Experiments in sound: generating sonic landscapes in online spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe democratic possibilities of a new public sphere created by communication technologies have been widely celebrated. Online technologies have created new spaces for individuals to facilitate encounters with and understanding of popular music. Across East Africa, online space as a medium to present popular music has been eagerly embraced by musicians, fans and cultural intermediaries. However, the social, cultural and financial resources required to convene a public for online space are unevenly distributed, and online spaces are frequently discarded, abandoned and deserted. These emergent and abandoned spaces offer us an alternative archive of imaginings, possibilities and potentiality in cultural life. Using the example of the Tanzanian hip hop blog Bongo Boom Bap, this article explores how, using online technologies, the blog's creator is able to generate a distinctly Tanzanian, pan-African, transnational hip hop space. I trace the origins of the blog to contestations over the direction of Tanzanian hip hop which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s and explore how these are revisited and reimagined through online space. The blog ultimately seeks to generate ‘authentic’ hip hop production offline and constructs this new genre through the configuration of relationships between multiple musical temporalities, localities and traditions.