Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa by Gavin Steingo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa by Gavin Steingo Suzanne Wint Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa. By Gavin Steingo. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. [xx, 307 p. ISBN 9780226362403 (cloth), $90; ISBN 9780226362540 (paperback), $30; 9780226362687 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, references, index. Kwaito is frequently defined as a South African version of other popular genres—South African hip-hop or South African house. In his book Kwaito's Promise, Gavin Steingo explains why neither label is accurate and suggests that it is more productive to consider kwaito not as a genre but rather as an aesthetic way of thinking. Steingo's approach is at once deeply theoretical and deeply ethnographic, drawing heavily on the work of philosopher Jacques Rancière. His deft incorporation of the two approaches is the reason this book is the recipient of the 2017 Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. According to Steingo, kwaito is not a form of "escapism" that critics are quick to denounce (p. 9). Rather, he asserts that kwaito is a way to generate multiple sensory realities, and through this multiplicity, effect futures other than those currently predicted for most South Africans in the postapartheid era. His stated theoretical aim is to "reinvigorate a politics of aesthetics" (p. viii), and he does so by invoking Rancière's notion of decoupling knowledge from ideology. He argues for seeing musical autonomy as a way to double reality rather than as an illusion that hides reality (p. xi). Following the preface and acknowledgements are brief yet instructive explanatory sections on languages (specifically, tsotsitaal and Zulu) and on the language of racial designations in the postapartheid South African context. In chapter 1, "The Struggle of Freedom," Steingo asserts that the contemporary field of music studies is based upon two assumptions: first, that there is no musical aesthetic judgment that can be decoupled from social and cultural evaluation and the contest over power; and second, knowledge is either true or false. True knowledge liberates, and false knowledge oppresses. Steingo argues, after Rancière, for two knowledges that are each accompanied by ignorance. In his scheme, the liberatory/oppressive binary can be flipped, such that there is a knowledge that represses and an ignorance that liberates. Kwaito produces multiple sensory realities that liberate the Sowetans with whom Steingo worked from their oppressive economic realities. "The Experience of the Outside" (chap. 2) provides an excellent history of kwaito and its relationship to genres produced in the United States. Chapter 3, "Platform, or The Miracle of the [End Page 685] Ordinary," details ways in which commercial kwaito is collected and distributed into the world. Steingo calls these "platforms"—performance contexts (labels, radio stations, television programs) that are at the same time "experimental arrangements of sensory perception" (p. 59). Through platforms, Steingo examines gendered divisions of labor and issues of gender identity in kwaito. He also expands upon the creation of multiple sensory realities, using the term "aesthetic undecidability" (p. 88). Chapters 4 and 5 focus on noncommercial kwaito and are heavily ethnographic. "Immobility, Obduracy, and Experimentalism in Soweto" (chap. 4) considers music circulation within Soweto through the lens of technical breakdown and precarity, whereas most explorations of music circulation assume ubiquity, availability, and lack of friction—in other words, unimpeded circulation. Apartheid-era urban planning limits mobility within the township, organizing both space and time for music making. Steingo embraces friction through an aesthetic obduracy, showing examples of how breakdown informs creativity in kwaito. Internal hard drives are extricated from machines and loaned out with indeterminate routes back to the original owner. Obduracy generates what the author calls an "aesthetics of propinquity" (p. 121), or working with the equipment and people—and even the computer glitches and corrupted files—that are nearby. "Acoustic Assemblages and Forms of Life" (chap. 5) widens in geography to the larger Johannesburg metropolitan area in order to consider strategies Sowetans deploy in interacting with centers of power. Steingo employs Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier's idea of the acoustic assemblage to explain the ways that Sowetans engage with various "outsides" (p. 125...