World music: an album from every country in the world
Like most people, I haven’t been able to travel much this year. A feeling of repressed wanderlust, combined with boredom and an interest in discovering new music led me to do a quick online search for albums that did not fit into what I usually listen to.
I do think I have a wide taste in music. I listen to opera, jazz, folk, rock — I’m quite open to anything, yet I still find that most of the music I listen to comes from either Western Europe or America and that most of it is sung in just a handful of languages (of course English being the predominant one). Having studied and played classical music for most of my life, I am quite aware of the canon most of us are following considering what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in music, and what is worthy of praise and what is not. It is not always easy to break away from that.
My internet search was to find an album from every country in the world. I did find many websites about “world music”, and it seems fairly easy to find music from specific countries. Yet I thought it would be an interesting challenge to listen to one album per week from every country, in alphabetical order. I couldn't find a website that had just that — a list of countries and an album for each one — so here I am.
To make things ‘easy’ I am going to follow the list of the 193 members of the United Nations, starting with Afghanistan and ending with Zimbabwe. An album per week means it will take me well over three years to go through all those countries.
The criteria to pick ‘the album’ of that country is, well, quite random. I want to avoid selecting the most sold album of that place — most countries don’t have those lists, or they aren’t reliable — , and I’m not sure that would be a good representation of the country anyway. In the measure that’s possible, I will try to find an artist from that country, who works there, and who performs — if the music contains lyrics — in one of the predominant languages of that place.
If I happened to finish the list of countries and I still had the energy to keep going, I would look for albums from distinctive regions/cultures/languages that may have been overlooked before (such as Wales, Catalonia, or Hawaii, to give you an example).
It will still be difficult to make some choices — George Gershwin or Kendrick Lamar? Benjamin Britten or The Clash? — but the decision shouldn’t be read as a political one. I guess this will be almost unavoidable in post-colonial countries, but I’ll try my best. If you are expecting a Pitchfork media style review of each album, look elsewhere. I just have a limited amount of time — and I definitely want to spend more time listening to the album than writing about it. I just plan to jot down some thoughts, and maybe inspire the few who will read this to listen to something new.
