What’s hot in world music

Next time you enter a major music store try and find its ‘world music’ section. Don’t give up too quickly, or at least, not before you reach the dark back corner of the shop. Since ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown came up with the term in the early 1960s, it has become harder and harder to define just what exactly ‘world music’ is; perhaps it is music hyper-aware legend and founder of the Luaka Bop music label David Byrne who best described the current state of affairs in an article for the New York Times: ‘The term is a catch-all that commonly refers to non-Western music of any and all sorts, popular music, traditional music and even classical music,’ he wrote.