Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (review)

In this carefully constructed social history of popular music and national politics, Marissa J. Moorman explores how “music in late colonial Angola moved people into nation and toward nationalism” (3). While Intonations begins by describing the events leading up to and following independence, it attempts to shift focus away from standard political narratives about Angolan history, instead looking at how the practices of musicians and consumers paved particular paths to a national sense of belonging.

After providing an overview of the rise of Luanda’s urban shantytowns, known locally as musseques (chapter 1), Moorman examines the activities of urban elites who began to imagine alliances with a rapidly expanding urban underclass (chapter 2) and how this dynamic contributed to the emergence of a lively music scene that cannot be understood without some attention to gender (chapter 3). Chapter 4 examines song lyrics and discusses the emergence of semba, a “sound that was locally rooted and internationally resonant” (25), and it raises a number of important questions about why some songs enter so deeply into social consciousness. The final chapters (5 and 6) explore how this music came to be popular elsewhere in Angola (with special attention to the role played by radio) and how the political climate in the years following independence corresponded with a “hiatus” in the performance and production of urban popular music. Intonations comes with a CD that includes an excellent selection of music that spans several decades and is surprisingly diversified in terms of rhythm and genre.

One of the critical threads running through this monograph is a discussion of how nationalist movements tend to instrumentalize culture: Culture “leads to politics and that is where the interest in culture ends” (57). Moorman’s analysis would have benefited from a more systematic approach to the notion of culture, which in her text is sometimes used to mean artistic expression and sometimes the set of practices and beliefs that lie behind anthropology’s use of the term. At moments in the text Moorman has a tendency to overemphasize the importance of human agency (e.g., 114), but her analysis does pose an important question: “What was life like for those who stayed behind?” (83), meaning those Angolans who were not involved on the front lines of the struggle.

There is a structural tension in this text, which, on the one hand, effectively chips away at canned narratives about popular music as resistance, and, on the other hand, sets out to show how an ethos of contestation in the music makes it politically and socially relevant (see also the epilogue). One of the strengths of this book is the description of urban space and social imagination, which is so compelling that the reader may wonder how the book would have been different if it had been written about cities instead of a nation. The photographs included in the book are sparse and could have been more closely linked to the text, even though the writing style and descriptions in the text are lively and vivid. Intonations makes a signification contribution to our understanding of how Angola became what it is today, and it also makes a serious case for why popular music is political in surprising and unsettling ways.