If a comparison can be made between the early 20th-century ethnomusicology (Bartók, Kodály, Villa-Lobos...) and the timidity of today’s researchers, we can observe a reluctance to venture into the urban jungle and its new musical forms, especially those exploring different paths from the technological dominance of DJs.
It is evident that academic rigor has taken precedence over empirical research. In other words, there is a tendency to conflate moralism with intellectual laziness, leading to the perception of urban music in their own countries as poor, naïve, and without a future—music made by young people, pop music, etc. Some consider it corrupted by commercial interests, while others believe it lacks social visibility.
This type of music remains outside the scope of study for most contemporary musicologists and ethnomusicologists, who are more inclined to work on "fossils," ancient manuscripts, or tribal music from Africa, ideally from populations that have yet to "wear jeans" or discover electricity.
The risk of being a pure “ethnist” is to find oneself, as depicted in a drawing by Gary Larson, confronted with the adaptation of peoples to the "civilized" world, to the point where they must hide in order to maintain an illusion of authenticity for Westerners.
Today, this avoidance of the "improbable and ephemeral" goes against the true scientific spirit, as if the sense of adventure had vanished from the academic scene—except for paleontologists. It seems that immersion in local culture is only considered valid when the subject of study is folkloric, as reassuring as tribal music or ancient repertoires.
The fundamental question, therefore, is to determine what truly constitutes ethnic music, how to define it, and what obstacles are deemed insurmountable in the eyes of modern ethnomusicologists.
Some hypotheses:
a) Disdain for urban music (seen as lacking a research problem)
b) Inability to frame the subject of study within a defined timeframe
c) Difficulty in establishing statistics due to the entropic process and the vast number of new creations, which would require new methodological models
d) Impossibility of detailing creative diversity within a formal framework due to the repetition of harmonic patterns and adaptation to media diffusion modes
e) Inversion of research priorities (“nothing is greater than the smallest”)