ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of several major Western popular music genres that have influenced popular world music around the globe, and reviews fundamental music terminology that will be used throughout the book. By Western, I mean mainstream popular music genres emanating from the United States and Europe (primarily Great Britain). Although this emphasis reveals my cultural bias, the American popular music industry is unarguably the spawning ground for many of the most influential modern musical creations throughout the twentieth century to today. Jazz, rock, and hip-hop music, creations of American musicians, are powerful forces that have fueled the development of many popular world-music genres, such as reggae, salsa, kwaito, bhangra, dangdut, and many others, as we will discover.
