Musical genre incorporating diverse styles from Africa, eastern
Europe, Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and
nonmainstream Western folk sources. The term was first coined
largely in response to the sudden increase of recordings in non-
English languages that were released in Great Britain and the
United States in the 1980s, but by the early 1990s world music
had become a bona fide musical genre and counterpoint to the
increasingly synthetic sounds of Western pop music. Initially,
African popular music and world music were virtually synonymous,
and the genre's biggest stars included the Nigerians King Sunny
Ade and Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the Senegalese Youssou N'Dour.
Moreover, one of its earliest advocates was the Cameroonian-born
Frenchman Francis Bebey. By the 21st century world music
encompassed everything from Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan and the pop-flamenco of the French group the Gipsy Kings to
ambient-global projects that merged so-called ethnic voice
samples with state-of-the