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 19 Conclusion – dis/connections Karin Barber (1987: 48) writes: The aesthetic of immediate impact in African popular arts seems to arise from conditions similar to those in which nineteenth century English music hall flourished. The large, heterogeneous , unknown African crowds – so large the performers may entertain them in football stadiums – nonetheless have latent values and experiences in common: the experience of living in a society undergoing rapid change and dislocation in which they, the majority, are in increasing danger of being trampled down. The audience is not necessarily gathered in one place. A stream of customers looks successively at the pictures which create the good time communal ambience of bars and hotels; the crowd at the motorpark looking at the decorative motifs on mammy-waggons is in constant motion. Individuals buy booklets, magazines, and newspapers in public places but take them home to read. Yet this audience, however volatile and scattered, is still reached by the techniques of immediacy, of an emotional "obviousness" that deepens and reaffirms common values. Through popular art, expression is given to what people may not have known they had in common. In the preceding seven chapters, I have taken a thorough look at various social patterns and dimensions of music consumption in contemporary Freetown. I commenced with the introduction of notions central to the subsequent discussion of musicking practices, such as sound, space, place and relationships (Chapter 12). Thereupon, I mapped out the broader context and setting in which forms of musicking occur in present-day Freetown (Chapters 13 & 14) and provided an initial framework and categorization of Freetonian music events and performances in general (Chapter 15). From there, I turned to the centerpiece of the third part of this book: collective musicking encounters in the setting of commercial music venues and events (Chapters 16-18). Throughout these chapters, and particularly in the course of the last three chapters, I explored several aspects and dynamics of how patterns of music consumption reinforce, reflect and defy patterns of social integration and segregation, and furthermore how social structures and concerns are reflected, often in contradictive ways, in the realms and practices of collective music consumption. In other words: I looked at how social DISCOnnections 204 dis/connections are reified and subverted in discotheques, as well as in other places of collective music consumption. Despite the wide scope and range of the above-presented and -discussed data about contemporary Freetown’s realms and practices of collective music consumption , my account does – by no means – claim to be approximately “complete ” or exhaustive; far from it. A multitude of other related and relevant aspects of collective as well as of individual musicking practices were either not taken into account altogether or simply exceeded the confined spaces of these pages. To name but a few of many other left out aspects: the complex and dynamic processes of individual and collective music taste formation were mostly left unmentioned; so were the intriguing realms of music-related identity formations. Particularly with regard to my specific approach – to look at music through society and not the other way around – the analysis of individual interpretations, meaning-ascriptions and “usages” of (popular) music were left more than a little on the short side. (Though, I will touch upon certain aspects of how Freetown’s audiences make meaning of their music in the following and last part of this book.) It is important to stress that with this third part I have set out not much more than a preliminary outline, a first tentative approach towards a field of study that deserves a much more in-depth and detailed investigation and analysis; that is: the diverse intersections and interactions of (popular) music and society and the diverse (inter)relations between the social and the aesthetic realms of (popular) music in urban Africa in general and in contemporary, “post-war” Freetown in particular. Because of the wide and partly widely diverging range of data presented above, the given account somewhat defies a concise summary. A central point that recurred throughout the preceding chapters should be accentuated nevertheless ; to wit: the question how music both unites and divides people – thus the central question and leitmotif of this book. Before attempting to sum up the answer(s) to this question, I will first briefly resume the foundation for an answer, which mainly builds on the findings presented in part two. As I argued in the historical overview (Part II), in the course of the past decades Freetown society evolved from a...

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