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

By Gavin Steingo

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.
           
Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226362687

Book preview

Kwaito’s Promise

Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

A series edited by Philip V. Bohlman, Ronald Radano, and Timothy Rommen

EDITORIAL BOARD

Margaret J. Kartomi

Bruno Nettl

Anthony Seeger

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

Martin H. Stokes

Bonnie C. Wade

Kwaito’s Promise

Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa

Gavin Steingo

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

GAVIN STEINGO is assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36240-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36254-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36268-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226362687.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steingo, Gavin, author.

Kwaito’s promise : music and the aesthetics of freedom in South Africa / Gavin Steingo.

pages cm — (Chicago studies in ethnomusicology)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-36240-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-36254-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-36268-7 (e-book) 1. Kwaito (Music)—Social aspects. 2. Kwaito (Music)—Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Kwaito (Music)—Political aspects. 4. Musicians, Black—South Africa. 5. South Africa—Social conditions—1994– I. Title. II. Title: Music and the aesthetics of freedom in South Africa. III. Series: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology.

ML3503.S6S74 2016

781.63096822'1—dc23

2015035019

This book was published with the support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Parts of Chapter 4 were published as Sound and Circulation: Immobility and Obduracy in South African Electronic Music by Gavin Steingo, Ethnomusicology Forum 24, no. 1 (2015): 102–23.

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on Language

A Note on the Language of Race

1 The Struggle of Freedom

2 The Experience of the Outside

3 Platform, or The Miracle of the Ordinary

4 Immobility, Obduracy, and Experimentalism in Soweto

5 Acoustic Assemblages and Forms of Life

6 Black Diamonds

7 Times and Spaces of Listening

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index

Preface

In 1994 people around the world turned their eyes toward South Africa to witness the official demise of apartheid and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first democratically elected president. At that critical moment, the urban black youth developed a new form of music called kwaito (roughly pronounced kwy-toh).¹ This book traces the political history of South Africa alongside the musical history of kwaito over the first twenty years of democracy (1994–2014). It investigates the often contradictory relationship between political processes and musical processes during a period that began with a euphoric and hopeful moment in the mid-1990s but that quickly led to disenchantment and even despair.

Contemporary South Africa is marked by high rates of unemployment, extreme inequality, endemic crime, and the increasing sedimentation of political corruption. Politicians, journalists, and intellectuals often complain that kwaito has largely failed to provide any meaningful contribution to a post-apartheid society that desperately needs direction. Kwaito has been variously described as immature, apolitical, disconnected from social issues, and lacking any meaning or purpose. Its practitioners and listeners have been accused of irresponsibility in the face of major social problems and of ignoring the conditions in which South Africans—and black South Africans in particular—live. Based on extensive research in South Africa, this book shows that if kwaito’s musicians and listeners ignore their conditions, they do so deliberately in order to invent another way of perceiving the world. I argue that kwaito is less a form of escapism than an aesthetic practice of multiplying sensory reality and thus generating new possibilities in the midst of neoliberalism’s foreclosure of the future. Employing this idea as a guiding thread throughout, the book’s chapters engage a range of issues, including practices of musical circulation, the performativity of racialized and gendered bodies, valuation and economies of exchange, and the experimental construction of new forms of life.

From a theoretical standpoint, I reinvigorate a politics of aesthetics at a time when aesthetic judgment is often dismissed as mere ideological mystification. With an ear attuned to kwaito’s promise of freedom, my aim throughout the various chapters is to explore the ways that musicians in post-apartheid South Africa engage multiple realities, experiment with the thresholds of knowledge, and challenge the partitions that structure contemporary South African life.

I will get to all of these arguments in due course. Here, I want only to respond to another set of assumptions promulgated largely by international culture brokers, particularly those in Europe and the United States. When I first began working on kwaito in the early 2000s, the study of hip-hop was becoming firmly entrenched in the academy, and I could not present a single paper without someone asking me to connect the material to American hip-hop. Isn’t this just South African hip-hop? people would ask. The conflation of hip-hop with kwaito was exacerbated, in turn, by the world music market, and in particular by a CD compilation simply titled Kwaito: South African Hip-Hop (Stern's/Earthworks, 2000). A number of newspaper and magazine articles soon followed, each of which pronounced the emergence of a homegrown version of South African hip-hop.

