Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse

12 5 Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-063 © 2010 Duke University Press

Thinking about utopia is relevant in our times. It is particularly urgent in our globalized historical moment in which dystopia is all around us. Recalibrated forms of disempowerment and systems of oppression stabi-lize regimes of unprecedented wealth. Unfettered privatization, eroded infrastructures, and decades-long wars have created landscapes of both dire suffering and gated privilege. What Zygmunt Bauman called the “century of camps” has flourished in this millennium.1 Brown women’s bodies are affixed to machines in export-processing zones; transnationally owned private prisons provide the warehoused with high-tech forms of “death in life.” Internally displaced persons and refugee camps hold mil-lions of people in suspended “no places,” penned in by violence.2

In the last thirty years, certain regions in Africa have become bloody war zones, violent battlegrounds with no clear sense of enemy or ally. In this era of what Bauman has called “globalizing wars and globalization induced wars,” constant battles and wars have created their own culture and economy.3 One young fighter from the civil wars in Liberia describes the culture he grew up in as the “Kalashnikov lifestyle,” after the common and inexpensive Russian-designed automatic assault rifle. “The Kalash-nikov lifestyle is our business advantage,” he boasts.4 The sound of gunfire is constant; it is the sound track of the everyday. “This is music,” another young National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter exults. “We love the music. . . . They play fantastically. . . . [The sound of death] is the sound of music to us.”5 Gruesome forms of dystopia blossom in the demolished regions, so that the sounds of death become the sounds of music in the young boys’ ears.

Buzz and RumbleGlobal Pop Music and Utopian Impulse

Jayna Brown

12 6 Brown ∙ Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse

Wars bleed into each other across national boundaries. Initially established as a utopian promised land for former North American slaves, Liberia has been in a perpetual state of war since the 1980s.6 Liberia’s conflict spilled into neighboring Sierra Leone, another territory formed as a kind of “utopian” community for freed slaves. But nothing is comparable to what is known as the Second Congo War, which involved seven African countries and ran officially from 1998 until 2003. Waves of violence con-tinue; in 2008, they were concentrated in the eastern region of the Demo-cratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). The war is known for particularly brutal practices: soldiers have perfected forms of extreme sexual violence as well as acts of dismemberment (noses, fingers, lips, and limbs removed by machete). The results of war also take the most banal forms; disease and malnutrition claim the highest numbers.

In Kinshasa, Congo, in the 1990s a type of music called konono was turned into a form of music exclusively for funerals. The rasping and insistent rhythms and the harsh, blown-out sound of an electrically ampli-fied likembe; the singing voices, emitted through megaphones, becoming both sharp and muffled; these all reflect the extreme and dehumanizing environment. The dissonant landscape inspired what Achille Mbembe has called “the willingness to blur the distinction between sound and noise, to join art to the world of screams.”7 This was music for death in a region where a language of torture was the common tongue. But these were also songs of love: “During a funeral, we play a lot of songs that are love related,” musician Mawangu Mingiedi explains, “because the departed one needs to be consoled.”8 The space of music still holds utopian possi-bility in the territories of extreme pain. The punctuating sounds of death described by the child soldier are answered by reclamatory notes of love and consolation, which marvelously refuse to be silenced.

This essay is about global popular music and dance, forged in oppres-sive and violent terrains, and these expressive forms’ relation to utopian fantasy and material possibility. I am evoking the heavily freighted term utopia in service of my wider inquiry into the ways in which other worlds and states of being have been envisioned or practiced in social theory, speculative fiction, and expressive cultures. I am interested in the ways music and dance, sound and the body, might be sites from which to take up the utopian as a mode of critical analysis. Here I am looking at musical and dance movements coming out of Africa: the first is the form developed in Kinshasa, loosely called konono, included on a compilation called Con-gotronics released by the Belgian label Crammed Disc; the second is a form of contemporary dance music called kuduro (or kudoro) coming out of the poor suburbs of Luanda, Angola, and brought to British and American attention by the Portuguese group Buraka Som Sistema and the British/Sri Lankan musician M.I.A. I also consider the latter groups, as their work

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is part of a new moment in musical and dance-movement formations. Considering these movements evokes discussion of the politics of cultural utopia generated in and around the symbolic Africa. Konono came out of Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko’s authenticité campaign, an authori-tarian design to reclaim Congo based on rejection of Western influence and an enforced return to authentic African cultural forms; konono was given European recognition through the mediation of Belgian music producer Vincent Kenis. Kuduro developed in Angola, long the site of imperial proxy wars between the United States and Russia, and it became an important influence on global pop music coming out of Europe. I argue that these forms, heavily mediated by technology, circulating relatively indepen-dently of market regimes, mixing styles and forms from across the global South and Europe, cannot be contained by the particular utopian desires deployed and commodified in the marketing of world beat or world music, desires connected to the legacies of colonial narrative. In such a narrative, the natives’ mellifluous purity and generosity act as a gentle reproach, an appeal to the moral conscience of Westerners. The terms of contact, made possible by the beneficence of a curatorial and conservationist West, create the possibility of “oceanic unification” and Western absolution. Another fantasy evolves out of this constellation, that of the brave and rebellious consumer. I argue that despite these overdetermined forms of dream-ing, we can look past, or through, manipulations of utopian desire — be it marketing strategy or an artists’ own investment — and recognize the utopian in new moments of global connection and diasporic formation. Much can be said about the off-label uses of technology and of the body as a site for constantly renewable joy. Parsing from the utopian fantasies of world-beat liberalism, I am exploring the concept of a utopian impulse in black expressive forms that is as momentary, ephemeral, and elusive as it is physically, historically, and politically placed.

