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World Popular Music

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World popular music is a broad category that includes many different urban-centered, mass-reproduced, and stylistically heterogeneous styles and types. A small sampling of these genres include bhangara, a form of dance club music pioneered by Pakistani musicians in London, England; African guitar-band music, performed in Africa, New York City, and Paris, France; the theme songs of romantic and martial arts films produced in Asia; and the recordings of contemporary musicians from Bulgaria, which blend American jazz and rock with traditional wedding music. The relatively recent discovery of non-Western styles by popular Western musicians such as David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, and Paul Simon might leave the impression that urban-centered, mass-reproduced popular music outside of Western culture is a new phenomenon. In fact, the recording industry was active in Asia and Latin America before the 20th century, and local popular styles were commercially recorded in Africa by the 1920s.

Although the influence of American popular music, supported by the multibillion-dollar transnational music industry, has in some cases contributed to the decline of traditional musics, there is also a rich history of cross-fertilization between popular styles. In the late 19th century the Cuban habanera influenced the development of American ragtime; the Argentine tango gained worldwide popularity during the 1910s, initiating a craze for Latin ballroom dancing in Paris, London, and New York City; recordings of Hawaiian guitar music, country-and-western music, and ballroom dance orchestras arrived in the port towns of Africa by the 1920s; and the Cuban rumba became popular around the world in the 1930s. In many cases the inclusion of imported elements in American popular music has been linked with stereotypes of the exotic. For example, many ballroom dance orchestras in the 1920s performed “Oriental foxtrots,” arrangements that owed more to Latin American music than to Asian music.

Today the global music industry is dominated by a small number of transnational entertainment corporations, with offices and agents in major cities around the world. One of the most popular forms of music internationally is Indian film music, which is produced in studios in New Delhi and Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and is popular in the Middle East and Africa as well as in Asia. The late Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, whose recording career began in the 1920s, is still popular throughout the Arabic-speaking world. African popular music includes a number of distinctive regional styles, including the juju music of Nigerian bandleader King Sunny Ade; central African soukous, a blend of indigenous songs and dance rhythms with Afro-Cuban music; and South African isicathamiya, the Zulu choral singing style performed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The rich variety of popular music found throughout the world continually provides the global music industry with new music trends.

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