From a certain perspective this analogy is somewhat justified. After all, many kwaito musicians cite hip-hop musicians as influences, and kwaito songs often feature rappers. But the comparison obscures more than it reveals. In fact, the vast majority of kwaito musicians and fans insist that this music is anything but hip-hop. They have repeatedly emphasized a number of distinctions: hip-hop is overtly political whereas kwaito is largely apolitical; hip-hop is didactic whereas kwaito is party music; hip-hop deploys asymmetrical break beats whereas kwaito is typically based on symmetrical four-on-the-floor rhythms. Those who remain tempted to conflate kwaito and hip-hop overlook another important fact: there is a robust hip-hop scene in South Africa, and this scene is usually opposed to kwaito.²

Most kwaito musicians actually align themselves closely with a different genre of African American music: house. House music was pioneered by gay African American producers in Chicago in the early 1980s, and unlike hip-hop—yet very much like kwaito—house music’s lyrics are sparse and seldom explicitly political. Yet house music was slow to take off in the United States, and it remained largely underground in the early 2000s—at the very moment when hip-hop went mainstream and gained a foothold in the academy.

And so it was that the words of kwaito’s practitioners were largely ignored. Based on superficial characteristics in the music and—let us be frank—the fact that these were black kids making the music, American and European audiences decided that kwaito = hip-hop. International culture brokers also devised a strategy of continually interviewing a group of musicians who were sometimes labeled as kwaito in South Africa but who were known to acknowledge hip-hop influence if explicitly asked.

And then everything changed. Sometime around 2012, electronic music finally took off in America. Middle-class white youth began listening to derivatives of house music—to genres falling under the general rubric of EDM (an acronym for electronic dance music). Hipsters began losing interest in indie rock and discovered deep house. And then in 2014 longtime Chicago resident Barack Obama mourned the death of house pioneer Frankie Knuckles in an open letter that was widely circulated on the Internet. From around 2012 onward, it became impossible for me to deliver a single paper on kwaito without a member of the audience asking: Isn’t this just South African house music? What a strange turn of events! For reasons I have outlined, this question is more reasonable than the earlier one about hip-hop. More importantly, though, these questions—Isn’t this just South African hip-hop? and Isn’t this just South African house?—illustrate clearly the fickleness of international audiences. After careful consideration, and in light of my experiences just described, I have eschewed simple translations of kwaito into international genre categories. I ask the reader to avoid easy comparisons and to instead read generously and with an open mind.

One other assumption (or cliché) I must respond to is the claim that kwaito is dead. There is of course some truth to this claim—as there is in all clichés. At the same time, saying that kwaito is dead is not particularly meaningful in my view. Although people do not use the word kwaito as much as they used to, electronic music genres very much like kwaito remain extremely popular in South Africa. Furthermore, anyone who enjoys pronouncing the death of genres should remember that jazz, rock, and hip-hop have also been pronounced dead countless times.

Interestingly, though, the popular-music scene is changing quite significantly in South Africa today. While electronic music has been the mainstay of South African popular music since at least 1990 (and considerably earlier than that, if one includes 1980s disco or bubblegum), in the last few years live bands have begun vying for audience attention. To be sure, there have always been rock, reggae, jazz, and Afro-fusion bands in South Africa, but for the past twenty or so years electronic music has dominated the market, and particularly the black music market. Now, for the first time since the early 1990s we are witnessing the emergence of a robust live-music scene in South Africa—led by young black musicians—with bands like The Muffinz and The Brother Moves On (TBMO) making a major impact. It is impossible to predict the future of South African music, but it seems that electronic music’s thirty-year dominance is finally being seriously challenged.