Considering these forms in the historical contexts of Mobutu’s Congo and civil war–torn Angola leads us to think about social utopias, concep-tualizations of ideal worlds that offer complete programs for alternate social systems, often tethered to nationalist projects. These are useful and powerful dreamscapes that harness the needs and desires of the populace, but they are limited in scope as they often remain purely compensatory reforms, which, as Phillip Wegner has noted, while “projecting ‘solu-tions’ in the future to problems of the present risk reducing the dialectical complexity of the historical process.”9 Anti-utopian criticism insists that social utopias restrict individual freedom and inevitably lead to totalitarian regimes, as an anti-utopian perspective considers humankind essentially incapable of changing without violent domination. Many utopian pro-grams have become authoritarian projects of social engineering, as did the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo.10 Authenticité was the word of


law and traditional forms of music were enforced. Yet, as I argue, as music melded with electronic equipment and repurposed forms of technology, its buzz and rumble refused authoritarian control and claimed a much wider space than Mobutu’s nationalist agenda. The buzz and the rumble is the sound of the new space the music creates, the space people create out of necessity for their sanity. It is shaped by the horrific circumstances of post-Mobutu Congo, but the buzz and rumble is the power that rides through these circumstances; improvising on the refuse of destruction, it is both of the moment and transcendent.

We can challenge criticism by remembering that utopia, in its true meaning, remains always unfinished and never fully attainable. We can-not realize utopian totalities, for they will be the consequence of histori-cally situated processes, and we are unable to imagine past our current paradigm. Utopian realization remains, to use utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s term, “Not-Yet.” We cannot fully know the details of what a state of newness would be like because it is just beyond the horizon.11 The use-fulness of critical social and fictional utopias is to offer the “education of desire,” to see beyond personal and private gratification (the evidence of capitalist hegemony’s successful harnessing of people’s felt yearnings) to moments and periods of collective fulfillment, or at least to recognize them as always possible. This is to understand utopia as a process, an ongoing activity, a continual reaching forward that can help spur revolutionary action. It suggests the bringing in of an entirely new paradigm, unreach-able from here.12

Critics have called utopian thought naive, escapist, and dangerous. In the face of strong anti-utopian argument, I insist that struggles against oppression would not exist if there were not some shared sense that other states of being were possible, where collective lives of abundance and happiness could be realized. No one can see a better world of alternate realities in full, but people feel the desire for it, anticipated in daily forms of interchange, and in their expressions of sadness, love, or sublime joy. As Fredric Jameson writes, “One cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.”13

In this essay I take up Bloch’s concept of anticipatory illumination, a utopian propensity or proclivity that infuses daily life and cultural prac-tices, manifesting in forms including play, literature, music, and dance.14 What animates collective and communal artistic creation is a utopian “energiea,” as Jameson calls it,15 an urge or a pulse that energizes social movements, art, and literature, showing up as what Tom Moylan calls “recoverable traces of radical longing in various cultural forms.”16 Utopian impulse does not rely on the idea of an essential, universal human nature or on the return of suppressed unconscious urges. It does not require a return

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to a state in the past or a revivification of a primordial or precognitive condition. We can conceive of a utopian impulse as a collective response situated in specific historical conjunctures of oppression and resilience.17 It suggests a kind of ineffable connection, a collective space free of possessive individualism, a condition of release from the liberal claim to autonomous, private ownership as defining the human. The weave of cooperating bodies and voices points to a place where blackness is not defined by its exchange value, where black people call to and with each other with waves not simply shaped by their history as property. It is not transcendent but intimately embedded in a shared history and the refusal to be contained by it.

In an oft-cited passage of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy insists that we recognize the utopian possibility of expressive arts: “The invocation of utopia references what, following Seyla Benhabib’s lead, I propose to call the politics of transfiguration . . . [which] exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams . . . will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims.”18 I would add that the lower registers evoked by Gilroy should be conceived of as not only sonic, but also fundamentally corporeal, in the experience of the flesh.

