The first round of ARIA awards were handed out earlier this week during the event’s nominations ceremony. Among the winners were Tame Impala chief Kevin Parker, who scored two wins, and singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett.

The initial round of nominations, known as the Fine Arts and Artisan Awards, were not without a few raised eyebrows. As Tone Deaf reported, many found it curious that Melbourne psych band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard were nominated for Best Jazz Album.

However, the Australian Record Industry Association’s decision to hand the award for Best World Music Album to Indigenous musician Gurrumul for his release The Gospel Album has garnered criticism from some.

“Gurrumul won an ARIA for best ‘world music’. If that’s not a reflection of current race relations in this country then I don’t know what is,” wrote on user on Twitter, while others took issue with the very term ‘world music’.

“Winning an ARIA for best world album is Gurrumul. How do you define ‘world music’ if it includes an Aboriginal Australian artist?” asked another social media commenter. It’s a sentiment echoed by Gurrumul’s camp.

“The only thing that Gurrumul does differently from every mainstream artist is that he sings in an Australian language. Australian languages are not a foreign language,” Gurrumul’s longtime collaborator and producer Michael Hohnen told The Guardian.

“It’s a shame when you sing in an Australian language that you get labelled ‘ethnic’,” he says. According to Hohnen, ARIA define the world music category as including Indigenous and “cross-cultural music”.

Thus, it’s not ARIA’s decision to bestow Gurrumul with the award for Best World Music Album that’s the cause for ire, but the lack of opportunity artists such as the former Yothu Yindi member have outside the tag.

According to an ARIA spokeswoman, labels are free to apply for whichever category they feel is relevant to their artist and Indigenous performers “are and have been nominated across a range of categories”.

But Hohnen says labels don’t have as much choice in the matter as one would think. He says Gurrumul and his family want to share his music as broadly as possible and an ARIA win would surely assist in that.

As a result, Gurrumul and his label made the decision to enter a category that would give them their best chance for a win. However, Hohnen says the world music tag and the branding perception that comes with it is problematic.

“The world music scene can be quite restrictive,” Hohnen, who runs the Northern Territory-based record label Skinnyfish, says. “It can be a bigger hurdle to jump over, a perception that’s difficult to shake.”

“Once I found what the other musicians in that category sounded like, I didn’t think the label applied to us.” Hohnen says world music is dominated by African traditions, a style of music that bares little resemblance to Gurrumul’s work.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne savaged the ‘world music’ catch-all in a memorable 1999 New York Times article, calling it a “name for a bin in the record store signifying stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere else in the store”.

Still, Hohnen says Gurrumul was thrilled to win the ARIA for Best World Music Album. Belonging to such a restrictive category hasn’t diminished his excitement, but “it’s great if he could be able to compete in the mainstream”, he says.

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