A Name Decided by Show of Hands
At 7:00 pm on Monday, 29 June 1987, roughly twenty-five label owners, journalists, and promoters filed into the Empress of Russia, a pub on St John Street in Islington, London. The meeting had been organized by Roger Armstrong and Ben Mandelson of GlobeStyle Records. Their problem was practical: British record shops had no idea where to stock releases from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East. Without a unified section, retailers refused to carry the music in depth.
The attendees included Nick Gold of World Circuit, Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, Charlie Gillett of Oval Records, and journalists from Folk Roots and Blues & Soul. They debated alternatives: “world beat,” “tropical,” prefixing “hot” to existing labels. “World music” won on a show of hands. Each participant chipped in toward a fund of 3,500 pounds. Mandelson assembled a promotional cassette sold through NME. The term was meant to be temporary. It never went away.
Before the Label
The music the 1987 meeting tried to sell had been crossing borders for decades. Ravi Shankar performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, a year after George Harrison asked to become his student at the London home of Mrs. Angadi of the Asian Music Circle. The partnership pulled Indian classical music into Western pop consciousness and spawned raga rock, audible on the Beatles’ Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In Egypt, Umm Kulthum had been the dominant voice of the Arab world since the 1930s. Her Thursday night radio concerts, broadcast from Cairo, reached listeners from Iraq to Morocco. Performances stretched a single song past an hour, built on improvised vocal ornamentations (tarab) negotiated in real time between singer, orchestra, and audience. When she died in 1975, four million people lined the streets of Cairo for her funeral.
In Lagos, Fela Kuti had been fusing Yoruba rhythms, highlife, jazz, and James Brown’s funk into Afrobeat since the late 1960s. He studied trumpet at Trinity College of Music in London, then returned to Nigeria and founded the Kalakuta Republic, a commune in the Mushin neighborhood of Lagos. His 1977 album Zombie, depicting soldiers as mindless automatons, provoked an attack by roughly 1,000 troops who burned Kalakuta to the ground. Fela’s 77-year-old mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a second-floor window; she died the following year. Fela responded by delivering her coffin to the gates of the Dodan Barracks and recording Coffin for Head of State.
Graceland and Its Fallout
In 1985, Paul Simon heard a cassette of South African township jive called mbaqanga. He flew to Johannesburg with engineer Roy Halee and booked sessions at Ovation Recording Studio, working with guitarist Ray Phiri, the Boyoyo Boys, and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, led by Joseph Shabalala. Simon paid the musicians $200 an hour when the Johannesburg rate was $15.
Graceland, released in August 1986, sold over six million copies within a year. It also drew sustained criticism. The United Nations had imposed a cultural boycott on apartheid South Africa, and Simon had recorded there without ANC clearance. Artists United Against Apartheid condemned him. Billy Bragg and Jerry Dammers accused Simon of undermining solidarity. South African collaborators countered that the album gave them an international audience otherwise out of reach. The argument was never resolved; it became a template for every subsequent debate about cross-cultural exchange.
WOMAD and Real World
Peter Gabriel co-founded WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) in 1982. The first festival, near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, featured over 60 acts from more than 20 countries. It was a cultural success and a financial disaster. The NME headline: “WOMAD: Brilliant but Bust.” Gabriel reunited with his former Genesis bandmates for a one-off concert to cover the debt.
By 1987, Gabriel had converted Box Mill in the village of Box, Wiltshire, into Real World Studios. The site had served as a sawmill, a semolina factory, and a girls’ school. The main recording space, the Big Room, placed a 72-channel SSL console facing windows overlooking a millpond, eliminating the barriers between musicians and engineers.
Real World Records became a conduit for artists who might never have reached Western audiences. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Pakistani qawwali singer, first performed for a non-Asian audience at WOMAD in 1985. He signed with Real World in 1989 and recorded Mustt Mustt (1990) with producer Michael Brook, blending 700-year-old Sufi devotional singing with ambient electronics. The album reintroduced Pakistani youth to qawwali and gave Khan an audience from Tokyo to Toronto.
The Problem With the Bin
The commercial infrastructure worked. By the mid-1990s, “world music” sections appeared in every major record chain. But the category’s logic was colonial by structure: it lumped Malian kora music, Indonesian gamelan, and Bulgarian choral singing into one bin, unified only by distance from London and New York. Youssou N’Dour, whose album Set (1990) topped Billboard’s World Albums chart, found the label reductive: his music was mbalax, rooted in Wolof griot traditions and the sabar drum, not a subcategory of someone else’s worldview. Every proposed alternative (“global pop,” “world beat,” “World Music 2.0”) has reproduced the same problem.
Sounds That Traveled Anyway
Regardless of what the section was called, the music moved. In Havana, in March 1996, Ry Cooder arrived at EGREM Studios for a planned Malian-Cuban collaboration. The Malian artists never showed; their visas had been denied. Cooder, Nick Gold, and Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez improvised, gathering semi-retired local musicians and recording fourteen tracks in six days. Buena Vista Social Club (1997) sold millions and introduced Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, and Omara Portuondo to a global audience.
In Mali, Ali Farka Toure, a farmer from Niafunke on the Niger River, made music that sounded like Delta blues, though he insisted the influence ran from Africa to America. His 1994 collaboration with Cooder, Talking Timbuktu, recorded at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles, won the Grammy for Best World Music Album. Toure returned to Niafunke to farm rice and run for mayor.
In Cape Verde, Cesaria Evora sang morna in her native Creole, performing in bars in Mindelo since she was sixteen. She retired when the money ran out and did not record internationally until 1988, at 47. She performed barefoot on the world’s largest stages and won a Grammy in 2004. In the Sahara, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a Tuareg refugee whose father was executed during Mali’s 1963 rebellion, built his first guitar from a tin can. His group Tinariwen became the first Tuareg ensemble to use electric guitars, fusing assouf vocal traditions with sounds from bootlegged Hendrix and Dire Straits cassettes.
Essential Listening
- Fela Kuti & Afrika 70 – Zombie (1977)
- Ravi Shankar – Three Ragas (1956)
- Youssou N’Dour – Set (1990)
- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook – Mustt Mustt (1990)
- Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder – Talking Timbuktu (1994)
- Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club (1997)
- Paul Simon – Graceland (1986)
- Cesaria Evora – Miss Perfumado (1992)
- Oumou Sangare – Moussolou (1989)
- Tinariwen – The Radio Tisdas Sessions (2001)
- King Sunny Ade – Juju Music (1982)
- Ladysmith Black Mambazo – Shaka Zulu (1987)