Page 33 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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role of ‘alternative’ culture, between dominance and resistance, that
is, the worldwide acceptance of a cultural object called ‘world music’.
The concept originated in 1987 when a group of music producers
decided to assign this name to a commercial label for a plethora of
musical products that would not fit into mainstream genres and styles:
Western classical/contemporary, jazz, rock, folk, pop, etc. (Martin
2002: 411). The success of world music in the international market of
entertainment sound, video and film products propelled it as an emblem
of ‘alternative’ musical communication, thereby covering not only the
eclectic materials it is made of, but also genuine types of production,
dissemination and consumption of these items. World music was
reappropriated by a broad idealistic young generation who found it
appropriate for supporting the ideals of international brotherhood and
solidarity across the barriers of space, languages, cultures and politics.
Within the dominant music industry, it stands as an undercurrent of
resistance to globalization, the response to a shared crave for emotion,
popular roots, ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’—‘the dream of a world in
which pleasure and the Good would be reconciled, through the charm of
rhythms ripened in the sun, in harmony with nature, and safeguarded
in the latest technological circuits’ (ibid.: 414, 415).

This aspiration for harmony is inseparable from the mist of exoticism
haloing World Music, and it prompts us to review its implications.
Exoticism, in the first run, designates anything that comes from a
foreign place, but it quickly acquires the connotations of strangeness,
‘superficial picturesque’… or ‘thrill caused by danger’…. According to
Tzvetan Todorov, this phenomenon displays three intimately linked
dimensions: the valorisation of the other, criticism of the self and the
society it belongs to, the fantasy of an ideal based on the image of a
romantically constructed other. In brief, exoticism equates ‘a praise
in misknowledge’ [Todorov 1989: 298]. Thus, exoticism amounts
to reconstructing the Other so that his/her difference becomes
appealing and attractive. To this effect, the difference needs to be
worked out, polished, rendered tolerable and consumable. Exoticism
consists of making the difference familiar and in the same time
preserving a distance that arises interest, titillates imagination and
blows off the dream. (Martin 2002: 415–16) 7