The search for sonic virtuosity has often divorced itself from the body, all but forgetting the ears. Too often the aural is prioritized over the corporeal. I argue that in analyses of music and sound we should not forget the sensate. Sound is not separate from the body, but intimately formed out of it, just as the voice is automatically a connection to the body. The voice proves a place where the physical is intimately part of the aural. I stress the importance of music’s connection to physical response, the utopian articulations of the body we find enacted in dance. It is our bodies as much as our souls that we seek to reclaim, or recover, despite the impossibility of restoration.

Thinking through ways to affirm what Mbembe has called the “pro-tean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another” brings me to what I call bodily utopias, the rehabitation of the body as a site of joy and exultation.19 It is important to think in terms of bodily utopian possibility, for the most potent dystopian states are corporeal. The state can be the repeated rape and mutilation of thousands of women in the war zones of central and northeastern Africa. These states can be based in forms of sensory deprivation and in the withholding of physical contact, such as in the touchless torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and in the supercarceral states of mechanized isolation in modern prisons of the United States, in which inmates sometimes go untouched for years. Lack of affection greatly contributes to the sicknesses afflicting children


without caretakers in war zones. Touch is essential to the concept of the repossession of bodily freedoms.

World Beat/Global Pop

Listening to the music from Kinshasa collected in the two volumes of Congotronics and to kuduro music from Luanda created by such sound mixers as Rei Helder, Dj Nays, Costuleta, and DJ Znobia, as well as the mixings and samplings of Europe-based Buraka Som Sistema and M.I.A., I am interested in the shifting terms of mediation between global pop and its older official cousin, world beat or world music. There is a dif-ference, as technology shifts us away from dependence on centralized music industries. What I am looking for is a way to think about music from disparate sites, not delimited by nation-state boundaries, and the possibilities for translocal formations of social connectivity. The original category of world music formed around a core utopian trope, the “first encounter” between Europeans and “discovered” peoples.20 The under-lying wish here was that the moment would transcend all social and politi-cal relations and offer Europe an exoneration that did not require any systemic change. The category of world beat was created as a marketing term in the early 1990s, but the conceptual ground preceded the term, developing within the fields of anthropology and musicology.21 The gen-erative interest in and marketing of world-beat music shares a narrative trajectory with utopian literature. This narrative is familiar in the liter-ary, and historical, imagination; adventurers, missionaries, or naturalists happen upon an ideal society of primitives, a utopia whose inhabitants lead lives of leisure and abundance. The cultural practices of the natives, their music and dance, are key expressions of their state of pure being. In world-beat music, the practice of encounter continues with exploratory musicians, record collectors, and other tourists seeking inspiration.

In their systematic studies and earnest classifications, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists sought to preserve forms of music by endangered populations, to freeze-dry musical traditions in an ethnographic present. Preservation had to be done not out of human curiosity but as a “moral imperative.” As in Edward Curtis’s A Dying Race, in which the photog-rapher collected thousands of photographs of Northern American Indian tribes, the call was to represent people, as Philip Bohlman puts it, “unable to represent themselves.”22 The indigenous have been situated as represen-tatives of the past and the holders of the future, the transcendent solution to the fracturing politics of race and global inequality. The world-musical search for an ideal space from which to conduct a redeemed sociality is usually concluded in the romance of a pristine landscape: on an island, in a forest or a jungle, or on a windy plane. Any mediation, technologi-


cal or human, must be camouflaged, hidden in the bush. The process of recording must be made to appear as simply capturing, the real work of the studio kept quiet.

Among other forms, as Philip Bohlman has noted, folk songs “created a space in which one cross section of the world’s music would bring human beings . . . together.”23 The entitled violence of Western imperialism and colonialism could be placed in the past and resolved. Social hierarchies could be euphemistically called “differences” and, in the space of music, dissolve into a state of utopian unity.

The idea of music as a universal and timeless sphere comes out of a utopian longing. Folk and world music can be as easily adopted by a lan-guage of the “oceanic.” David Schwarz writes, “The all-around pleasure of listening to music is one of many ‘oceanic’ fantasies. . . . Although these fantasies are quite different from one another in obvious ways, they share a common feature: the boundary separating the body from the external world seems dissolved or crossed in some way.”24 This state of the oceanic dissolve is what people are buying as listeners and participants in the kind of call-and-response demonstration format of some live world-music appearances. The recording offers a solid fetish to hold the desire for this state.

The field of ethnomusicology has changed, and many musicians, anthropologists, musicologists, label owners, and music buffs have an awareness and critique of the political implications of such journeys of discovery and absolution from imperialist violence. Ethical guidelines have been etched and apologies made. Yet there remains a curious preserve. In terms of time, the fantasy of the first encounter is a foundational process in the construction of world music and remains a site of intense utopian fantasy.25 There remains a belief that at the heart of any encounter is a moment powerful enough to transcend even its own politics of inequality. In terms of space, and less laden with troublesome history, is the concept of contact zones, spaces within the music where forms, symbolic of the bodies they represent, crisscross each other, their touch producing new forms of personal fulfillment.26 But this concept can be just as misleading as the first, as it takes social inequalities, the material conditions of the music’s creation, as purely aesthetic “differences.”

