, however, was originally invented in an earlier era to describe the European situation.

All World/Folk genres