-
5. Radios, Turntables, and Vinyl: Technology and the Imagined Community, 1961–75
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
140 5 w Radios, Turntables, and Vinyl Technology and the Imagined Community, 1961–75 The music of Luanda’s musseques produced meaning through sound, dance, space, and story. It symbolized the world of cultural sovereignty, of African-owned and -run clubs, and of African-produced music that drew on rural and cosmopolitan resources to express an urban Angolan experience. In the production and consumption of this music, people created a sense of nation—of Angolan specificity and self-sufficiency. For all its pretenses to being representative, and even at its most popularly accessible in the street festivals, the musseque music scene was, arguably, a circumscribed phenomenon limited to Luanda’s African neighborhoods. It required the development of a local recording industry and the spread of radio broadcasting to overcome physical and social distance and elaborate an ethos of nation that was also national in terms of its territorial presence.1 The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it explores to what extent the local phenomenon of the “nation” established in musseque clubs and festivals became “national.” Was it just something produced and consumed in Luanda musseques or did it have a greater range? Second, it looks at the ways in which the cultural technology of radio was critical to producing a sense of nation in Luanda by linking the capital with other cities and with the guerrilla struggle (a process that was paralleled in other cities and towns). Building on Benedict Anderson’s concept of print capitalism as the technomaterial engine that drives the imagination of nation through novels and newspapers, I argue that “sonorous capitalism,” in the form of radio and the recording industry, was the motor that drove the development and spread of music as a medium for imagining the nation in late colonial Angola. The You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. music of Luanda’s musseques took on national significance when the technology of the radio and the establishment of a small recording industry made the music reproducible and thus mobile. Even before the advent of local record production, radio broadcast the sounds of musseque music recorded at Luanda stations throughout the territory and beyond. The local recording industry further enabled the spread of the sounds and styles produced in Luanda by putting records into people’s hands and homes and into the collections of stations based outside Luanda. People moving back and forth between various Angolan cities and towns and between Angola and other countries could take the music and its images (on album covers) with them. In this sense, radio and the recording industry reterritorialized the music produced in the musseques, giving it a national presence and meaning. Thus radio disseminated a new sound over a larger geographic area and connected the guerrilla struggle with those who stayed behind. But the link between radio and nation was not limited to this. Radio also helped produce a sense of nation within Luanda and other places. Radio serialized music: it was one reality among, but attached to, many. Radio connected people in the musseques to people in other parts of the country and people at various places throughout Angola to the “world outside”: to the guerrilla struggle, to the international media, and to independent African countries. These different sites constituted the various “meanwhiles” that radio concatenated and through which Angolans realized the imagined community of nation. Political repression may have been great in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Angolans sought connection to the outside world and to the guerrilla struggle, even if only for a few minutes a day and at great risk. Tuning in to various worlds, they imagined their own world in different terms. radio as a cultural technology: sounding out the nation Central to Anderson’s analysis of the nation as imagined community is the concept of print capitalism. In Imagined Communities he links cultural processes with technological innovation and economic dynamics. In this account, print capitalism does not create the nation but rather fuels it with mass-produced novels and newspapers. Music, I have argued, is the cultural practice through which Angolans imagine the nation. But the music of Luanda ’s clubs in and of itself would have only a limited impact were it not for the technologies that record and reproduce sound and the radios and...