Decolonizing Pop Music: Recognizing Bias in the Global Canon
Colonialism has not disappeared, but has become harder to see — especially within culture. Holger Lund, curator of the Berlin-based label Global Pop First Wave (which specializes in non-Western pop music), finds himself caught in neo- or post-colonial contradictions. This text explores the tensions between global pop music and its local expressions, and argues that true decolonization of this music has become unavoidable.
«When you are decolonized, colonialism is not simply taken away from you. The essential subject of decolonization is a critical view on colonial patterns of thinking, colonial categories, colonial history of knowledge [...].» (Rassool 2017, 150, translation: H.L.)
«As a matter of fact we have a problem with our history and our memory, since these have been written by the conquerors and not by the colonized people. Generations of Cameroonians were told that their ancestors had been the Gauls, although that is completely wrong.» (Obolo 2017, 179, translation: H.L.)
Starting Points: Global Pop and Enduring Colonialism
This essay examines how global pop music history has been constructed and asks what a decolonial approach might change. Two themes will come into focus through Turkish and Brazilian pop music examples. The first starting point is my curatorial role at Global Pop First Wave, a sublabel of Berlin-based Corvo Records. While Corvo Publications handles contemporary experimental work, Global Pop First Wave digs into musical archaeology, re-releasing historical non-Western pop — especially Turkish material. To produce these compilations covering global pop's first wave around the 1960s and 1970s, I work with record dealers, collectors, and researchers from around the world, plus conduct fieldwork in shops, private archives, and online databases. Finding the original LPs is the first step, followed by transcribing sleeve and label information, digitizing and restoring the audio at a Berlin mastering studio, before cutting the new lacquer and shipping to a pressing plant.
Second, this work is motivated by the awareness that colonialism has not ended. Some see this process as continuous and unbroken; others note a neo-colonial surge on the rise today (Mbembe 2015, 229, 244–245). By «colonialism» we might mean active land grabs involving armed forces and multinational agribusiness in Africa, as portrayed in the documentaries Bauer unser (Robert Schabus, Germany 2017) and Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas (Joakim Demmer, Germany 2017). Elsewhere I came across the documentary The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (Rama Thiaw, Senegal 2016), which describes how the European Union works with corrupt, Western-backed African governments to buy fishing rights along Senegal's coast, then resells those licenses to multinational fishing firms, decimating the livelihoods of local fishermen, driving many toward refugee boats bound for Europe.
The Politics of Entanglement
Such neo-colonial problems are found nearly everywhere. Consider the restaurant inside Berlin's House of the World’s Cultures (HKW), an institution that officially promotes critical discourse on colonialism. There I saw a classic first-to-third-world hierarchy operating: a white male director heads the whole building, a restaurateur of Turkish descent manages food service, and many low-paid kitchen assistants of African descent perform the dirty work. Colonial structures there seemed uncomfortably more powerful than the institution's own professed anti-colonial thinking. What explains this gap? And how does this relate to my own record-label work? I feel equally entangled in neo- or post-colonial paradoxes regarding Global Pop First Wave.
The drive to decolonize pop music — to unmoor it from colonial structures of power, thought, and judgment — is coming mainly from writers in the United States and Europe, the key centers of power and decision-making for post- and decolonial debate. Consider Peruvian psychedelic music from the 1970s. Only after Brooklyn-based Barbès Records began reissuing tunes from that time in 2004 did Peruvians themselves start to appreciate the music of their own past. The running rationale? If the Brooklyn hipster calls it cool and puts it out again, it really is cool. So this music now gets played at parties and clubs in Peru by Peruvians, but the canonical paperwork and re-evaluation arrived through a New York scene.
