World Pop

Every so often, some earnest preservationist or another gets worried that the relentless march of Western popular music will eventually annihilate the unique, idiosyncratic musics of the world. And while artists from the Beatles to Michael Jackson have certainly cast long shadows over the globe, musicians outside the U.S. and U.K. have long been in the practice of creating their own pop universes, blending the local and the global, the traditional and the commercial. World pop attempts to encompass all the worlds of popular music, from Mexican punk to Balkan brass-fueled club beats, from Senegalese hip-hop to Chinese indie rock. This category also includes indigenous popular traditions, like Indonesian dangdut and jaipongan, West African highlife, Brazilian baile funk, and Egyptian shaabi, not to mention the many "world" pop genres that have influenced American and British popular music like Cuban dance music, Indian bhangra and Jamaican dub. And then there's "world beat," essentially a marketing term from the 1980s that nonetheless helped spawn some of the biggest global pop stars of the last few decades, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Manu Chao, Youssou N'Dour and Zap Mama.