Talking Heads David Byrne Hates World Music..Or Does He?

DAVID BYRNE: Music is shaped by all these different forces. [MUSIC] DAVID BYRNE: I wrote a thing, an article called "I Hate World Music" and it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek title because at that time I had a record label that put out a lot of what would be called world music, music from Brazil and Cuba and Japan and different places. So obviously, I like music from a lot of different places. But at the same time, when I wrote that, the term "world music" was becoming common and I felt like this term was basically a catch all phrase for basically like exotic sounding restaurant music. Background music that you could put on and ignore and you didn't have to take the artist very seriously. It didn't really affect your life. It just provided a pleasant exotic background. And I was kind of saying let's get rid of that idea. Let's focus on the kind of…what are to me the kind of positive aspects of what was happening at that time and continues to happen, which is that uh…let's see..North American audiences, we'll talk about them in particular, who are in general pretty insular. In general, they're not very receptive to non-English language stuff. But there's a few artists from outside of that world are…made some inroads and have been accepted as being artists. So people know who certain people are. To me that's major. That kind of cracks the door open and allows people to kind of change their thinking because then they don't think of everything from Brazil or wherever as being oh it's all just a woman dancing with bananas on her head. They realize there's stuff..there's certain artists in there that have made an emotional connection to them and whose music they really like. So they realize, yes, there's nuances. There's other artists out there. It's a world that's as deep as the English language pop-music world and that's a…that's a pretty big thing. I don't know if it…I would like to think that it has repercussions. That it…makes people understand another…another people a little bit better, that it maybe lessens our inherent racism. I would like to think that it has all these knock-on effects, but I'm not sure if that's true. DAVID BYRNE: I'm David Byrne and you're watching EPIPHANY on THNKR. [MUSIC]