For Turkish pop music from the 1960s and 1970s, the pattern is almost identical. Starting with the «Californian Stones Throw podcast #12, Turkish Funk Mix» (2006) and moving through the Saz Beat compilation series, Vols. 1–3 (2013–2017) on Global Pop First Wave — along with American and Swedish hip hop producers sampling Turkish material in projects like Oh No’s Dr. No’s Oxperiment (2007) or Rikard Skizz Bizzi’s Ur Funktion 2 (2016) — Western involvement sparked a revived appreciation for vintage Turkish pop both abroad and at home. This attention helped found new Turkish-run labels doing archival restoration: Volga Coban’s Arşivplak (meaning «archival records,» founded 2012) and Ercan Demirel’s Ironhand Records (founded 2016), both dedicated to reconstructing a musical legacy that was systematically hidden after Türkiye's 1980 military coup and the subsequent junta. A major milestone came in 2019 with the factory Nova re-opening a vinyl pressing plant inside Türkiye. Similar re-archiving models exist deeper in Africa — such as producer Odion Iruoje’s Nigerian label Odion Livingstone (focused on 1960s–1980s Nigerian pop) and the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes (studying both contemporary and historical Ugandan music).
«There’s a Whole World to Discover»
Let us zoom into the similar process happening with Brazilian pop music. In a recent interview by DJane Mafalda (from Melodies International), DJ Tahira described how he started collecting Brazilian tunes:
I’ve been buying records since the 90s. It’s funny how it all started, as it was actually because of a foreigner. [...] In the beginning of the internet, I was part of an Acid Jazz mailing list that was big in Europe. They found out I was Brazilian and someone asked: «Ah, you’re a Brazilian. [...] I love Brazilian music [...] Do you think you could help me find them?» [...] He made a list with 20 titles and I started looking. At the time there wasn’t really a digging culture here like there was in Europe and the U.S., I found a lot of those records and they got me curious. [...] I looked for these records, found some and I listened to them I was amazed! It was completely different from the Brazilian music I knew from the radio.
I felt silly about what he showed me. That’s when I thought, «There’s a whole world to discover here.» That’s when I started collecting [...]. It was from this moment and it was because of a foreigner. [...] In the 90s, Brazilian radio wasn’t very good. [...] There was no way for you to know unless you were a researcher [...]. Thank god someone from abroad showed me and I followed him. (Mafalda 2018)
This anecdote reveals deep barriers to retrieving Brazilian pop history: a mainstream radio that was trapped in a rut with no historical programming, supplemented by a vanished avenue for education about pop and its past. An almost identical narrative applies to Türkiye — whose military isolation began after 1980 — and to Iran, whose government shutdown pop after the 1978/79 revolution. The Brazilian dictatorship ended in 1985, too late to rescue that stored-up output. Access would have required proactive digging methods of the type that Simon Reynolds (2009) calls «Western retromania,» wedded to a specific record-digging culture and audiophile play-listening. In much of the non-Western world, the old vinyl LPs had been written off as worthless.
The turning point in Tahira’s case came via the stranger from abroad — who exactly pointed him to the same sorts of fusion (Jazz, Soul) that Tahira already loved — ironically broadening him not beyond his preexisting tastes but within them. As Tahira put it, «recognition came from outside» (Slater 2018). Or as Caio Beraldo says: «[...] gringos have been interested in the ‹B side› of Brazilian music, way before Brazilian people, and you have got to respect that in a way» (Slater 2018).
Tahira opens a treasure chest: «a whole world to discover» exists indeed around Brazilian hybrid styles from forty years ago. Brazil began to appear on global vinyl miners’ radar around the year 2000. Re-releases of historical Brazilian pop have poured steadily for about a decade, with ones produced abroad, then increasingly inside Brazil. A critical breakthrough happened in 2016 when the pressing plant Vinil Brasil opened, «a factory made by musicians and music lovers,» allowing locals «staking a claim to their own music once again» (Slater 2018).
The Westernized Approach to Brazilian Music
Trends align into foreseeable grooves. Brazilian 1980s disco-boogie classics have enjoyed steady reissue action for around five years; predictions place Brazilian 1990s hip hop next in line. Currently only scraps have emerged from national scenes nurtured by under-the-radar labels like TNT, Kasakata, and Zimbabwe, and collectives such as Comando D.M.C., Baseado Nas Ruas, DF Movimento, P.MC Poetas de Rua, Duck Jam e Nação Hio Hop, and Geração Rap. The pattern stays the same, though: non-Brazilian collectors are driving demand for these eighties mixtape moments, raising a genre many Brazilians themselves may describe as a lower priority. The same invisible machine moves: Western hobbyists sketch the map and chare for records; locals watch and catch up, altering their sense of what among their own culture is important.
