As many other forms of classification, musical genres describe and group music. Through genre, people tend to describe what a certain musical item shares with others and also what differentiates it. In fact, musical genre has become the most popular music descriptor in the context of large musical databases and electronic music distribution (Aucouturier, 2003: 1). The object of this paper is the category “world music”. Although music genres such as jazz, rock, hip-hop normally describe musical features of the work of a band or a specific song (tempo, pitch and rhythm); the main feature that recordings grouped under this category seem to share is their politics of representation (Feld, 2000: 148). Regardless of its musical characteristics, most non-western popular music has been lumped into the general category of “world music”.
What is the desire on my part to make its politics of representation intelligible? Why make a close reading of a music genre? World Music is not only an explicit example of the cultural arena in which unequal power relations are embedded but also in which I found the possibility to explore the politics and ethics of music. In this essay I address the significance of “world music” through the concept of cosmopolitanism. As many theorists have noted, World Music has increasingly been used as a vehicle for the cosmopolitan project (Roberts, 2008). However, as I will further explain in this essay, while initially it served as a catalyst for mobilization around transnational political issues, the commercialization of global music has made this music a mass-cultural phenomenon that raises problems of cultural, economic and ethical politics symptomatic of larger processes within the global cultural economy.
