Boosting the bass guitar, blending the vocals, overdubbing percussion while fretting over shoot-outs in the street, grumbling about a producer, teasing a white engineer, challenging an artist to feel his African beat - "Sound of Africa!" is a riveting account of the production of a mbaqanga album in a state-of-the-art recording studio in Johannesburg. Made popular internationally by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, mbaqanga's distinctive style features a bass solo voice and soaring harmonies of a female frontline over electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and drumset. Louise Meintjes chronicles the recording and mixing of an album by Izintombi Zesimanje, historically the rival group of the Mahotella Queens. Set in the early 1990s during South Africa's tumultuous transition from apartheid to democratic rule, "Sound of Africa!" offers a rare portrait of the music recording process. It tracks the nuanced interplay among South African state controls, the music industry's transnational drive, and the mbaqanga artists' struggles for political, professional, and personal voice. Focusing on the ways artists, producers, and sound engineers collaborate in the studio control room, Meintjes reveals not only how particular mbaqanga sounds are shaped technically, but also how egos and artistic sensibilities and race and ethnicity influence the mix. She analyzes how the turbulent identity politics surrounding Zulu ethnic nationalism impacted mbaqanga artists' decisions in and out of the studio. Conversely, she explores how the global consumption of Afropop and African images fed back into mbaqanga during the recording process. Meintjes is especially attentive to the ways the emotive qualities of timbre (sound quality or tone color) forge complex connections between aesthetic practices and political ideology. Vivid photos by the internationally renowned photographer TJ Lemon further dramatize Meintjes' ethnography.

Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio

Signal and noise

This chapter explores how industry personnel respond to audience and industry expectations by examining the negotiations behind the production of world music. The chapter looks behind and underneath world music products to analyze, not just the effects of representational decisions, but also how people make these decisions—how they negotiate the dynamics of representational and interpretive distortion. Industry personnel work with musicians and audiences to develop products that are authentic and sellable. They play with and push against markers of authenticity that intersect and parallel each other on axes of locality and globality, liveness and mediation, marginality and mainstream, purity and hybridity. Authenticity occupies different positions on these axes depending on musicians’, industry actors’, and audiences’ expectations. As they negotiate this web of expectations, industry personnel reinforce and contest the discourses of alterity, essentialist stereotypes, and unequal power dynamics that continue to be so problematic in the world music industry.

The Art of Representing the Other: Industry Personnel in the World Music Industry

Este artigo aborda as práticas e valores de um conjunto de músicos em autoedição, dentro do universo peculiar da música popular de matriz rural em Portugal, no contexto das duas últimas décadas em que a produção de música sofre o impacto dos fenómenos de digitalização e desintermediação. Tomando como âncoras teóricas as teses de Bourdieu e de Becker sobre campos de produção cultural e mundos artísticos, respetivamente, bem como estudos recentes em torno das culturas musicais DIY (do-it-yourself), caracterizadas pela adesão a um conjunto de práticas e valores autónomos em relação aos circuitos dominantes de produção de música, e recorrendo a entrevistas semidirigidas a uma amostra de músicos, procuramos compreender o sentido das suas práticas em relação à edição e à sua articulação com outras atividades que desenvolvem para a disseminação da sua produção musical. Concluímos que a adesão a modos DIY de produção e distribuição de música nestes músicos, embora seja evidente em muitos casos, não é total ou incondicional, seja pelas ligações mais institucionais dentro de um subcampo de produção de música popular, seja pelas vantagens que muitos ainda encontram em estabelecer parcerias com editoras e distribuidoras.

Nos interstícios do subcampo: autoedição e empreendedorismo em músicos folk em Portugal no século XXI

This chapter employs Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's work on scalability to examine the music manager, a kind of popular-music analog to the nineteenth-century concert agents discussed in the previous chapter. Today's music managers act as chiefs of staff for musicians, helping them build their team of lawyers, publicists, agents, and more, attempting to make what is nonscalable—a musician (who can only write so many songs, give so many concerts, make so many recordings)—as un-nonscalable as possible. Music managers attempt to transform their clients into productive laborers whose work can be scaled through building and maintaining an audience and loyal fanbase, which must be constantly cultivated, maintained, and augmented through the unceasing labors of musicians on social media. 

Making Musicians into Productive Laborers

The record labels Sahel Sounds and Sublime Frequencies position themselves as insurgent alternatives to the mainstream music industry’s capitalist profiteering in the global circulation of Tuareg m...

Arid fidelity, reluctant capitalists: salvage, curation, and the circulation of Tuareg music on independent record labels

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Arid fidelity, reluctant capitalists: salvage, curation, and the circulation of Tuareg music on independent record labels