TV Adverts and ‘World Music’

Many of today’s television adverts are accompanied by what to many is considered ‘world music’, which is to say that the music promoting the airline/automobile/cruise/getaway in question is identified as non-western. However, this music does not belong to an indigenous or traditional practice in a far-off part of the world. It is instead invented entirely by performing musicians and those working for an advertisement company.

Standard indicators of generic ‘world music’ include choruses of children, and a soaring female vocalist singing nonsensical syllables belonging to a language wholly invented for the purpose of shifting the client’s product. On occasion there’ll be a male singer sometimes accompanied by a chorus – never a children’s chorus, but instead other men. Drums are sometimes there as well, and often the sound of some wooden wind instrument, both supposedly lending a more rudimentary or ‘primitive’ sound.

The first ad featuring similar ‘world music’ to receive mainstream recognition was a 1994 promotion for Delta Airlines. The music, by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, whose previous work spans both rock and classical, proved so popular that it was eventually released as a single. Jenkins’ group, Adiemus, went on to release an album, Songs of Sanctuary, a year later, which topped the classical charts in Britain and went on to sell over 1.5 million copies worldwide.

The success of Adiemus illustrated the business potential of using ‘world music’ in adverts. Companies who look to profit on this initially untapped market, as I’ve already suggested, are usually in the travel and vehicle business. Advertisers look to exploit the growing need for freedom and escape in our society; it’s become fashionable to want to be where you aren’t, and the placeless ambiguity behind such music is instrumental in developing the idea of a world open to everyone. As with Jenkins, their approach is to blend different kinds of music in the broadest possible sense, such as classical or world or new age, in order to emulate, manipulate, and master them.

The result is music that incorporates a vague kind of spirituality or mysticism which takes viewers away from the here and now and toward an exotic elsewhere, which, in keeping with centuries of western perception of other places, is viewed as spiritual, whereas the modern West is not.

All that said, this generic ‘world music’ is empty. The music for these ads is never memorable and makes no sense without the accompanying images, and yet, in the moment, it allows listeners to project their own meanings onto it. The smoothness and affective coolness of the music in these ads is reassuring; if you don’t possess real knowledge of real people making real world music, this musics says that that’s alright. It says that everything is alright. It’s certainly true that none of these tracks emanate from a single tradition, but then, little music does, or ever did.

Matt Fullerton