I am not arguing that we resurrect the idea of appropriation, because expressive forms — music, song, dance — cannot be owned. The term exploitation is also inaccurate, as it dismisses the possibility that the musi-cians have some negotiating power in the terms of exchange. What I argue is that every exchange and encounter is embedded in a history and a politics and cannot claim, on the grounds of compensatory recognition, to be a transcendent form of utopian vision. We must make a distinction between a utopia of personal gratification and that which is glimpsed, felt, or created collectively within the material relations of its creation.


While I critique the embedded inequalities in the production of what gets called world-beat music, I wonder, when thinking about emancipatory practices of disenfranchised people migrating and immigrating across the globe, what fields of possibility transnationally produced and circulating music may open up. These possibilities are not invested in claiming indi-vidual national identity; I am thinking of people to whom the nation-state formation has never offered, and does not offer, its warm embrace. These populations exist as surplus labor or as completely “redundant,” outside of civic polities: in prisons, refugee camps, and slums surrounding major metropolises.27 I am interested in how new forms of migration are reshap-ing black expressive cultures, expanding how we think about diaspora. As I argue, these forms are increasingly mediated by technology at the same time as they are less defined by Western curatorial mediation. Within the new recording technologies, proliferation and manipulation are part of the sound itself. Mixes and remixes are shared uncontrollably, as they are regularly uploaded to Web and blog pages. The record, or the tape, no longer has the power of preservation. Footage of real-time participa-tion with the music is recorded and uploaded, music “videos” are cheaply made, no longer reliant on big studio time and money. Manipulation and “inauthenticity” is what makes this new moment increasingly defined by a state of play, a spinning off from, if not free of, the market.

Collectivity is made and histories shared by the movement of expres-sive forms between both spatial and virtual sites. In our historical moment, the concept of diaspora has expanded, truly letting go of a center or site of return. These new formations take flight in the music of the singer/rapper Maya Arulpragasam (M.I.A.). Her album Kala tracks the forma-tion of new diasporas, the new routes of migration between Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Europe. Her album signals not just the one-way movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants from Africa and Asia to Europe, but the cross-migratory relationships created between displaced Africans and Asians as the result of globalizing capital and global wars. The movement is not just “bush to block”; it is about the porousness between underdeveloped and overdeveloped worlds, the pres-ence and effects of modern technologies in the global South. This seems to me the direction that global popular music can take us.

In this world, Sri Lanka and the Congo are neighboring states. Postmillennial global pop music is produced out of a world now linked in complex Webworks: satellites, cell phones, and other communication electronics reach into previously isolated sites. Cell phones are part of life in the remotest villages. Young Angolans use cell-phone sounds to pro-duce kuduro music. Other forms of global “ghetto tech” flourish, and with them vibrant forms of dance affirming the resilience of collective bodies, however maimed and disabled by poverty and war. Through inexpensive


modes of production, Internet downloads and file sharing, new music is much less reliant on older systems of curation. These forms scoff at the term world music, as their intercontinental exchanges now have much less need for European interlocutors.

Considering the broad field of access, and the enthusiastically anti-nationalist embrace of technology in musical production by disaffected brown people, it is difficult not to be excited at the music’s and musicians’ expanding presence. With the potential of new digital technologies, new forms of intimacy, contact, interaction, and cocreation are possible.28 This is not to share entirely the utopian vision of new-media scholars who have claimed that new forms of communication and circulation of informa-tion can shape a brave new world, where true egalitarianism and global democracy are assured. On the other side of the channel from the Scylla of world-beat primitivism sits the Charybdis of technophiliac utopianism in which all social barriers are torn down by a populist digital insurgency.

There are limits to these claims of freedom through and from media-tion; as the Belgian record label made the work of the konono artists avail-able to the West, so M.I.A. also worked as a mediator, “putting people on the map, who never seen a map.” Without producer Vincent Kenis, or M.I.A., I would never have known to access the music and videos on YouTube.

What can keep us from the dream world of false utopias, those that transcend the body and all earthly politics, is that musics demand we reach to understand them in their own historical conjunctures. My interest is always in the breakages and ruptures from which the music and dance come. These are the convulsive politics of place, the histories of political struggle and conflict and the sounds of those contradictions. It includes colonialism, revolutions, postrevolutions, and civil and global wars shaping the context out of which these songs and movements are created.

Rumble in the Jungle

The forests of the Congo are not just home to the mythical pristine forest of a sprite-like pygmy folk, whose music inspired generations of world musicians.29 They are also filled by generations of spirits who died very modern and unsung deaths. They include the millions who died violently during King Leopold’s reign and those fleeing the turbulence following independence. In the late 1990s, the wars spreading from Uganda and Rwanda led to horrific bloodbaths. Neoliberalist policy turned areas with rich natural resources into enclaves ruled by commercial interests and factions of local governments; the United States and Europe perpetuate the violence with the sale of small arms and other forms of support for parliamentary groups they depend on to protect their interests.