Two additional points need to be made. First, this book focuses on music in South Africa and not on the circulation of South African music to other places. Of course, there are instances when the reception of South African music in other countries impacts local music production—I describe several such cases in these pages. Nonetheless, I remain focused on what happens in South Africa and largely elide discussions of international reception. This has very real consequences on the book as a whole, because the South African musicians who are commercially successful in the United States and Europe are not the most popular musicians in South Africa. Many of the musicians discussed in this book receive only two or three thousand views on YouTube, while far less locally popular groups such as Die Antwoord receive as many as sixty million views for a single song. In short, there is a disjuncture between the South African musicians who make it oversees and the musicians most popular within the country—particularly in the townships surrounding major cities. I felt that it was important to tell the story of South Africa’s local heroes and not simply to write about musicians adored by scenesters in Brooklyn and Kreuzberg.

Second, an additional note on theory is in order: while this book takes a somewhat polemical stance on music, I do not intend this as an antagonistic gesture. Rather, my aim is twofold. I hope to contribute to the development of ethnomusicology as a discipline and I also hope to elaborate an understanding of music that lives up to the challenges of the contemporary South African political situation.

It is a truism in music studies that talking about the music itself is not only wrong but also problematic and even dangerous. We all know that music does not exist in a vacuum and that it is always connected to society, culture, gender, politics, power, and so on. I can only hope that on completion of this book the reader will be sufficiently generous to acknowledge that I understand this argument and have taken it seriously. At the same time, I hope to inject some doubt into this safe position. To anticipate my argument, I want to shake our confidence that all claims about musical autonomy are the result of ideological mystification. Instead, I take a cue from the philosopher Jacques Rancière and suggest a different relation to knowledge than that assumed by the concept of ideology. Following Rancière, I argue that musical autonomy is not so much an illusion that hides reality than it is a way of doubling reality.

Or perhaps it may be useful to state my argument another way by considering a typical pedagogical encounter. As an ethnomusicologist, I often tell my students that music is always political. I used to believe that this statement communicated a profound insight. But in recent years, I must admit, telling students that music is always political sometimes rings hollow—not because it is untrue but rather because I have learned to wield the statement like a weapon against enthusiastic and bright-eyed eighteen-year-olds. I used to delight in crushing a student’s belief in music for its own sake. After all, is it not my job as teacher to educate or even enlighten? Perhaps. But anyone who has ever demystified a student’s supposedly naïve attitudes about music will also probably have noticed that the student was not as satisfied by the demystification as we—as teachers—are. Should we continue to attribute the student’s dissatisfaction to her inability to grasp difficult concepts? I am not convinced.

This book takes the question of music seriously, not as a universal category but rather as a historically situated modality of experience. The consequences of this experience remain underdetermined but also, and precisely for this reason, compelling to think with.

Acknowledgments

This book benefited from the support and generosity of many people. I am grateful to my teachers, colleagues, friends, and family, all of whom contributed to my thinking and writing in countless ways.

I received a great deal of support from the University of Pittsburgh. I must thank my colleagues in the Department of Music for the engaging conversations and for helpful comments on my work. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Adriana Helbig, Neil Newton, and Andrew Weintraub. An Internal Faculty Fellowship at the Humanities Center provided me with valuable time and peace of mind at the final stages of writing—a million thanks to Jonathan Arac for his unwavering support. I also owe thanks to Susan Andrade, Brenton Malin, and Patrick Manning for being excellent interlocutors at the center.

Much of this book was penned during a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University. My thanks to the faculty of the Department of Music for making my time at Columbia so memorable. I reserve a special word of appreciation for the brilliant Ana María Ochoa, who has inspired my work in innumerable ways. I would also like to add a note of thanks to my New York friends (ca. 2010–12) for their encouragement: Charlie Frohne, David Gutkin, Yoon-Ji Lee, Daniel Linden, Trisha Low, Keith McNight, Stephen Potter, Kirsten Saracini, Jonathan Singer, Nadine Vassalo, and Emily Yao.

In Philadelphia, I benefited from the support of some amazing teachers who taught me most of what I know. A special thanks to Carol Muller, who has offered crucial guidance since the earliest stages of the project and who has always treated me like family. Special thanks are due as well to Gary Tomlinson, who has consistently challenged, stimulated, and encouraged my thinking. I additionally learned a great deal from Rita Barnard, Mark Butler, Emma Dillon, Guthrie Ramsey, and Timothy Rommen.