Rodrigo Plaça shows one revealing example of domesticated Western curation. He is a young record dealer in São Paulo with no actual storefront — instead, he ventures from Salvador to Porto Alegre tipping antique racks. Much of his time is logged at the huge Casarão do Vinil (images 1–3). Here, Rodrigo makes livelihood via online sales through Discogs. As he personally says, he studied to develop "Western ears": he purposely attends to what that psychological ear latches onto when evaluating Brazilian native materials. He claims this ear-knowledge is what makes his business possible. Those ears route directly through conversations and deejay appointments made through Brazilian tastemaker-curators — Millos Kaiser (part of the duo Selvagem) who recently handled Onda de Amor (2018) compilation for Soundway Records in London
One writes well sums Onda de Amor promotional message: «[It] covers a decade that has been forgotten and routinely disregarded on its home soil; thick with smooth grooves, active sequences, herring-bone lines (glistening), bouncy synthesis, bass electric [...] For Kaiser a second step performs reintroduction during examination decade near a shift tilt: rides wanting riders.»
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How to Decolonize Pop Music?
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Reynolds again establishes a dismissive tone when he describes non-Western pop as “heavily influenced” by Western pop, following “the template laid down by their British and American arena-touring models as closely as possible.” As a result, he claims, such music “provides a distorted mirror image of Western pop: in other words, a slightly askew, exotic-but-ultimately-familiar version of things we already love.” Eurocentric Devaluation This perspective registers only borrowing and copying from Western originals, thereby devaluing non-Western pop and creating a colonial mode of music historiography where Western pop ranks as first-class and non-Western pop as second-class. That division Another possibility is that the non-Western elements in non-Western pop become an exotic flavor, savored like curry in a curry dish as a pleasant change from domestic cuisine. Nor should we forget the Orientalist projection described by Edward Said, with all its longings and fears mystifying non-Western elements. But the depth of ignorance on this subject is equally striking. Entire continents and their musical productions can be devalued simply by ignoring them. Condor Airlines has done exactly this with its maps of musical styles and profoundly Eurocentric nonsense like: “Depuis les années 1990, la majorité des genres musicaux s’est développé en Europe.” A closer look at Condor’s musical world map shows the United States and Europe as leading continents full of musical invention, while big parts of Asia, for instance, appear to have no musical invention at all or mention only non-styles like Karaoke. The Turning Point So far we have not discussed the actual positions and intentions of non-Western musicians. During the 1960s and 1970s many were genuinely fascinated by the West’s new electrified and electronic pop. Electrified music symbolized the modernity they wanted to join. Yet these musicians did not simply borrow or copy Western music—they hybridized. They combined numerous elements from their own musical cultures (language, lyrics, composition, instruments, rhythms, harmonies, melodies) with Western pop to create something new, a common thread that transcended both their traditional culture and Western pop: hybrid pop. Prime examples of mixing traditional indigenous structures with global Western structures include genres like Anatolian Rock and Ghanaian Highlife. This hybrid pop points to a specifically non-Western modernity, a multi-local position of another modernity. It allows musicians and listeners to participate in and identify with global modernity without losing local, regional, or national identity. Modernities Can Differ The instrument featured on the Saz Beat series from Global Pop First Wave offers another symbolic example. The saz is a traditional Oriental string instrument somewhere between a sitar, a lute, and a guitar. During the 1960s it was electrified by Anatolian rock pioneer Erkin Koray and Arabesk pioneer Orhan Gencebay (Baysal 2018) and then played more like an electric guitar, using distortion and wah-wah effects. Finally, hybrid pop also exists in the Western world itself. Listen to the Spencer Davis Group’s medley “Det war in Schöneberg/Mädel, Ruck Ruck Ruck” (1966). Here Anglo-American rock’n’roll hybridizes with German folk songs. Hybrid pop is not unique to non-Western music, though it is much more common there. Vanishing Point: Combining Local and Global Returning to this text’s title, the decolonization of pop music and the rewriting of global pop history are closely linked: decolonizing non-Western pop requires presenting global pop history as both pop music history and hybrid pop music history. Such a presentation would also need local perspectives—for example, African, Arabic, Turkish, Brazilian, and others. This would involve critically examining specific functions of pop