Kinshasa had long been deteriorating under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and the once flourishing music industry had shut down: musicians including Tabu Ley and Papa Wemba immigrated to Paris. Mobutu banned any foreign music from coming into the country and allowed only “authentically” Congolese music to be played. Impoverished refugees and migrants from rural areas established ethnic communities outside of Kinshasa. It was the music coming out of these communities that interested the Belgian musician Vincent Kenis.

Musician Mawangu Mingiedi founded Konono No. 1, the first of the electro-African traditional music groups, in the 1970s, with people from the Bazombo lands of the Congo/Angola border who had migrated to Kinshasa. The music’s defining sound is a raspy distortion that both over-whelms with dissonance and mesmerizes. It is created through improvised instruments, including sardine cans and hubcaps, hooked up to equally improvised amplification equipment. The main instrument is the likembe. Mingiedi explains their music: “That’s what we call masikilu. . . . It used to be played with drums and a trumpet made out of an elephant’s tusk. I took that sound and modified it by using the likembe, the thumb piano. It was made out of bamboo back then.”30 Mingiedi explains the blasted electronic technique that began to form in their sound: “I also used to play a lot with electronics, radios and whatnot. Then one day it just hit me. I decided to convert the bamboo to metal so I could make a better sound from the likembe.”31

The form of music grew out of Mobutu Sese Seko’s authenticité cam-paign, instituted in 1971. Under authenticité, traditional musicians from the rural areas were encouraged and paid to teach authentic forms of African music to younger musicians. These groups, such as Zaiko Langa Langa, incorporated these resuscitated musical practices into their sound. Mingiedi explains how these younger musicians copied his sounds: “People who are used to playing electric guitars, they would copy my songs, modify a little bit, and then they would exploit it. They did that for many, many, many years.” But this sound grew alongside, not out of, the influential music culture of Congo.

Until the 1980s, Kinshasa was a major center of musical production in Africa. In the late 1940s, Greek immigrants and traders set up recording studios in Kinshasa. Radio stations were also started, in French for Belgian colonizers and in Lingala for Kinshasan Africans. The first recordings to make it to the Congo were from Latin America and particularly Cuba; Congolese music remained heavily influenced by Cuban son music, and the sound of Kinshasa became known as rumba. The guitar was a main instrument; a group of emigrants called coastmen had brought the gui-tar to Congo in the 1800s. Playing a selection of European and African instruments, musicians including Kabasele, Iziedi, Roitelet, and the soon-


to-be-quite-powerful Franco flowered in and around two major bands, OK Jazz and African Jazz. These groups influenced the music from other parts of Africa.

But, by the 1990s, many of Congo’s surviving musicians had immi-grated to France, and their music had changed. Under authenticité, Mobutu ended all foreign control of Zairean businesses, including the major musical recording and distribution companies, and handed them over to a select group of Zaireans.32 This began the erosion of the economic infrastructure that would spell the end of a prolific popular music industry in Congo.

With a politics of cultural recovery, Mobutu successfully harnessed the powerful utopian longings of a brutally colonized people. The move-ment meant to reclaim territory: Mobutu changed the name of the country to Zaire and ordered the names of streets, villages, and buildings changed from their former colonial names to more authentically African names. It also meant to reclaim an African identity: people were to shed all influences of their colonial oppressors; women could no longer wear pants and men were required to wear a long shirt called an abacost designed by Mobutu himself.33 Zaireans were also required to change their names. Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. The legendary popular musicians all changed their names, partly for self-preservation: Rochereau (Pascal Tabou) became Tabu Ley, Docteur Nico (Nicolas Kasanda) became Kasanda, Franco (Francois Engbondu) became Luambo Makiadi.

This conscious Africanization spoke to people’s desire to celebrate independence from Belgian dominance and oppression, and the first four years of Zaire were exultant. “[It was] a very interesting moment in the his-tory of Zaire,” says president of Tabilulu Productions Lubangi Muniania, in describing the experience of growing up under authenticité:

People came from villages. People like Grandparents and came [sic] and we spent time with them teaching us about the traditional life. Which a lot of us did not know. Myself I did not know. I remember that time. I was growing up like a little kid in Europe. Really. Growing up speaking French. Did not have anything to do with the village. So they came. Taught us who we were. We changed our names like for me from Walter Henri Gabin to Lubangi Muniania which had a meaning.34

The program of authenticité was also part of a diaspora-wide black- consciousness movement. African American funk, soul, and R&B music found its way into Congolese sound.

