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Originally Posted by Hawksun
but we gotta learn to live with some music journalist's misnomer that got accepted as a whole genre descriptor.
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heh! Nice.
I like Poda's point. It's all ethnic in some way. If you're from rural Tennessee and playing a banjo, it's bluegrass, but it's also ethnic in that it springs forth from an ethnic group's history. With that said, once a genre is established, anyone else out there with that sound falls into it no matter where they are from. Keith Urban is a great example. He's Australian and is on top of the country music world. Why is he "country?" Because he is purposefully playing a certain established sound. Therefore it's not ethnic or world. But if an Australian record label records native Aboriginal music and releases it, it's ethnic because it IS the music of an ethnic group. Now, as soon as that music becomes the influence of someone like Sting, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, etc., we say something like, "The new so-and-so album is a rich mix of smart pop and progressive rock, laced with world and ethnic music." We say that because it works and is established.
I'm not one for reinventing the wheel, fixing something that isn't broken, or insert-idiom-here when it's not really needed.
Now, as for Clannad, they're definitely world in that there is a pure native music that they are largely channeling. But they are also "new age" or "prog" or "pop" in that they aren't playing a pure form of traditional Celtic music. I mean, Maire Brennan is Enya's older sister, and Enya has the same problem. Is she pop? New age? Prog? World? or all of the above? Thing is, you almost NEVER find a pure form of anything. As has been said before, "The mesh is the mess, baby."