The Inequalities of Classification

Go into the iTunes Music Store on your MacBook or iPhone and type in a search for "World Music." Here are the first six albums that come up within that organized genre: Irish Drinking Songs, Moulin Rouge Songs of France, Sicilian Folk Festival, Songs of Israel, Paraguayan Harp Vol. 1, and Little Singers of Tokyo. I don't think you have to be a music scholar to hear the difference between an 'Irish drinking song' like "Biddy Mulligan" and "Kisha-Poppo", the Japanese child choir choral.

I have written on the taxonomy of music for BTR before, and this week being 'Globalization & Culture Week' presents the perfect opportunity to re-hatch the topic. Understanding there is an innate part of the human psyche that has each one of us subconsciously seek ways to organize items and thoughts in our head as to better understand their components, I still ask the question; "How necessary is this practice?" When you go to visit a friend living in a new town and they take you out to a place you have never been before, before getting ready you ask the question, "What kind of place is it?" In this scenario, the question serves as part of a greater purpose--"what should I wear?" Therefore the attempt to predetermine whether the place is a restaurant, English pub, sports bar, or full on nightclub actually plays a role in related decision-making. The point to be drawn here is that the organization of an object can serve a valuable purpose and thus not all practices of taxonomy are moot.

Music is not as concrete however, and when dealing with the abstract, the idea of organization under rubric becomes a tougher concept to sell. If anything, it can or should be linked to 'mood.' For example, when you get comfortable on your couch at the end of a week and flip on Netflix, the categorization of films in the Netflix library most likely assists you in determining which film you want to watch by forcing you to ask yourself, "What am I in the mood for?" Even still, the programmers at Netflix take a little too much liberty with their film-buff lexicon, offering genres like "Independent Romantic-Comedy Heist Film with a Twist," or my personal favorite, "Movies You'll Like." How is this a qualified genre when Netflix doesn't even know what mood I am in?

Record companies originally began to organize their product in categories so their customers could more easily navigate about the store in search of items they intended on purchasing. The point must not be lost on the reader here - the creation and development of organizing music by "type" was a practice in customer service and increasing sales revenue and had very little to do with sound. If someone walks into a music store looking for John Coltrane, they would be more likely to purchase an Ornette Coleman album that is filed next to Coltrane in the "C" column of the Jazz Section than if the entire store was merely alphabetized and next to Coltrane sat Coldplay, Edwyn Collins, Jason Collett and Sam Cooke. The business model was simple: learn the customer's musical taste, steer him/her down the desired aisle like cattle, and sell more records.

(Interluding anecdote: Some of you may find it interesting to learn that before Record Shops, music was sold in the furniture section of large department stores because radio/turntables were seen as pieces of furniture and the records were sold alongside them as add-ons to the purchasing of a new home stereo by furniture salesmen. I can guarantee, there was no "music-by-genre" then.)

Many artists who get categorized under the "World Music" heading find it ever more offensive than I have already discussed. According to an online BBC News article, Nitin Sawhney, a UK artist who was named winner of the Boundary-Crossing award at BBC Radio 3's inaugural Awards for World Music in 2002, is "less willing to accommodate the whims of retailers, media and shoppers."

Sawhney applies race-theory to the categorization of World Music: "The phrase creates a 'racist' category ... that lets people sideline music by artists who are not in the same style or from the same background as the majority," Shawney told the BBC. "It's always flattering and complimentary to get awards ... [b]ut at the same time I don't understand the concept of judgementalism [sic] in the arts. I always think of the arts as being about personal, emotional expression. I tend to think that music is the place that doesn't have barriers or prejudices, but it's amazing how people try to force their barriers or prejudices onto music."

While I personally would not go as far as to apply theories of racism to the categorization of music, I do empathize with Sawhney's ulterior motive--that being, to do away with concepts of "judgment in the arts" altogether. How can one major grouping like "rock" or "jazz" have so many subtypes that everything from Icelandic prayer to Aboriginal didgeridoo be classified as 'World Music?'

I prefer the laid back, disinterested approach of Spanish-French guitarist Manu Chao who says it is a "lazy label," and UK-born African singer Susheela Raman who calls the idea of a World Music genre "ridiculous." Regardless of what I, or any other artists think on the matter, "the term 'world music' has already become well established" in the industry. "There are magazines and festivals dedicated to it, and the music business has used it as a category to measure sales since 1998." Furthermore, some "2.5 million albums from the world category were sold in the UK that year."

It is great that sales are up in the category. Without doubt, the explosion of file sharing and online purchasing of music has made just about any piece of music, from anywhere in the world, accessible to all people of the earth. It may be too early to tell, but one can argue that the more we move into online music sharing as the norm and get away from large record labels trying to find a mathematical method that easily track sales in order to improve revenue streams, the closer we will be to getting rid of the concept of genre completely. And then what would we be left with?

Sound. Collaborative, harmonic, cooperative sound.