The boxing match in 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa’s Mai 20 Stadium inspired enthusiasm and calls for a renewed Pan-African identity. A three-day musical event was planned to precede what Ali called the “rumble in the jungle,” and what Zaireans


preferred to call super-combat du siecle. An astounding group of musicians from across the diaspora performed.35 As Gary Stewart asserts, this was the zenith of authenticité, and the mid-1970s saw the increased brutality of Mobutu’s dictatorship. Mobutu exploited the utopian desires of the nation’s people for profit, looting the country and foreign-aid contributions for over eight billion dollars.

Although Vincent Kenis had visited Kinshasa in the 1980s and heard Mingiedi and the other konono musicians, it was not until 2005 that he was able to record them and release Konono No. 1. Its sequel, Congotronics 2: Buzz ’n’ Rumble from the Urb ’n’ Jungle, followed in 2006. Kenis’s involve-ment in recording the musicians on the two collections is complex.36 Dif-ferentiating himself from other producers, he refuses the role of curator: “One of the reasons why I don’t like a lot of world music, because I can hear, and I can feel that there is a misunderstanding between what the musicians want and what the producer pretends to be standing for. ‘I know the market. I know what people like. I know he should change this music to do this or that.’ I don’t like this role.” Reflecting on the recording process for the albums, he says, “It was just music, sounds, trying to make it work through speakers which is what production should be about, and not a power game between black and white, which I really dislike.”37 It is important to Kenis to communicate this fact that he was able to transcend power relations in his musical exchange, declaring that the forms of “encounter” he and his subjects enacted were mutually respectful.

A key way he does this is by making a point of avoiding the studio. “In the studio, sound mixing is a process of negotiation for control over the electronic manipulation of style,” writes Louise Meintjes, in her ethnogra-phy of South African music production.38 The studio functions as fetish, a rarified space, privileged as the site of creation. According to Kenis, the studio is isolated and insulated and strips the music of what is essential, what Kenis explained he found in the live performances of the groups in Kinshasa. Kenis insisted on recording in Kinshasa, and not in Europe, claiming in fatherly tones that the musicians were unable to retain their artistic integrity before a Western audience. When the artists performed before a Dutch audience, he explains: “They are aliens, and they start acting like aliens. And they lose a part of the music that is very strong, and very reflective, and very progressive. They want to show off because they’re like Martians. I felt that in the recording and in the concerts that they did in Kinshasa there was some kind of continuity, some kind of driving force that I didn’t find so much in Europe.” The music must not be mixed in a studio, and so Kenis worked out of his hotel room. After the music was recorded, musicians came to his room for the remixing process. “The logical thing to do was to bring some of the musicians into the hotel room, and ask them, ‘What do you want? How do you feel the balance


should be? How loud should this instrument be? What do you think about the sound of this and that?’ And it was really amazing. Because there was no cultural filter between us anymore,” he says.39 In looking for a moment free of all cultural filter, Kenis is held by history, by the hope for an absolve, the fantasy of egalitarian creation. Here is the hoped-for moment, when music rises above power relations and equality is achieved.

Kenis’s hotel room becomes a utopian space, one in which he and the musicians can transcend all social barriers. But this space is far from neutral; it is a symbolically loaded site for such cultural interchange. What can be more intimate than the room of a hotel: the suspended site of the tourist, the foreign journalist, the lovers’ tryst? Most important, it is pri-vate, closed off and hidden from meddling industry politics. The act of mediation, between Kenis, the technology, and the musicians, is free of all other participants.

The most powerful moments of transcendence happen for Kenis when he can share technologies with the musicians. The culture barrier lifts for Kenis when he lets one of the musicians mix on the computer:

I was so excited by this, because as I told you there was no more cultural barrier. I said, “Okay, this is a graphic equalizer, and you just move it around until you like it.” This guy doesn’t read, doesn’t write, but he had no prob-lem using the computer at all. So we were bypassing all this ideological shit that stands in the way when a rich, white man wants to play games with a poor African. You know? I really enjoyed this. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to mix the album in Kinshasa.

The computer here becomes the great unifier, the democratic equalizer.Kenis is conscious of having the musicians feel and decide what

sounds right, yet, by bringing equipment and suggesting uses for it, he is also as responsible for shaping the sound as any other producer. Yet some-how as Kenis shares his technological equipment, his equalizers enable the musicians and Kenis to bypass “all this ideological shit.” The exchange is around the distortion, the manipulation of first the distinctive sounds of the musicians’ amplification and then their use of Kenis’s equalizing machine. The implication is that technology unifies. The meeting of souls is around technological mediation. This is the magic moment where the cultural filter dissipates, not around the verisimilitude of authentic traditional music, but around future landscapes glimpsed through technological means.

