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The story opens by citing the 1981 David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (reissued in 2006 by Nonesuch) as “an album cheekily designed to imitate the exoticism of so-called ‘world’ music.” Where to begin? The term “world music” didn’t come into currency until 1983, after a consortium of DJs and label folks met in England to come up with a way to market records that had no clear home in Western music stores–they found it frustrating that African records were routinely shoved in the reggae section, for example. Given that “world music” hadn’t yet acquired its present popular meaning in 1981, much less its connotation of shallow exoticism, how could Byrne and Eno have set out specifically to tweak it?
Klein goes on to provide short profiles of six acts that are supposedly “new faces of world music,” and it’s here that he really goes off the rails. Of course he includes New York’s Vampire Weekend (pictured), who play a sold-out show at the Metro on Sunday and whose inexplicable popularity is clearly the engine for this asinine trend piece. I’m not necessarily down on the band–all I can blame them for is being mediocre and dubbing their indie pop “Upper West Side Soweto”–but the alleged African elements in their sound have allowed plenty of rock critics to demonstrate how little they know about music from that part of the world. Robert Christgau wrote a thorough analysis of the situation a couple of months ago, so I won’t go into detail here–except to point out that Klein is only slightly less than 100 percent wrong when he claims Vampire Weekend use “Congolese dance rhythms.” They do ineptly ape the bubbly, crystalline guitar sound of Congolese rumba on a few songs, and on a few others they bang on a conga. Otherwise there’s nothing remotely African about their music.
Anthony Ortega, Afternoon in Paris (Hatology)Christine Sehnaoui, Solo (Olof Bright)Hecker, Electronic Music Soundtrack for “The Disenchanted Forest x 1001” by Angela Bulloch (Editions Mego)Vierergruppe Gschlößl, I Take Everything (Jazzwerkstatt)Skyphone, Fabula (Rune Grammofon)