I have had the good fortune of meeting several other excellent teachers and mentors along the way. I must give thanks to Étienne Balibar, whose generosity amazes me; David Coplan, whose sharp wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and political conviction I greatly admire; Manuel DeLanda, for inspiring me to take intellectual risks; and Louise Meintjes—seldom has a wiser mind and more magical spirit inhabited this earth. A number of friends have also unofficially influenced this book. Thanks to my newer friends, Wills Glasspiegel, Jessica Schwartz, and Noam Yuran. And to Bill Dietz, Andrew Smith, and Hervé Tchumkam—I thank you for a lifetime of support.

I have been lucky enough to share the material in this book with audiences at various institutions in the last few years, including at Carnegie Mellon University (with gratitude to Wendy Goldman and Joe Trotter), Duke University (with special thanks to Louise Meintjes), Northwestern University (thanks, Ryan Dohoney), and Oberlin College (my thanks to Ian MacMillen). I am additionally grateful for similar opportunities at the Apollo Theater (with thanks to Jamilla Deriah and Shirley Taylor) and at Columbia University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities (thank you, Hagar Kotef).

Several individuals offered invaluable comments on chapter drafts. I am very grateful to Brian Beaton, Michael Gardiner, David Novak, Benjamin Piekut, Thomas Pooley, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Martin Scherzinger, and Emily Zazulia.

For Zulu language instruction, my thanks to Audrey Mbeje (USA) and Godfrey Tshabalala (South Africa). Bongani Mmbatha, Daniel Nakedi, and Joseph Napolitano assisted with translations in the text. Jonghee Kang did a fabulous job re-notating and polishing the music transcriptions. Her meticulousness throughout was very impressive. Thanks also to Brian Riordan for stimulating discussions about the transcriptions, to Bill Nelson for producing the maps, and to June Sawyer for preparing the index.

Having grown up in South Africa, I cannot of course thank all the people who have contributed to my knowledge of that country. In terms of this book project, I am particularly grateful for the generosity I experienced in often challenging circumstances. In Soweto, my heartfelt thanks to Emmanuel Manie Chirwa, Ralph Miya, Azwindini Munonela, Daniel Nakedi, and Ndivhuyafhi Nemungadi (DJ Davic). I am also grateful to a number of individuals who are not named directly in this book, and whom I have referred to with pseudonyms in order to avoid embarrassment or unwanted attention. In the greater Johannesburg area, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Zwai Bala, Hudson Bongani Chauke, Jonathan Ziggy Hofmeyr, Dan Joffe, Kabelo Mabalane, Gao Mokone, Nonhlanhla Ngwenya, Cassandra Steingo, and Kgotso Gabriel Twala. A huge thank-you also to my parents, Sally Steingo and Leonard Steingo, for their constant support.

At the University of Chicago Press, I am extremely grateful to the formidable Elizabeth Branch Dyson for her advice, guidance, and encouragement throughout the process. Pamela Bruton was a most excellent copy editor—thank you, Pam, for lending your exacting eye. Thanks also to Caterina MacLean and Ryo Yamaguchi for their hard work. I additionally greatly appreciate the assistance of the series editors. In particular, I must thank Ronald Radano for his sustained support and for initially shepherding me toward the press. Tim Rommen also provided swift and astute feedback. In terms of the publication process, I am grateful for two publication subventions—one from the American Musicological Society and one from the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund—that helped this book see the light of day.

Finally, a few singular thank-yous. To Tigger Kim, for the friendship on many lonely days. To my intellectual companion, Jairo Moreno—words cannot express my gratitude. To the spectacular and unmatchable Roger Grant, for believing in me and for reading countless drafts, and revisions, and revisions of revisions . . . To Helen Kim, the one and only—for making my days bright and my life full—I cannot imagine a world without you. And to Sizwe, the most gifted person I know: your brilliance inspires and shakes me—this book is dedicated to you.

