Crossing Cultural Boundaries
A cross-fertilization of musical styles produces a new and diverse sound

During the 1980s the boundary between mainstream and marginal music became ever fuzzier, and pressures to expand the global market for American popular music and create new alternative genres and audiences within the American market grew ever stronger. One result of these processes was the emergence of a category called world music. The term was adopted in the late 1980s by independent record label owners and concert promoters, entering the marketplace as a replacement for longer-standing categories such as “traditional music,” “international music,” and “ethnic music.”

What, then, is world music? In a strictly musical sense, it is a pseudo-genre, taking into its sweep styles as diverse as African urban pop (juju), Pakistani dance club music (bhangara), Australian Aboriginal rock music (the band Yothu Yindi), and even the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, whose 1987 release Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices) reached Number 165 on the Billboard album chart in 1988. Bestselling albums on Billboard’s world music chart have featured the Celtic group Clannad, Spanish flamenco music, Tibetan Buddhist chant, and diverse collaborations between American and English rock stars and musicians from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

Back to Africa, Crossing Cultural Boundaries
Contemporary African sounds enrich American popular music

By the 1990s collaborations between American and foreign musicians had become more common, spurred on the one hand by folk and alternative music fans’ search for a broader range of musical experiences, and on the other by the globalization of the music industry. Two interesting examples of this sort of transnational collaboration are the album Talking Timbuktu, which won the Grammy Award for Best World Music Recording in 1994, and a sampler album inspired by the film Dead Man Walking, which reached Number 61 on the album charts in 1996.

South African cornetist Hugh Masekela performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2004.Talking Timbuktu was produced by the singer and guitarist Ry Cooder, whose career as a session musician and bandleader had already encompassed a wide array of styles, including blues, reggae, Tex-Mex music, urban folk song, Hawaiian guitar music, Dixieland jazz, and gospel music. The sound and sensibility of Talking Timbuktu are derived from the music of Ali Farka Touré, a guitarist and traditional praise singer (griot) from the West African nation of Mali.

Encountering a track like “Diaraby,” an American listener is likely to be struck by the music’s close affinities with the blues. This is no accident. To begin with, the blues styles of Mississippi, Texas, and other southern states were strongly influenced by the traditions of African slaves, many of whom came precisely from the Sahel region of West Africa, homeland of Ali Farka Touré’s people, the Bambara. The high-pitched, almost wailing sound of Touré’s singing; the percussive guitar patterns; and the use of song as a medium for social and personal commentary – all of these features represent an evolution of centuries- old links between the West African griot tradition and the blues created by black musicians in America’s Deep South. It turns out that Touré’s style was directly influenced by American blues musicians such as John Lee Hooker, whose records he discovered after his career was established in Africa.

Talking Timbuktu features contributions by the blues guitarist and fiddler Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and various prominent session musicians. The result hews close to its African roots, with the American musicians playing in support of Touré. The lyric of the song is itself reminiscent of the bittersweet emotion of some American blues:

What is wrong my love? It is you
I love
Your mother has told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
Your friends have told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
Your father has told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
What is wrong my love? It is you
I love.
Do not be angry, do not cry, do
not be sad because of love.

The sound and sensibility of “Diaraby” provide additional evidence of the deep links between African and American music. This is not music functioning as a universal language, but a conversation between two dialects of a complexly unified Afro-Atlantic musical language.

The Qawwali Influence
Sufi Muslim mystical singing shapes world music

The track “The Face of Love” is a different sort of collaboration, featuring the lead singer for the Seattle-based alternative rock band Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, and the great Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and produced by Ry Cooder. Khan was a leading performer of qawwali, a genre of mystical singing practiced by Sufi Muslims in Pakistan and India. Qawwali singing is accompanied by a double-headed drum called the dholak and a portable keyboard instrument called the harmonium, which creates a continuous drone under the singing. In traditional settings the lead singer alternates stanzas of traditional poetic texts with spectacular and elaborate melodic improvisations, in an attempt to spiritually arouse his listeners and move them into emotional proximity with the Divine.

 
Pearl Jam leader Eddie Vedder has collaborated with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.During the 1990s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan became the first qawwali artist to command a large international following, owing to his performances at the annual WOMAD festivals curated by the rock star Peter Gabriel. Khan began to experiment with nontraditional instruments and to work with musicians outside the qawwali tradition, leading some critics to charge that the music had moved away from its spiritual roots. “All these albums are experiments,” Khan told the interviewer Ken Hunt in 1993. “There are some people who do not understand at all but just like my voice. I add new lyrics and modern instruments to attract the audience. This has been very successful.”

The 1996 film Dead Man Walking – the story of a nun’s attempt to redeem the soul of a convicted murderer on the verge of execution – was the first to foreground Khan’s contributions. Many reviews of Dead Man Walking stressed the contribution of Khan’s voice to the haunting, mystical, and spiritual atmosphere of the film. The song “The Face of Love” is based on a simple melody, sung first by Khan with lyrics in the Urdu language, and then with English lyrics by Pearl Jam’s lead singer Eddie Vedder:

Jeena kaisa Pyar bina [What is life without love] –
Is Duniya Mein Aaye ho to [Now that you have come to this world] (2x)
Ek Duje se pyar karo [Love each other, one another]
Look in the eyes of the face of love
Look in her eyes, for there is peace
No, nothing dies within pure light
Only one hour of this pure love
To last a life of 30 years
Only one hour, so calm and dark

This is not an example of music’s functioning as a universal language, for most members of the film’s American audience neither understood the words that Khan sang nor possessed any knowledge of the centuries-long history of Sufi mystical traditions. Nonetheless, it could be argued that this is a case where the well-meaning effort of artists to reach across cultural and musical boundaries does produce something like an aesthetic communion, a common purpose embodied in musical texture and poetry.

Khan’s appearance on the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking led to his being signed by the indie label American Recordings, managed by Rick Rubin, formerly the mastermind behind the rappers Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys. The American music industry’s market positioning of world music as yet another variant of alternative music is indicated by that label’s roster of artists, which included not only Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan but also the “death metal” band Slayer, the rap artist Sir MixA-Lot, and the country music icon Johnny Cash.