Art & Creativity Quote by Joanna Newsom

Joanna Newsom is guarding the integrity of both her own practice and the traditions people sometimes project onto it. Because she plays a plucked string instrument and favors intricate, cyclical patterns, listeners may hear echoes of the West African kora and rush to categorize her work as touched by so-called World Music. She refuses that shorthand. The term itself is a marketing umbrella that flattens vast, distinct lineages into a single exoticized shelf label, and her remark pushes back against that flattening. Superficial resemblance between instruments does not equal shared methods, histories, or intentions.

Her emphasis on how she works and feels points to the fact that sound springs from embodied technique and cultural context, not just timbre or texture. A kora player draws on griot traditions, repertories, and polyrhythmic habits shaped across generations; Newsom’s harp writing grows from different tunings, classical and folk idioms, and a lyric-driven compositional approach rooted in her own background. Even if a listener perceives similar cascading figures, the underlying logics diverge. She is not cherry-picking foreign signifiers to flavor her music, nor claiming kinship she has not earned.

There is also an ethics embedded here. By refusing to frame her songs as infused with World Music, she avoids a tokenistic gesture that would reduce African music to a set of borrowable textures. The acknowledgment that her practice yields a different sound honors the kora’s specificity rather than treating it as a plug-in for eclecticism. At the same time, she stakes out artistic independence from the genre tags critics use to domesticate what they find unfamiliar.

The statement is thus a double boundary: a resistance to being misfiled under a catchall category, and a commitment to let her music arise from her own craft and sensibility. It is respect through differentiation, not distance through denial.