A Note on Language

South Africa has eleven official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu.¹ In addition to these, other African and European languages such as Shona, Tonga, Lingala, French, and Portuguese are commonly heard in the urban soundscape. These languages are mixed in creative ways, both in kwaito’s lyrics and in everyday discourse among black South Africans. The process of language mixing has a long history in South Africa. The best-known and researched creole is tsotsitaal, which emerged in the freehold township of Sophiatown in the 1940s. There, tsotsi referred to the slick urban hustler, modeled on characters from American films like The Street with No Name (1948). The word is derived, in fact, from the attire worn by dapper Hollywood heroes—zoot suits.²

Tsotsitaal is a creole that incorporates strains from many languages but is constituted primarily by Afrikaans, English, and Zulu.³ It is commonly used throughout urban areas in South Africa and forms the basis of most kwaito lyrics. Some linguists have argued that in the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area a new creole, isicamtho, has replaced tsotsitaal. Bonner and Segal take a longer view, observing that the difference between the two language-varieties is based on their respective historical origins. Tsotsitaal, they maintain, was transported from Sophiatown directly to the Soweto township of Meadowlands after black residents of the former were forcibly removed. Isicamtho, by contrast, spontaneously evolved in the slightly older areas of Soweto, such as Orlando East and West (Bonner and Segal 1998, 59). The latter language-variety, by their account, evolved in the 1960s and is based on Zulu, unlike tsotsitaal, which is based on Afrikaans.

What does it mean to say that a language-variety is based on another language? As Dumisani Krushchev Ntshangase explains, both tsotsitaal and isicamtho are used through other languages. Like tsotsitaal, he observes, isicamtho has no structure of its own since it relies heavily on the language structures of the languages from which it ‘operates.’ This means that it has not yet developed its own syntactic base which will make it linguistically independent of the base languages (2002, 407). Ntshangase suggests that the main difference between tsotsitaal and isicamtho is the syntactic base, which is Afrikaans in the former and Zulu (or sometimes Sotho⁴) in the latter.⁵

Ntshangase’s comparative analysis of tsotsitaal and isicamtho confirms my own research in most respects. There is, however, one important aspect where our work diverges: I found that in Soweto many people use the word tsotsitaal as a general term referring to any urban slang.⁶ In other words, my interlocutors refer to the Zulu-based creole that they speak as tsotsitaal and not isicamtho. I am not arguing that they would refuse the designation isicamtho, but only that they seldom use that term.⁷ In this book, then, I use the term tsotsitaal when referring generally to urban creoles.

Although I took courses in Zulu and continued to study the language during fieldwork, I was not prepared to follow conversations that continually mix and move between four or more languages—as is frequently the case in Soweto and other parts of the Johannesburg area. The conversations I understood best were those in Zulu-based tsotsitaal, because I was able to draw on my Zulu education from university and my twelve years of Afrikaans study in school (grades 1–12). Still, I relied on friends in the field for help understanding conversations and for translations into English when necessary. I am very grateful for their generosity and goodwill.

One final small point is in order. For the sake of convenience, and to avoid confusion, throughout this book I omit prefixes of Zulu noun stems when referring to languages or ethnicities. For example, I refer to the languages Zulu and Xhosa, and not isiZulu and isiXhosa (the latter being technically more accurate by some accounts). I also simplify plural forms, referring to Zulus and Xhosas (rather than the amaZulu and amaXhosa) and to more than one traditional healer as sangomas rather than izangoma.

A Note on the Language of Race

I use the terms black and white as racial designations throughout this book. This is not an essentialist gesture but rather seeks to recognize the historical, material, social, and psychic realities of contemporary South African life. While the parameters of race have shifted considerably since the end of apartheid, South Africa remains intensely segregated, and the emic categories black and white continue to function on psychological and affective levels. Additionally, there are solid sociological reasons for employing these terms, not least of which is the fact that inequality in South Africa remains highly racialized: while an estimated 54 percent of blacks were living under the poverty line in 2011, fewer than 1 percent of whites were poor by the same definition.¹

I am uncomfortable describing white South Africans as Europeans and black South Africans as Africans for several reasons. For one thing, the terms black and white (rather than European and African) are more commonly used by the South African government—for example, when it refers to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Second, the terms black and white are more commonly used by South African citizens themselves (although considering the country’s immense linguistic diversity, it is admittedly difficult to assert as much with any confidence). Finally, I insist on the real possibility—even if currently unrealized—of a multiracial (and, yes, ultimately nonracial) South Africa. If people have no problem accepting the idea of a white Australian or a white American, then I do not see why one should reject the idea of a white South African. What needs to be acknowledged and addressed in each of these cases (i.e., South Africa, Australia, America) is the long history of systematic oppression and continued inequality. This is not achievable through nativism.