At least Kenis is interested in the music coming out of Kinshasa in the here and now, not with preserving tradition. But world music still often looks to the past for its haven, and musicians perform authenticity. In a recent report from the 2007 World Music Exposition (WOMEX) in Seville, Spain, the Kasai Allstars, one of the groups recorded by Kenis, is described as a “symbol of ethnic unity.” According to Kenis, he brought


these musicians together from different and oppositional ethnic groups from Kasai, and after he left they stayed together. Music dissolved even internecine conflict, and timeless tradition is resurrected as a unifying force. The reporter explains: “One tradition that the Kasai ethnic groups all seem to share is the festival of the new moon where all the musicians come together to perform for the customary chief. The Kasai Allstars re-created this occasion onstage, ultimately coaxing the big chief with his furs and body paint to rise from his throne and dance with graceful understated moves.” The band’s spokesman adds to this explanation (in translation): “Traditional music is our life, our histories found in our songs, the stories of peoples, towns dynasties and chiefs, passed down from father to son, for centuries.” The WOMEX reporter adds: “Kasai Allstars doing their part to keep the old ways alive . . . based on the mesmerizing music” have become the “Congotronics torch bearers.”40 But where has the buzz gone from the version that Kasai Allstars are staging in Seville? Where is the drastic electric hum, the sound of Kinshasa, the sound of the present that Kenis sought to capture? It is gone from the version appearing in the world-music variety show.

Represent the World Town

“Somalia, Angola, Ghana, Ghana, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bam-boo Banga,” M.I.A. chants on “Bamboo Banga,” from her album Kala. Here we enjoy the empire striking, not so much striking back but in rec-ognition that the terms on which empire rested, as well as resistance to it, are destabilized; our crisis of opportunity is the porousness of global geo-graphical and virtual borders. While Africa and South Asia meet on the album in sonic form, often transmitted through virtual/digital space, the music recognizes the grounded realities shaping peoples’ lives in the global South. War is the lingua franca, paramilitary groups splintered into fac-tions whose interests center on areas of rich resource: where diamonds are mined and oil drilled; where drugs are made; and where women, as cheap and/or sexual labor, are rounded up for import — situations capitalized on by global small-arms sales. “Do you know the cost of AKs up in Africa? 20 dollars ain’t shit to you but that’s how much they are,” M.I.A. sings. Her voice swims in a post – nation-state set of battles, shaped by and devoid of nationalist fervor, registering new waves of illegal and extralegal migration. “If you can catch me at the border, I got visas in my name,” she says; and, if asked, she could easily “make them all day.” The perspec-tive of the album is quotidian dystopias of dispossession, lethal migratory travels, and an exultation of underground economies, black markets, and piracy. “Hands up, guns out, represent the world town” is the chant of thousands. Disenfranchisement is a kind of access to the world.41


Politically, M.I.A.’s music looks to third-world revolutionary move-ments, like that of her father, and to the identifications made between guer-rillas fighting for their independence. But in her music, made in the first decade of this century, there is a gap between the utopian desires around which the wars began and what the wars are now, a gap filled with ambiva-lence about the institutionalization of violence. Filled with gunfire, bombs, and random explosions of electrified sound, her music may defiantly claim the right to fight, but it also recognizes that war cultures are what have formed out of many of the African and Asian revolutionary movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And now it is not at all clear what people are fighting for. Maya’s call-out for “third world democracy” on her second album, Kala, is a poignant, if hazy, gaze at the utopian horizon.

M.I.A.’s music and message on her first and second albums are shaped by what is left behind from these earlier black utopias. Much of her sound seems to ask: what does a generation do with the legacy of their par-ents’ revolutionary politics? How do we form protest or art in the aftermath of third-world independence movements, politics that have balkanized into irresolvable internecine battles and beached up as gory bloodbaths? M.I.A. does not abandon a politics of freedom fighting, but the battles lose their righteous moorings and become the inescapable terms of existence.

The utopian pulse is not nostalgic for a lost revolutionary purity of purpose. Nor is it looking to somewhere in the future or to some plan that may bring peace and prosperity. The music on this album registers the profound ethical ambiguity accompanying modern wars. It does not have the self-righteousness of justified violence, but it also does not escape that ethos. It allows in the voice of child soldiers, with their Kalashnikov lifestyles. It gestures to deeper dystopias, in which children, often after the murder of their parents, are recruited into the paramilitaries with the use of methamphetamines and gunpowder, and grow to enjoy the bonding rituals of violence. But within the music’s ambivalence and ambiguity lingers a romanticized notion of violence. It is as if M.I.A. cannot accept the true scope of that violence in its entirety, without threatening allegiance to the idea of freedom fighting her father lives by.

M.I.A. is a product of this past decade’s technological landscape. Her music is made of beats and prerecorded samples, mixes created completely on the computer. Her music was produced independently and made popu-lar through DJ play in underground clubs and through Internet access and file sharing rather than by any major-label recognition. And, above all, her music is dance music. The shrieks and clonks and horns are the anarchic sounds of turbulent movement, of irrepressible play. Dance music ensures that listening is never passive consumption. It demands participation, cocreation; it must be practiced. It demands we stay in the present; there is nowhere else to go. The power of this music and movement is not generated


out of forgetfulness or nostalgia. It is generated through play. Wherever there is bliss, ecstasy, or joy, there is a pulse of the utopian energeia.

