In 1987, a group of white British independent label bosses came together to invent a new marketing category: world music. Eager to promote the growing public interest in artists from Bulgaria, the Middle East and across Africa, they were encouraged by the massive success of Paul Simon’s Graceland album the previous year, which had spliced his New York songcraft with the music of South African artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Their campaign was a massive success, and even led to the introduction of a new category at the Grammys.
But “world music” is now seen as evoking a patronising, even colonial “us and them” mindset from the west towards global majority musicians – the Guardian stopped using the term in 2019, the Grammys in 2020.
