WORLD MUSIC:

We are planning to integrate more world music into the Mi5 recordings roster.

For more information on Rai Music, World and some of the artists we anticipate working with see Dawn Elder Management: www.demgmt.com

Why World Music, and why now? For many in the industry, World Music often conjures a exotic mix of "Western" pop music with so-called “indigenous” styles, created by “foreigners.” But this is too narrow a perception of World Music, one that blocks the view of an expanding audience, expanding commercial opportunities, and most certainly an expanding artistic medium through which a commercially sizeable---and desirable-- audience can express its own artistic, cultural, and even political aspirations.

Here are some facts to consider about World Music:

1. Some of World Music’s biggest stars (Khaled, Cheb Mami, Souad Massi) are citizens of the most advanced Western nations, including Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Through Europe alone, World Music stars sell millions of records in the mainstream markets and sell out in the largest venues; due to the large audiences, the mainstream media (BBC, ITN, Chanel Cinq, RAI, Guardian, London Times, Le Monde, etc.,) report on all manner of World Music and the comings and goings of its artists. World Music continues to make significant inroads in American markets, particularly among young, affluent, well-educated “merged” markets (White suburban and urban multicultural groups, bot male and female), a prized group due to their disposable income, discriminating sense of taste, and their loyalty to “prestige” product. “World Music’s audiences---young, affluent, well-educated “merged” markets---represent what numerous popular cultural observers (i.e. David Brock) and noted academics (i.e. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Boudrilliard) designate as those with cultural capital, or more commonly known as TREND SETTERS.

Additionally, there is an historical analogy to consider when weighing the expanding presence of World Music: in terms of its national origins and its subject matter (modernity, Liberal aesthetics and politics as a challenge to conformist, consumerist, and conservative culture) one should note that World Music mirrors the impact and indeed dynamic of an earlier World art form: New Wave Cinema.

In scope and verve, World Music is cinematic in its exploration of themes, characters, emotions, and conflicts that stand in sharp contrast to the dominant but increasingly irrelevant forms of popular music the industry
continues to depend upon to diminishing commercial and aesthetic results (i.e. Rap, Boy bands, “Alternative,” Metal, mainstream country, etc.). Unlike the aforementioned dominant and largely static genres of pop, World
Music does not conform to extolling consumerism (“Blink, Blink”), nor contrived rebellion, nor shopworn promises of domesticity and patriotism.

By contrast, World Music artists (fill in) celebrate change; explore national, cultural, ethnic, gender and even religious identities; address social injustice and political strife. World Music is alive to and engages
with the complex realities of the Post-Modern world, and it celebrates it as no dominant pop music genre dares to do.

Most importantly, World Music artists, by their very diverse backgrounds and styles, create a new inclusive SENSE OF COMMUNITY, as did earlier masters, be they Truffaut, Fellini, Cassavettes--- or Dylan, Marley, the Beatles, Motown, Hendrix, and Wonder.

Keep in mind that in the beginning of the 1960s revolution, the young,well-educated, affluent American audiences first sought out cinematic masters and the work of the great World Cinema as the art form around which these young Americans could come together in a community of dissent against what they saw as the increasingly oppressive, banal, and failing dominant society around them. The art form gave these Americans of cultural capital (Trend Setters) a new vocabulary, a new way of engaging the world, and the concepts by which to change it. The influence of this World art empowered the Beats and the Beatles, addressed the various Civil Rights movements, and gave a new vocabulary to American artists, such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and even Steven Spielberg.

World Music provides these same possibilities via new artists, new visions,and a new music for a new generation. World Music is thus neither limitedby its “foreign” origins nor its “exotic” allure. It is at once vibrant,inclusive, challenging, and it is increasingly the sound of things to come.

It is the music of, for, and about our World. Its time is now.