Reviewed by: Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 12: Genres: Sub-Saharan Africa ed. by David Horn et al Krystal Klingenberg Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 12: Genres: Sub-Saharan Africa. Edited by David Horn, John Shepherd, Gabrielle Kielich, and Heidi Feldman. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. [xxiv, 629 p. ISBN 978-1-5013-4202-8 (hardcover); 978-1-5013-4203-5 (e-book). $275] The latest installment in the Bloomsbury’s global pop encyclopedia series, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 12, Genres: Sub-Saharan Africa contains 179 entries, offering a wide and remarkable representation of African popular music varieties. Volume 12 is the fifth in the genre thread of the series, preceded by volumes on North America, The Caribbean and Latin America, The Middle East and North Africa, and Europe, and a thread of volumes organised around location rather than style. Volume 12 opens with a brief introduction that situates the effort around creating the volume, the choices made by the editors in its preparation, and some of the challenges experienced across the creation of the volumes in the series overall. The editors—Heidi Carolyn Feldman, David Horn, John Shepherd, and Gabrielle Kielich—lay out the operating definition of genre used in gathering the entries, as defined by Franco Fabbri and John Shepherd in Volume 1 of the series: ‘In music, genres emerge as labels for defining similarities and recurrences that members of a community understand as pertinent to identifying and classifying musical events’ (p. xv). Using local community definitions of the labels is critical to the enterprise, bearing also on the definition of ‘popular music’ used across the series. Though the editors admit that ‘the question of where “the popular” ends and “the folk” begins has proven particularly difficult’ (p. xvii), entry authors were counseled that, ‘music created and disseminated in rural situations in an exclusively oral-aural fashion with little or no currency outside its location of origin does not constitute a prime focus for these volumes’ (p. xvii). This places the definition of ‘popular music’ in the domain of urban, commercially recorded musics, an apt definition for the study of African popular music, which has deep ties to the urbanisation of the continent. [End Page 264] The editors conclude the introduction by reiterating the community consideration as the core criteria for inclusion, stating that they chose in the end to be more ‘inclusive rather than exclusive’ (p. xvii) in the genres presented in the volume. Written by ninety-four contributors, the volume’s entries are organised alphabetically. Each entry offers a stand-alone description of the genre, with varying levels of discussion on the genre’s defining musical elements (depending on how fixed the aesthetics are and how tightly defining the genre label actually is in practice). The entries also give a sense of the national and regional contexts in which the genre was born and has come to be performed and consumed. Written in accessible academic prose, each piece ends with a bibliography, discography, and other resources regarding the genre in question. The experience of reading through the volume, as opposed to how it might more regularly be used—on an entry-by-entry basis—reveals a highly-connected world of African popular music. There is overlap between the pieces, but this speaks to the standalone quality of the entries and the user-friendliness of the volume. For example, one cannot discuss Soukouss without placing it in relation to Congolese Rumba or describe Uganda’s Kidandali and Band genres without relating them to Kadongo Kamu. These overlaps reflect historical, national, and regional ties between genres, some of which find influence from other parts of the African continent or from overseas. The broad consideration of these genres offers readers a reminder of how in Africa, as in many places, matters of ethnicity and culture are not bound to national borders, and neither are the cultural products enjoyed by the folks who live there. In addition to offering a survey of the continent’s pop offerings, the volume acquaints readers with writers having deep ties to their materials who might be the next stop for more...