World

"World" (or "World Music") is a classification often used in music marketing to easily discriminate different music from the anglophone genres. The term can thus encompass - at its broadest - everything from traditional African drumming and the extended qawwali singing of Pakistan's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan through to rock'n'roll from Italy or Brazil. Indeed, as even the United States has its own traditional music styles (both those of the native population and those of more recent arrivals), the description is often used to refer to an even broader collection of music than that previously outlined. One music journalist has referred to "world music" as "someone else's pop music". Those who use of this classification display a breathtaking ignorance of the variety of music through history and around the world. In recent years, music marketing has gradually moved away from the all-encompassing "world" style, a move made partly in response to the growing popularity of Jamaican reggae and other readily-identifiable former denizens of the "world" racks.