IIn 1987, a group of white British independent label bosses joined forces to invent a new marketing category: world music. They wanted to capitalize on the growing public interest in artists from Bulgaria, the Middle East and across Africa, and were encouraged by the huge success of Paul Simon’s Graceland album the previous year, which combined his New York songwriting with the music of South African artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Their campaign was a huge success, even leading to the introduction of a new category at the Grammys.

But now the term “world music” has become synonymous with a patronizing, even colonial Western mentality of “us and them” towards musicians from the global majority population – the Guardian stopped using the term in 2019, and it did so at the Grammys in 2020.

Joe Boyd was one of those who attended that 1987 meeting. The American record producer, who has led sessions with Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and dozens of other world-renowned artists, shows no remorse. “I understand the complaints, but whatever we call it, it would be seen as colonialist,” he says. “The very fact that this group of white label owners chose the names of these records and put them together in a corner of a record store for people to find would meet the definition of a crime.”

“You can complain about the concept, but not the practical effect,” he adds. “All those musicians would never have had those careers, met those audiences and never got paid. I don’t think it could have been done any other way. It changed people’s lives and the music changed lives. ‘World music’ had flaws – but not for that reason.”

Now 82, Boyd was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard and was a seemingly omnipresent figure in ’60s countercultural music: he made the sound when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and, after moving to London, co-founded the psychedelic nightclub UFO, where Hendrix performed. In addition to his work as a producer (REM was a later client), he was also a label head, tour manager, filmmaker and writer: in 2006 he released White Bicycles, a fascinating memoir of the 1960s scene.

Music from around the world is the subject of the long-awaited and controversial follow-up, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. Named after a lyric from Graceland, the book’s cover praises Brian Eno, Robert Plant and Ry Cooder – but it’s clear that Boyd’s words may well upset fans of dancehall, electronic music or contemporary African pop.

It is not the memoir of his later years that one might expect (although it does contain plenty of personal stories and gossip), but a comprehensive, opinionated history of music, showing how – thanks largely to slavery and the migration of the Roma – the “twin floods” of music from Africa and India interacted with and changed Western music.

Having produced musicians from Africa, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cuba, India and beyond, he is well placed to examine this extraordinary history, which in Boyd’s book ends with the arrival of the drum machine. “I write about music with handmade, personal, man-made rhythms,” he says, acknowledging that his opposition to digitally generated music will not go down well. “Some people will read the book and the steam will come out of their ears. I make no claim to objectivity when it comes to my own taste and the struggle over what people will be listening to in 50 years.”

He speaks from Germany, where he is recording the audiobook. As the printed version is more than 900 pages and 400,000 words, this is no easy task.

He begins with South Africa and Paul Simon, who is portrayed as something of a hero throughout. Boyd covers the Graceland tour – Miriam Makeba apparently gave Ladysmith Black Mambazo the cold shoulder in the face of Xhosa-Zulu tensions – and then returns to the country’s political and musical history, recalling that Zulu choirs were a success in 19th-century London, despite Charles Dickens’ comment that “if we can learn anything from these noble savages, it is what to avoid.”

Cuba and India follow, then Boyd returns to the year 450 and the migrations of the Roma, “which transformed every musical culture they came into contact with.” In Eastern Europe, he delights in listening to the 35-strong Philip Koutev National Folklore Ensemble and the hugely successful Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, and he examines the suppression of traditional music in the Soviet era, comparing the musical protests of angry Russian village women with the authorities’ concern about Pussy Riot. He records the murder of Ukrainian musicians in 1938 as a sign of Soviet determination that Ukraine should not have a culture of its own. “And they still do,” he says.

Elsewhere you’ll find the story of tango star Carlos Gardel, instructions on how to dance the samba, or a thoughtful appreciation of Fela Kuti (with an emphasis on the rhythms of Tony Allen). The chapter on Jamaican music, meanwhile, includes a commentary on dancehall that “sounds like it was put together by someone with a computer and a short, coke-fuelled attention span”. I ask him to elaborate. “The shift from real rhythm to machine rhythm has changed people’s relationship with music somewhat,” he replies. “I can enjoy some tracks that are machine-driven, but they don’t get into my brain through the same door.”

He argues that Paul Simon’s use of rhythms from different cultures “works much better for me than the other way around: ‘Let’s take this melody or this song and put a mid-Atlantic dance beat under it.'” Is he saying that other cultures shouldn’t adopt Western rhythms? “Of course they can! They can do whatever they want. I’m just saying that I find fusions – whether from the West or the Global South – less interesting. Simon has done the opposite and is selling millions of records.”

This brings us back to the controversy over “world music.” (I wasn’t at the meeting where it was invented, as he writes in his book, but I brought many of those present together for a discussion in the Guardian years later.) The problem with the development of the success of “world music” in the late 1980s, argues Boyd, is that “it started with great artists from local cultures who had become popular in their culture – and we loved them. The crowds here in London flocked to hear African artists who were still big stars in their home areas. But when the drum machine came along, there were eventually fewer of those artists.”

Western fans loved traditional works that conveyed the shock of the new in their own countries – such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Bulgarian choirs or Buena Vista Social Club – but in their home countries this music was considered outdated.

He tells the story of Virgínia Rodrigues, a Brazilian “chamber samba” singer who was introduced to him by fellow countryman Caetano Veloso. She became a cult success in the West and Bill Clinton bought 100 copies of her album Sol Negro, but in Brazil “nobody knew about it. Before she could capitalize on all the great publicity, she became disillusioned and the relationship broke up.”

But, he adds, “one of the many points of this book is to put ‘world music’ – that is, everything that happened in the ’80s – into historical context. It’s a slip. A pinprick. Nothing in the ’80s or ’90s compares to Latin dancing in New York in the ’40s or the influence of bossa nova in the early ’60s.” And what about reggae and Bob Marley? “His influence during his lifetime was enormous, but in the ’80s and ’90s he was more nostalgic.”

What about the current situation, now that music of all kinds is accessible to everyone around the world via the Internet, and hip-hop or electronica are influencing traditional music? “My book is not about the current scene,” he says, “and I had to stop somewhere.” That’s why he doesn’t mention established bands like BCUC from South Africa or South Korean representatives of traditional and electronica fusion like Jambinai. As for successful African pop artists like Burna Boy (a contemporary musician who is mentioned), he agrees that they “won an audience that Fela never reached… but the mood is hard and electronic-modern, while the vocals are filled with the Auto-Tune flourishes that dominate modern international vocal performance.”

He admits that his views are passé and that he has been left behind. “One of the tasks of music is to be a club for the younger generation to hit the older generation on the head with – and the younger generation has had success with me.” But he is not completely discouraged. “Young people do things that I don’t want to hear,” he says, but adds that they also love steel bands, the New Orleans second line tradition or Brazilian axé. “That’s the dream!”