Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa by Gavin Steingo (review)

Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 320 pp.

Kwaito, a brand of electronic dance music that emerged in South Africa in the 1980s and came to prominence as the music of township youths after the end of apartheid in the 1990s, presents a fertile field for academic investigation. Gavin Steingo, who worked in Soweto, southwest of central Johannesburg, in 2008 and 2009, here brings his findings forward in a book flush with ethnographic detail and thick in descriptive and theoretical nuance. Each chapter, in its own way, explores how "kwaito frames sensory experience by ignoring actual social conditions" (10), subverting in effect the truism that music is a sonic expression of ideology.

The word "kwaito" may reflect Afrikaans kwaai "angry, harsh," repurposed to signal an approving "cool, hot" (43). The sounds of this music, eclectic and changing over time, echo those of multiple popular genres, reaching back to mbaqanga, kwela, dancehall, disco, and even bubblegum, but most directly to house music, which originated in Chicago and was initially accepted in South Africa under the label of international music. Pieces consist mainly of percussive and melodic layers looped into tracks using synthesized instrumental sounds, conventionally of a guitar and a bass guitar, with electronic imitations of a snare drum, a hi-hat cymbal, and a bass drum. They are not usually performed onstage with live instruments, but are put together on computers and played through sound systems. In clubs, and for recordings and videos, vocalists may contribute to the mix, commonly in a rapped manner, inviting shouted responses. The lyrics, often invoking the urban creoles isicamtho and tsotsitaal, with occasionally interjected English, Zulu, and Sesotho idioms, highlight the vagaries of contemporary urban life while remaining paradoxically apolitical. Associated dancing typically features flashy leg and foot movements, set against a reinterpreted four-on-the-floor house beat; in some social situations, solo dancers in turn claim the center of a circle to flaunt their moves.

Kwaito serves as a token of identity, a symbol of all things township, real and imagined, a celebration of individual choice, once under the social restraints codified by apartheid, but now let loose in a more democratically ordered world. It is hence "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" (vii–viii). Steingo takes up theoretical concerns deriving from this practice at the start, in the preface and Chapter 1, "The Struggle of Freedom." He emphasizes the analytical centrality of freedom in aesthetics, nodding affirmatively toward the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, with a determined aim "never to discover the meaning" in his interlocutors' words, "or to discern what they mean to say or what they would say in the absence of mystification," all to avoid enshrining the academic mastery that interprets by demystifying and seeks any "truth behind illusion" (19). He thus tries to refrain from creating, in Rancière's phrasing, "a knowledge which represses," lest it incommode "an ignorance which liberates" (20).

Chapter 2, "The Experience of the Outside," traces the origins of kwaito from its emergence in the mid-1980s to the formal end of apartheid in 1994. One legend says it grew out of speed garage, a British electronic genre, which South African DJs transformed to appeal more to township tastes by spinning 45-rpm records at long-playing speed, thereby slowing down the tempo (49–50). Steingo explores how kwaito differs from house music and in the process discusses theoretical problems inherent in the concept of genre. He attributes the local appeal of kwaito to its origins outside South African society, foundationally in music emanating from the United States, seen as a utopian land of plenty (56), far removed from the oppression perceived in the local political system.

Chapter 3, "Platform...