World Music

How wonderful that vast swathes of human music-making have been gathered under the anemic category of "world music."

Actually it's worse than that. "World music" is a miscellaneous category, a repository of the otherwise unclassifiable. It's as if world music isn't even music because it falls outside the eternal categories of rap, alt-rock, and country-western.

American culture has achieved a Ptolemaic position of power: the world orbits us. I believe this is what the Marxists call "hegemony." Dance, world, dance!