music. During the Nigerian Biafra Civil War (1967–70), military forces encouraged pop music for recruitment and to promote an African modernity (Now-Again Records 2016, Alapatt and Ikonne 2016). Here pop was militant music—but not the military marches one expects to create discipline. Sexualized funk and soul served as official music to attract and seduce young people into the military and keep soldiers fighting. Even in this military context, another modernity emerges. Currently, rewriting global pop history remains a fragmented effort. Surveys of the bigger picture mostly either orient toward structures and general principles while avoiding local details (like Motti Regev’s Pop-Rock Music, 2013) or Who Sets Ethical Standards? This leads to an ambivalent development: on one hand, the musical qualities of historical hybrid pop enter contemporary Western pop primarily through sampling in hip hop and Afro house. On the other hand, a new interest in non-Western pop—in both its countries of origin and Western countries—gives many musicians a second career and revitalizes many styles. Take The New Generation of Turkish Psychedelic (2016): Ercan Demirel, born in Türkiye and raised in Germany and Türkiye, now living in Germany, compiled contemporary Turkish (post-)psychedelic music for fans of historical Turkish psychedelic worldwide. Even an American hip-hop group like the Hispanic Cypress Hill goes global today, as their video “Band of Gypsies” (Cypress Hill 2018) demonstrates, featuring Egyptian electro chaabi rappers Sadat and Alaa Fifty. Most importantly, the globally recognized qualities of hybrid pop lead to a new self-image and identity in the non-Western world and its diaspora: their musical past and culture are no longer seen as inferior but as something that earns recognition and appreciation on a global level. This process is driven—which reveals its ambivalences—by Western and non-Western groups with different aims and intentions. Ercan Demirel’s compilation emerges from a completely different spirit than Cypress Hill’s “Band of Gypsies,” yet both deliver contemporary hybrid pop. Nonetheless, this aspect of revaluation is probably the most important, at least for the decolonization of (non-Western) pop music. It matters even in areas of pop music that present problematic complexity, such as the use of pop as militant music; for example, Nigerian pop developed in quality within an ethically dubious military context. Yet similar complexities and contradictions are nothing new in Western music history—just think of the war-loving The Cooperative Approach Let us return again to Global Pop First Wave and my work for that label. Currently, decolonizing approaches increasingly involve cooperative working structures that include Western and non-Western partners on a preferably equal footing. Tendencies to exclude Western people, especially white ones—like those explicit in the South African web series The Foxy Five—remain the exception. I see the cooperative approach as a model for my future decolonizing work at Global Pop First Wave and for related curatorial and scholarly efforts. At present, along with my partner Cornelia Lund, I am collaborating with Turkish scholar and curator Banu Çiçek Tülü on the project “Hybrid Glamour – Turkish Pop Music Images. The Music and Its Communication Design: Record Covers, Photos & Posters & Ads in Magazines, Cinema Posters, Music Performances in Films & Clips 1960s – early 1980s.” This scholarly-curatorial project includes an extended team with Mona Mahall, Asli Serbest, and a wider Turkish community network involving Murat Meriç, Erbatur Çavuşoğlu, Hilmi Tezgör, and many others. With our independent media art and design platform fluctuating images, Cornelia Lund and I plan to expand our cooperation with African partners like the Senegalese cultural production platform Wakh’Art in Dakar. We are currently developing the exhibition project “Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design,” for which fluctuating images works with the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts and Design) Berlin and Wakh’Art. Nothing is more important to us than mutual exchange to achieve a critical and self-reflexive decolonizing practice. We greatly value continuous dialogue with Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, two Brazilian agents of the international group Decolonizing Design. Their input takes reflection and critique of decolonial discourse and its various interests to the next level. Like any intellectual practice, decolonial thinking itself requires attentive revaluation. How Does Streaming Affect the Future of Music? → footnotes → list of references
mirrors and reinforces colonialism’s wider project of sorting people into first-class Westerners and second-class non-Westerners. It continues the classifying and hierarchizing work of missionaries, as Jean-Marie Teno critically explains in his documentary Le malentendu colonial (Cameroon, France, Germany 2004). Teno demonstrates how this colonial classification project stakes claims and defines positions and evaluations that, predictably, always benefit the superior class while disadvantaging the inferior.