It should be noted, finally, that Coloured and Asian identities complicate the white/black binarism.² Nonetheless, because this book focuses on black music, I take up the issue of Coloured and Asian identities only piecemeal and when relevant.

One

The Struggle of Freedom

As I write, kwaito is booming all around me in the office, blasting through the walls and out of our souls. Everything about my surroundings seems to give you the jitters, as if it’s society’s worst nightmare. George Hill, The Kwaito Revolution¹

In 2008 I returned home to Johannesburg, South Africa, after seven years of studying in the United States. The first thing I saw when exiting the plane at Oliver Tambo International Airport was a newspaper headline, accompanied by a photograph of the city center, that read: Welcome to Hell. In the weeks and months that followed, I would lose friends to AIDS, gun violence, and poisoning. I would experience a place, a time, and a people reeling under the weight of poverty and joblessness, anguished by political corruption, and deeply traumatized by a wave of xenophobic attacks against Africans from northern lands. Recurrent power outages and rolling blackouts resulted in dark and eerie urban nights, and the sheer frequency of motor vehicle accidents rendered the very word accident meaningless.² Cultural critics Sarah Nuttall and Liz McGregor (2007, 12) summarize the situation as follows: [t]o live in South Africa is to be subliminally primed for major loss, the most common causes being traffic accidents, crime or HIV/AIDS.

Fourteen years earlier, South Africans had witnessed the formal demise of apartheid. On April 27, 1994, people of all races went to the ballot box in the country’s first ever democratic election. In the spirit of reconciliation, my family’s longtime domestic worker, Johanna (who is black), accompanied my mother (who is white) to the voting station.³ Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president a few weeks later, and for a moment people of all backgrounds bathed in the glow of our nascent democracy. For just a moment, anything seemed possible.⁴

At this critical historical juncture, and in unison with the democratic transition, the urban black youth developed kwaito, a form of electronic music commonly understood as the expression of freedom in the post-apartheid period. Songs like Boom Shaka’s It’s About Time and Trompies’ Celebrate clearly marked the beginning of a new, democratic society—a Rainbow Nation, as it came to be known. In an early article about kwaito, the ethnomusicologist Angela Impey (2001, 45) wrote: No longer restrained by the need to comment on racial injustice and political freedom, it expressed a new set of dreams.

But by 2008 the thrill was gone.⁵ Johannesburg, I was told upon arrival, was hell. What had happened to freedom? According to activist and kwaito musician Zola 7: As much as the children of the ’70s and ’80s had to be violent to make a point, the generation of the ’90s had to deal with freedom and that is hard. Whoever says the struggle continues didn’t tell us how. Kwaito came out of that (Neate 2004, 142).

Dealing with freedom is hard: if music during apartheid expressed the struggle for freedom, then kwaito expresses the struggle of freedom. How does one struggle, not for freedom, but with freedom, in freedom, or perhaps against freedom? How does one struggle freely? And if such a struggle is indeed possible, then what are the vicissitudes and parameters of freedom in the first place? Most importantly, how did kwaito come out of this struggle? And how, in this context, might we understand musical expression and the role of the sonorous more generally?

I have spent the past ten years researching kwaito in an attempt to answer these impossible questions. Between 2008 and 2009 I spent a year living in Soweto, South Africa’s largest township, a key site of anti-apartheid activism and the birthplace of kwaito. Since then I have returned frequently to Soweto and other parts of South Africa, including the northern suburbs of Johannesburg where I grew up. Taking a cue from Zola 7, I have long considered kwaito a suitable medium through which to understand the calculus of political freedom in a country ravaged by record levels of inequality, crime, and AIDS. As Zola suggests, in post-apartheid South Africa people struggle precisely because they are free.

