Sound of Africa!

Louise Meintjes. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Mediating Difference in a South Africa Music Studio. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Aficionados of "world music," like those of jazz, who enjoy reading about their passion are in a far more fortunate situation than devotees of some other musical genres. The number of book-length treatments with an appeal beyond academic ethnomusicology is not overly large, but the best among them, like Tim Taylor's Global Pop (1997), are as enjoyable to read as the music they dilate upon so lovingly is to listen to. Further, world music scholars have shown an incisive sophistication in relating issues of performance to both local and global processes of cultural production and identity politics. Louise Meintjes' new volume from Duke University Press, Sound of Africa!, displays these qualities as well as stylistic and theoretical originality in considerable measure. Still, this is not a book like others in this field (or any other), and its idiosyncrasies will both intrigue and frustrate readers persistent enough to get themselves all the way through it. This difficulty in a book of only 265 pages (endnotes, glossary, and bibliography excluded), that is anything but a reference work is an indication of some of the challenges presented by the style and structure of the volume.

Sound of Africa! documents not only the studio production of a particular genre of South African Zulu popular music but also a particular moment in time: the unstable period of negotiation preceding political transition from minority white rule in South Africa in 1991-1992. While the "end of apartheid" is popularly linked to the first democratic non-racial elections in 1994, those who were in the country will recall vividly the day in July 1991 when all racially based legislation and regulations were repealed. The reason the author chose that historical moment for the documentation of African music making in a Johannesburg recording studio was not its epochal transitional character, however, but the fortuitous timing of her research for a doctoral thesis in anthropology and music at the University of Texas, completed in 1997, of which this book is the published re-write. The work suffers nothing from this distance from the research moment, and it stands today on its considerable merits as a reflection on a meaning-making musical process in a city and society at a unique political juncture.

It is worthwhile, however, to compare the text of the original dissertation to that of the published version. While clearly a lot of reflection and hard work went into the revision, they are not either in form or spirit all that different. Indeed, the book's Acknowledgements express at the outset the author's debt to the teachers and advisors who assisted in the preparation of the thesis. As an African colleague once observed pointedly, if you haven't time to read a scholarly book, you can get the essentials from the Acknowledgements. The author's debt is not only to the inspiration drawn from her mentors' own ideas and craft, but also to their approval of such an unorthodox narrative as an academic thesis in the first place. I am sympathetic to Meintjes' desire to escape the conventions of academic genres, and the painfully visible effort it required to break down the formal academic constraints on performative writing about performance. As premise for this attempt the author can point, although she does not, to the lengthy history of debate over just how to describe and analyse musical sound and process in a purely verbal/visual medium, transcriptions notwithstanding. But even with this challenge accepted, the narrative style and structure is unusual even for a ride through a popular musical landscape.

Like the book, the thesis strings together in-your-face evocations of personal experiences, encounters, and observations during fieldwork with thickly written meditations on critical theory not peculiarly applicable to the South African subject matter, with analyses of studio production processes and technology that will keep even the musical...