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Owlor 🦋@Owlor@meow.social (2026-09-21 17:20:23)
World music is a funny genre in many ways. Like, every sub-genre of it is hyper-local as it's based on the traditional forms of music from a specific part of the world, but taken together it's a global genre consisting of basically anything that isn't north american or european pop music or made in that mode.

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elilla&, bara no duelista@elilla@transmom.love (2026-09-21 18:10:00)
@Owlor it's the musical equivalent to how the USA version of Cannes movie awards classifies movies as like, "best live action film", "best animation", "best documentary" etc., and then "best foreign movie".  as if we foreigns didn't have the sophistication to make stuff that could be classified in live action, animation etc.

or the equivalent of the "ethnic" shelf in supermarkets in Europe and how I can never know whether I'll find laoganma or sriracha in "spices" or "ethnic".  instant ramen is "noodles" but udon is "ethnic".  tortillas are "bread and bakery" unless they're made of corn then they're "ethnic", and so on.

I have listened to "world music" for a long time now and I feel like ethnomusicology at least has become way more accessible these days, and the Internet has at least helped people to have access to musical theories/tunings/structures besides European.  of course true decolonisation only will happen when local musicians are allowed to be the protagonists and when the category "ethno" disappears altogether, and European musical theory becomes just one sub-topic in a more general musical theory that applies to all music, the way that linguistics distinguishes what is a phenomenon of language as a human capability vs. specific to this or that language family.  I feel like things are slowly improving in that direction, if too slowly to my tastes…