In order to understand how things came to be this way, it is necessary to return to the moment of South Africa’s democratic transition. With the failure of actually existing Socialism in the late 1980s, intellectuals and activists around the world recognized the need to rethink radically the concepts of freedom and emancipation. Although the triumph of neoliberalism has clearly not brought emancipation for most of the world’s population, the search for alternatives has been strikingly unsuccessful.⁶ When criticized for abandoning its initial Leftist project, the African National Congress responds with the Thatcherite slogan: TINA!—There Is No Alternative.⁷ Against this assertion, the response from the Left has been mostly unimaginative. In the place of TINA, activists such as Patrick Bond (1992) have suggested THEMBA, There Must Be an Alternative. In Zulu, the word themba means hope, but this leaves us with the questions what political forms might this hope take? and what kind of economic and political reconfiguration can we expect in the ‘postrevolutionary’ era?

The turbulent and at times euphoric transition of the mid-1990s was undermined from the start. The democratic dispensation actually contained assurances that white South Africans would not have to give up their property, and as the important anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele (2001, 11) observed: The outcome, brutally stated, is that white South Africans got away with murder.

In one of the most lucid analyses of the present conjuncture, Achille Mbembe (2011a, 10) affirms that since the end of apartheid, South Africa has been marked by the apparent foreclosure of any form of radical politics and, therefore, of any real transformation. Granted, one can easily point to political, social, and economic changes over the past two decades. In terms of official politics, Mandela’s vision of a multiracial Rainbow Nation gave way, to some extent, to President Thabo Mbeki’s continental view of an African Renaissance in 1999, which was replaced, in turn, by President Jacob Zuma’s populism in 2009. But on closer inspection, the political scene has not changed in any fundamental respect since 1994. South Africa is stuck in a kind of deadlock: the major achievement of liberal democracy has been the suspension of revolution and the suspension of war. In this sense, the post-apartheid period is best characterized as a time of radical stasis.

Against and beneath this stasis, I will argue, kwaito continues to sound an alternative sensory reality. After the fall of apartheid, South Africans listen to the song Celebrate with hope and nostalgia, with nostalgia for hope—a hope that refuses to be fully muted. Over a steady electronic drum track and repeated four-chord sequence, we sing along with the group Trompies:

Although the song will be over in five minutes, for its duration kwaito sounds the promise of freedom, a long walk, a mirage, a secret.

But this promise comes at a price. Politicians and cultural watchdogs never tire of complaining that kwaito’s musicians and fans ignore actual social conditions—that they are not socially responsible—and that, although South Africa has dozens of social ills, all they can do is party. South African journalists have described kwaito variously as higgledy-piggledy music, music with no meaning or purpose, music that infects our youth with a sense of recklessness, and music that is analogous to a piece of bubblegum that one chews for a bit and then throws away after it has lost its sweetness.¹⁰ Former president Mbeki famously called kwaito a distraction from real political issues, and echoing that sentiment, political commentator Joel Pollak asserted: Kwaito music is particularly apolitical, celebrating the material and social aspirations of the post-apartheid era, while passing over the actual dismal material and social conditions of most of its listeners.¹¹

The most important theoretical implication of these various criticisms is that they replicate and reaffirm—albeit in different terms—the mainstream (ethno)musicological idea that no musician or listener can ever successfully evade his or her actual social conditions. Moreover, claiming that one’s experience of music departs from actual social conditions is seen as an illusion and a form of ideological mystification.

What unites the so-called New Musicology with the discipline of ethnomusicology is a trenchant critique of aesthetic autonomy—that is, a critique of the notion that people can abstract themselves from the social.¹² Since the 1990s the field of music studies has affirmed the inherent interconnectedness of music, culture, and politics by adopting a vigilantly critical stance against musical autonomy. The primary target of critique has not been popular music, of course, but rather classical music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with this music’s human counterpart—namely, the aesthete who believes that he or she has the ability to appreciate beauty disinterestedly and without recourse to a particular taste culture. In most cases, ethnomusicologists and New musicologists have drawn inspiration (whether directly or indirectly) from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, 493) highly influential argument that aesthetic distinction—the notion that some people enjoy music for its own sake, outside of social and political interests—is in fact "a misrecognized form of social difference" (my emphasis).¹³ Following Bourdieu (again, either directly or indirectly), musicologists have joined ethnomusicologists in the task of demystifying claims of disinterested aesthetic judgment.¹⁴