Consider the sleeve of Brahim Izri’s record D’Ifrax-I-N’Ella (1988, image 5). It announces the music inside by juxtaposing modern urban and traditional rural clothing as well as a modern synthesizer with the traditional Algerian mandole. The sleeve promises music that offers both by juxtaposition and amalgamation—a “tradi-modern” music that includes the Algerian past and transfers it into an Algerian modernity.
Listen, for instance, to Cengiz Coskuner’s instrumental “Samsun’un Evleri” (1973) (omzbr 2016), re-released on the compilation Bosporus Bridges Vol. 3 by Berlin label Black Pearl (2019). The tune is based on a Turkish folk song, outfitted with drums and electric bass, and features two electrified sazes—one rhythmic, one lead—both played with warm distortion and a wah-wah pedal in rock style. It includes both electrified urban modernity and Anatolian rural culture, pointing to an electrified rural-urban, different modernity. The electrified saz meant a great deal to musicians back then; they proudly displayed it on sleeves and promo photos, shifting it from an electrified rural modernity to an electrified urban one (images 6 and 7), and even to an electrified super-modern modernity by inventing double- and triple-neck electric saz-guitars (images 8 and 9).
The compilation series The Trip. Psychedelic Music from the Hippie Trail Pts. 1–4 (2015–2016) on Global Pop First Wave provides further examples of different hybrid pop concepts and different mix ratios within hybrid constructions. The farther the Hippie Trail extends from Europe into Asia, the higher the proportion of non-Western, indigenous elements in the music. This results not only from curatorial choices but from changes in the music itself, although exceptions exist. Another form of hybrid pop construction exists as well—not as amalgamation but as coexistence of the starting ingredients, as in Niama Makalou et African Soul Band’s Kognokoura Drissa Coulibaly (1980) (TheLasphere 2011). Elements from Malian music sit alongside Afro-American disco-funk like two separate layers, so the same song can be heard as either a traditional Malian piece or an up-to-date disco-funk number.
focus on contemporary phenomena, such as the Bern-based platform Norient.com. Other major attempts include British publication series like Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Global Music Series: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, and Routledge Global Popular Music Series (Horn and Shepherd 2003, Campbell and Wade 2003, Fabbri and Plastino 2013). But I am confident that rewritings of global pop history as both pop music history and hybrid pop history will appear soon. Why? Because so many non-Western pop archaeological labels are expanding globally, supported by important archives for traditional non-Western music such as the Amar Foundation for Arab Music, and the proven musical qualities of original and re-released hybrid pop can no longer be ignored.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his Futurist avant-garde at the turn of the 20th century. The Futurists would have been unfortunate—but delighted—to see their music used as militant music. In any case, do we have the right ethical standards and justified position to judge these aspects outside the Western world when we face similar difficulties within it? Should an African music ethics not be developed and assessed here?
One final point: given that streaming is now the dominant way of hearing music, new questions emerge. “Will our digitally connected music world result in a globally informed pop monoculture, created at the whim of Western streaming companies?” (Pelly 2018, 32) New York–based writer Liz Pelly asks. She notes that streaming services produce a loss of context, leveling historical and contemporary music onto a single plane and erasing geographical differences: music from nowhere/anywhere and timeless/from any time—music from the Non-Places of Marc Augé. Developing a sense of history becomes difficult here. Yet this annihilation of history affects both music and images, cultural production and its perception in general. Music historiography must consider this cultural practice and contend with it—we now have streaming history against music streaming.