Soon after the Gipsy Kings, an affable bunch of musicians who had settled (mostly) in the south of France released their mega-hit ‘Bamboleo’ in the late 1980s, a rumour spread through like wild fire through the wild of music writers. The Kings, it was said, had rushed down to the music stores with their royalty cheques. Synthesizers, drum machines and many other pluggable items had been snapped up. Well, it was 1988 and a whole new dance music, constructed on the first wave of cheap digital equipment, was coming through. But naturally, the purists – for whom the Kings would always be associated with rumba catalana and a feel-good flamenco – were outraged, in much the same way as Bob Dylan fans were incensed when their man went electric.

We’re told we live in an information society: if this is the case, we, as listeners, can no longer get away with pleading ignorance about what we have on our iPods. This also goes for the neglect of the musicians who make the sounds

Whether or not there was any truth in the rumour is not the point. This periodic outbreak of bad temper was indicative of the extent to which notions of authenticity are embedded in music and how music – and especially world music – is seen and fantasised about. When I began to write The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music, I faced an immediate quandary. I didn’t want to write an encyclopaedia of world music (there are masses of books out there, written by experts of all hues, that serve this need); I didn’t want to go down a musicological route. Thinking about things, I realised that what did interest me was something that hadn’t been touched on in much detail by previous writers: the invention of world music; its attraction to listeners from other cultures and linguistic groups; the fantasies and the expectations we project onto it.

So this is what the No-Nonsense Guide tries to do: ask questions. In this, it very much follows in the tradition of New Internationalist itself – a monthly magazine with a truly global interest and one for which I have the great privilege of writing the music column. By taking a thematic approach to a selection of musical traditions – fado, rembetika, blues and ecstatic musics among them – it endeavours to pinpoint their development within wider social and political contexts. Music’s role as a motivator – and not always for the best reasons – is considered in the form of Simon Bikindi, the man who was once called Rwanda’s Michael Jackson and who is now serving a long jail sentence for incitement to commit genocide.

We’re told we live in an information society: if this is the case, we, as listeners, can no longer get away with pleading ignorance about what we have on our iPods. This also goes for the neglect of the musicians who make the sounds. World music has, like anything else, its fads and two of the current flavours are very much Balkan/Gypsy sounds and the neo-proto blues of bands like Tinariwan and Etran Finatawa. The latter two bands come from war-torn areas of Africa and are creating something out of chaos; the former two inhabit realms of poverty, and in the case of Europe’s Gypsies, a higher level of abuse and privation than at any time since the Second World War.

We inhabit a world of sound and so do the musicians we listen to. To take the music and to disregard the musician is to impoverish our understanding of either.

© Louise Gray

The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music by Louise Gray (£7.99) is published by New Internationalist: www.newint.org