The most prominent scholar in this regard is Susan McClary, who in the early 1990s wrote forcefully about the ideological basis of music’s operations that allow[s] cultural activities to ‘make sense’ whether or not people in that culture acknowledge it.¹⁵ For McClary, music is inherently social, and the analyst’s job is to uncover music’s social dimension—particularly when it is disavowed. Thus, in response to modernist male composers such as Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg, and Milton Babbitt, who assert the inherent value of Western art music over and against any social value it may have, McClary (1989) detects a hidden motivation. She unmasks any claim for musical autonomy as a power play, as a strategy for accruing cultural capital and gaining prestige.

The critique of aesthetic autonomy has been extremely important and valuable for contemporary music studies, especially when one considers the often pernicious ways that aesthetics has been seized upon by Eurocentric ideologues and harnessed for political ends. The advent of modern aesthetics, after all, made possible Eduard Hanslick’s assertion that contemplative listening should be properly contrasted with pathological forms of audition ascribed to women and savages.¹⁶ It also played a part in the construction of an overwhelmingly white and male canon, which feminist music scholars continue to challenge.

For all these reasons, the field of contemporary music studies (with notable exceptions) has been structured around two related assumptions. First, musical practice and experience are an exercise of, struggle for, or contestation over power. That is to say, engagements with music are always interested—there is no aesthetic judgment that is not simultaneously a social and cultural evaluation based on material interest. As David Graeber (2001, 29) quips, in much critical thought the assumption is that ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ analysis means trying to cut through to the level on which you can say people are being selfish, and that when one discovers this, one’s job is done.¹⁷ The second assumption is that knowledge is only ever true or false: there is a true knowledge that is aware (and thus liberatory) and a false knowledge that ignores (and therefore oppresses). The task of the scholar is to access true knowledge by demystifying the claim that some people enjoy music for music’s sake, when in reality those people are merely harnessing aesthetic distinction in order to elevate the status of their own music and thereby dominate those who exhibit only vulgar taste.

The central argument of this book is that these two assumptions (while important when addressing rampant Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism) are too simple, and in what follows I show that the study of kwaito calls for a fundamental reevaluation of music studies’ basic axioms. Following Jacques Rancière (2006, 3), I argue that "there is not one knowledge but two, that each knowledge [savoir] is accompanied by a certain ignorance, and therefore that there is also a knowledge [savoir] which represses and an ignorance which liberates."¹⁸ On the basis of ethnographic evidence, this book shows that if kwaito musicians and listeners ignore actual social conditions, they do this intentionally in order to forge another body and another way of hearing. From this perspective, kwaito is not an illusion that hides reality; on the contrary, it doubles reality, which the critical tradition would like to retain as one (Rancière 2006, 6). The conceptual shift from illusion as hiding/masking to illusion as generating a new sensory reality is fundamental to my argument.

In this book I revive the notion of aesthetics so disdained by contemporary music studies, but only in order to reconfigure and reshape it. For one thing, my aim is not to advocate the superiority of European classical music. Furthermore, I do not understand aesthetics in terms of particular artistic practices or objects, and neither do I understand it as a theory of the beautiful or its judgment. Instead, as I detail at length below, aesthetics can describe a particular modality of sensory perception. I will argue, moreover, that it is the critical (ethno)musicologist—and not necessarily the aesthetic listener—who is liable to the accusation of elitism and social distinction. The aesthetic listener ignores or suspends normative ways of hearing, however politically progressive they may be deemed to be, in order to create for herself or himself another way of perceiving the world. The critical music scholar, by contrast, unmasks aesthetic attitudes in order to reveal some more fundamental truth about the nature of power and its relationship to musical experience. The critical scholar, in other words, believes that she or he knows the correct way to perceive sounds and rails against any deviation from that proper mode of perception. It is to this critical position that Rancière refers when he says that there is knowledge which represses: in demystifying the aesthetic illusion, critical music scholars effectively assign to each social group a correct way of hearing and knowing, effectively allot to each group "the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos" or habitus (Rancière 2006, 3).

Consider, for a