Jennie and Doechii / Captured from "ExtraL" music video

At the end of the 20th century, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne wrote a provocative piece titled, “I Hate World Music.” To be clear, he wasn’t talking about the genre (because world music isn’t a genre), he was talking about the music industry’s habit of lumping everything that wasn’t western into one pseudomusical catchall term.

For Byrne, the term world music operated as a containment strategy, a way of neutralizing difference by rendering it consumable -- exotic, yet ultimately irrelevant. It wasn’t just a label but an ideological mechanism, one that quarantines the non-Western Other into a realm of aestheticized safeness: colorful, curious, and ultimately subordinate to the hegemonic center of Anglo-American pop. In its very structure, world music affirmed Western dominance by defining everything that is not us as them — a vast, undifferentiated field of sonic otherness, conveniently compartmentalized for easy consumption without disruption.

This is how cultural hegemony sustains itself—not through outright exclusion, but through the careful orchestration of visibility. Music from outside the Anglo-Western orbit is allowed into the marketplace, but only under strict conditions: it must be authentic (a term whose definition is controlled by the West), it must conform to pre-existing fantasies of the primitive or the spiritual, and crucially, it must not look too much like us. But if the Other is no longer exotic, no longer quaint, then what remains to justify the West’s continued dominance?

In an effort to reflect changing sensibilities, both The Grammys and The Oscars eventually changed the names of their categories: The former from best world music album category to best global music album; the latter from Best Foreign Language Film category to Best International Feature Film. Many laughed at these changes as they didn’t really........

© The Korea Times