Kwaito's Promise

Kwaito's Promise PDF Author: Gavin Steingo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636254X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today - who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime - Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them

Kwaito's Promise

Kwaito's Promise PDF Author: Gavin Steingo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636254X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
Examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today - who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime - Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them

Kwaito's Promise

Kwaito's Promise PDF Author: Gavin Steingo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636268X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them. Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Kwaito Bodies

Kwaito Bodies PDF Author: Xavier Livermon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007354
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
In Kwaito Bodies Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg's nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

South African Popular Music

South African Popular Music PDF Author: Lior Phillips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501383442
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the '40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the '00s, this book explores vignettes taken from across South Africa's popular music history. There are moments in time where music can be a mighty weapon in the fight for freedom. Disguised in a danceable hook or shouted for the world to hear, artists have used songs to deliver important truths and bring listeners together in the face of a segregated reality. In the grip of the brutal apartheid era, South Africa crafted its own idiosyncratic popular musical vernacular that operated both as sociopolitical tool and realm of escape. In a country with 11 official languages, music had the power to unite South Africans in protest. Artists bloomed a new idyll from the branches of countless storied musical traditions, and in turn found themselves banned or exiled-the profound epiphany that music can exist both within the pleasure of itself and for serving a far greater purpose.

Hip Hop around the World [2 volumes]

Hip Hop around the World [2 volumes] PDF Author: Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313357595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 945

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Book Description
This set covers all aspects of international hip hop as expressed through music, art, fashion, dance, and political activity. Hip hop music has gone from being a marginalized genre in the late 1980s to the predominant style of music in America, the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, and other countries around the world. Hip Hop around the World includes more than 450 entries on global hip hop culture as it includes music, art, fashion, dance, social and cultural movements, organizations, and styles of hip hop. Virtually every country is represented in the text. Most of the entries focus on music styles and notable musicians and are unique in that they discuss the sound of various hip hop styles and musical artists' lyrical content, vocal delivery, vocal ranges, and more. Many additional entries deal with dance styles, such as breakdancing or b-boying/b-girling, popping/locking, clowning, and krumping, and cultural movements, such as black nationalism, Nation of Islam, Five Percent Nation, and Universal Zulu Nation. Country entries take into account politics, history, language, authenticity, and personal and community identification. Special care is taken to draw relationships between people and entities such as mentor-apprentice, producer-musician, and more.

Kwaito

Kwaito PDF Author: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783861358169
Category : Kwaito (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description


Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture PDF Author: Grace A Musila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000588343
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

Lion's Share

Lion's Share PDF Author: Veit Erlmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023597
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.

Sonorous Worlds

Sonorous Worlds PDF Author: Yana Stainova
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472039326
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In Venezuela's El Sistema, music is both a means of government control and a form of emancipation for youth musicians

Born To Kwaito

Born To Kwaito PDF Author: Esinako Ndabeni
Publisher: Blackbird Books
ISBN: 1928337783
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
"Born To Kwaito considers the meaning of kwaito music now. °Now not only as in °after 1994' or the Truth Commission but as a place in the psyche of black people in post-apartheid South Africa. This collection of essays tackles the changing meaning of the genre after its decline and its ever-contested relevance. Through rigorous historical analysis as well as threads of narrative journalism Born To Kwaito interrogates issues of artistic autonomy, the politics of language in the music, and whether the music is part of a strand within the larger feminist movement in South Africa. Candid and insightful interviews from the genre's foremost innovators and torchbearers, such as Mandla Spikiri, Arthur Mafokate, Robbie Malinga and Lance Stehr, provide unique historical context to kwaito music's greatest highs, most captivating hits and most devastating lows. Born To Kwaito offers up a history of the genre from below by having conversations not only with musicians but with fans, engineers, photographers and filmmakers who bore witness to a revolution. Living in a place between criticism and biography, Born To Kwaito merges academic theories and rigorous journalism to offer a new understanding into how the genre influenced other art forms such as fashion, TV and film. The book also reflects on how some of the music's best hits have found new life through the mouths of local hip-hop's current kingmakers and opened kwaito up to a new generation. The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive history of the genre but rather a present active analysis of that history as it settles and finds its meaning