Breaking the sound barrier

Since the label 'world music' emerged in the Eighties, it has served to confine rather than define, says Tim Cumming

"It has been a long, slow process," says Andy Morgan, the British co-manager of Tinariwen, the axe-wielding desert nomads who have just won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award. You might think that, with his band's star in the ascendant since the release of their two albums - The Radio Tisdas Sessions and Amassakoul - he'd be over the moon. That he isn't is down to the peculiar restraints of the musical genre in which Tinariwen have found success.

"It has been a long, slow process," says Andy Morgan, the British co-manager of Tinariwen, the axe-wielding desert nomads who have just won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award. You might think that, with his band's star in the ascendant since the release of their two albums - The Radio Tisdas Sessions and Amassakoul - he'd be over the moon. That he isn't is down to the peculiar restraints of the musical genre in which Tinariwen have found success.

Last month, they were shaking the soundboards on the African Soul Rebels package tour, with the louche rai star Rachid Taha and the Senegalese rappers Daara J. The editor of Songlines magazine, Simon Broughton, saw them at Shepherds Bush Empire, in west London. "It was a very different crowd from the usual world-music audience," he says. "The tour was put together specifically to break out of what is increasingly seen by some acts as a world-music ghetto."

But did they succeed? Tinariwen have had five-star reviews and sell-out audiences, and won an award that does have a significant effect on exposure, recording and tours - the livelihood of the artists. Yet, having come so far, they remain a niche act screaming for the mainstream audience that their primal, deep-rooted rock'n'roll deserves. They, and Andy Morgan, have found that they can go only so far, and no further. "It's like hitting a glass ceiling," Morgan says, and it's due, he believes, to the constraints that the "world music" label puts on the band.

"The media like to keep the music in its place," he says. "They created that place, they built the ghetto, and they like to keep it in that ghetto. 'World music' was an expedient term when it was invented, but it's odourless and colourless. It defines nothing, really, and because of that, it's a very frustrating ghetto to be in."

"World music", as a term, emerged in the 1980s with the rise of small, independent labels importing music that had never been heard beyond its native shores. Before that, distribution was sporadic, and more in the spirit of the field recording - think Paul Bowles, the novelist, trekking around Morocco with just a Revox recorder and William Burroughs for company.

As the 1980s progressed, collectors became importers, then record producers and label bosses. The rapid growth in the genre's popularity in the Nineties has led to a flood of recordings and new artists of astonishing range. There are increasingly sophisticated and daring collaborations between artists - performers who might be considered "ethnic, authentic, traditional" concoct sophisticated meldings of different musical traditions that are as contemporary and wide-ranging as anything in modern jazz or hip hop.

Souad Massi, the French-Algerian singer, for example, produces perfect, mournful, pop melodies that steal your heart; while the Romanian Gypsy band The Shukar Collective use spoons and barrels along with the latest digital effects for their modern-day ursari, or "bear-handler", music. It's not so much genre-breaking as a parallel universe, vibrating at the edge of an increasingly thin-sounding mainstream.

The emphatically 21st-century mix of styles and approaches among the winners of this year's World Music Awards points to a need to revise how this music is perceived. It's not all tradition anymore. The likes of Lhasa and Amparanoia - winners of the Americas and European awards - write fabulously original songs whose influences resonate with the familiar base of our own pop traditions, to which they add their own, and the result is new and unexpected. Yet because they don't sing in English, they don't have the exposure of, say, Björk (also a nominee in this year's awards). Their presence is limited to the margins.

"We're the only country in the world that doesn't play non-English records on daytime radio," Morgan notes, with exasperation. "Programmers think that they'll lose their audience, that people will complain, that they'll get pressure from above. The gatekeepers are scared, and something needs to happen to make the programmers less scared." But how do you get the gatekeepers of, say, Radio 2, to open the doors to world music? "You need someone to say, 'It's OK, guys.' And in this climate, that person has to be famous, a white, mass-appeal pop star. And it's got to be sustained over six months or so."

Damon Albarn did it briefly with Mali Music, but the ripples of such one-off projects haven't broken any barriers upstairs. The glass ceiling is still firmly in place. "The 'world music' label has been fantastically good for getting bands over," says Simon Broughton, "but all labels confine as well as define." He's talking about a genre that encompasses a five-hour concert of Indian classical vocal music at Queen Elizabeth Hall, performed last week to a full house, and the African Soul Rebels at Shepherds Bush Empire, who have their feet planted firmly in the rebel-rock tradition.

Nick Gold, producer of the Buena Vista project and of the Malian guitar legend Ali Farka Toure, agrees with Broughton. "As much as it opened things up in the beginning, it's a shackle, too, because everyone's trying to define it, and "it" doesn't exist. The term, and some of its associations, can put people off."

There have been breakthroughs, of course, exceptions that prove the rule that world music should stay next to country, jazz, folk, classical and the soundtracks section. The Eighties saw Afropop storm the charts worldwide; in the Nineties, the Buena Vista project became the genre's biggest and bestselling phenomenon. "Buena Vista attracted more of a nostalgic audience," says Broughton, one that has little in common with the Shepherds Bush crowd. "There's no doubt that the audience is expanding, though," he adds. "Every week, there's a major world-music concert on."

More recently, the Portuguese fado singer Mariza has had worldwide success, drawing huge audiences, and in Europe, the major labels have tried to steer her towards mainstream pop material. It's a move that she fiercely resists; she is an artist who is careful with her sources, a quality shared by many artists under the world-music umbrella.

In that sense, world music is more artist-led than market-driven, as is Western rock and pop at its most energetic and vital. All the more reason for the gatekeepers to see sense and remove the barriers in their head. It is only music, after all.