“Tsunami Télécommande”

M.I.A.’s album has a range of influences, but one notable form is the movement called kuduro. M.I.A. was first introduced to the sound by Buraka Som Sistema, three young musicians from Lisbon who had incor-porated into their own music the rhythms they had first heard coming from the section of Lisbon settled by immigrant communities from Por-tugal’s former colonies. It had traveled there in the 1980s and 1990s from the suburbs of Luanda.

Made in a nation shaped by thirty years of war for independence, followed by another thirty years of civil war, the music from Luanda is assaulting, harsh, broken, and relentless, a hot mechanical, bloodless, dys-topian sound, echoing like the sound of warfare. First created by young Angolans by combining ringtones on their cell phones, it is the sound of a black planet: a mix of 1990s European electronica, English drum and bass, Brazilian baile funk and samba, African drum styles, Mexican banda and cumbia, black American hip-hop, soul, Cuban and Puerto Rican reg-gaeton, Dominican bachata, and sometimes Jamaican dub. The dances incorporate breaking, popping and locking, vogueing, capoeira, and vari-ous dance styles from western Africa. “Kuduro was never world music,” DJ Riot of Sistema explains. “It wasn’t born on congas and bongos, as some traditional folk-music. It was kids making straight-up dance-music from, like, ’96. Playing this new music, this new African music, that feels straight-up political in itself.” Rather than attempting faithful re-creation, Sistema created their own version of kuduro. Like M.I.A., their own music has its own decentering intentions. “If you listen to [our] record, it’s like a trip around the world,” says DJ Riot. “It starts in Angola, then goes to Portugal, then goes to Brazil. These countries are all very connected: the Portuguese once took Angolan slaves to Brazil. As well as that, we drew on dubstep from the UK, and went off to Sri Lanka a bit with M.I.A. It’s an album about the world without United States at its centre.”42

A different kind of kuduro comes out of the African clubs in Lisbon, as it is produced and played on state-of-the-art turntable technology rather than the scrappy systems and cell phones of Luanda, and as the dance moves indoors, off the dusty banlieu courtyard. But Sistema became iden-tified as the group to bring the movement legitimating recognition. “Do you feel as if you’ve become kuduro ambassadors to the world?” an inter-viewer asks DJ Riot of Sistema. “I’m gonna be honest: I think that’s a little bit unavoidable, because we’re bringing the rhythm outside of Portugal, outside of Angola,” DJ Riot replies. “But that’s a very heavy expression:


kuduro ambassador. I know what you mean when you say that, but we don’t feel like it. For us, for Portuguese guys, the reality is totally different: kuduro is just another influence for us, we’re just using the rhythms, and if you listen to [the Sistema album] Black Diamond you can hear loads of other influences. For some guy in Angola, the way he feels about kuduro might be completely different.”43 DJ Riot’s recognition does not deny the unequal relations of power between Portugal and its former colony. But his ambivalence about being dubbed “ambassadors” allows for a new sense of mediation, one that does not attempt to broker an authentic version of kuduro outside of Angola.

For at least two generations of Angolans, war is a permanent state of being. The wars of independence from Portugal raged from 1961 to 1974, as three factions battled the Portuguese. After independence, civil wars were funded and armed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and South Africa; each supported separate political parties.44 What is still at stake is land rich with oil and diamonds. But this land is as full of land-mines. Watching the videos from the Luandan suburbs, the first thing to notice is the number of dancers who are amputees, scores of young men and women, boys and girls who have lost their limbs.45 Their bodies are war-torn, and kuduro is a specific celebration of the broken body. They integrate their hospital prosthetics, a part of the physical discussion with their world of war. Those with other disabilities dance also, and their particular forms of movement are integrated into the dance itself. It is a lexicon of twisted limbs, distinguished by sudden drops to the ground, bended feet to the face; in one move, a prosthetic foot becomes a cell phone, lifted to the ear.

“Tsunami Télécommande” is the title of a song uploaded to YouTube in 2008 by a duo calling themselves Les Princes. A static image of “Les Princes Du Kuduro” accompanies the song, a pile of skulls sitting in the forefront, the Web site address “planetkuduro.com” superimposed over it. This graphically depicts what I find in the music: the troubling weave of technology and death, part of what I am elsewhere calling the alter-human condition. “Tsunami” is the title of a popular mix repeatedly sampled and riffed upon, as it is here. This could be the tsunami across East Asia that took with it more than 150,000 people, or the flood in Haiti, just months after 9/11, which took 3,000 people. These are traumas quickly forgotten in the West, but remaining in the collective bodily memory, a télécom-mande for the global South. The sound is an abrasive, grating, repetitive, and invasively metallizing beat; the rhythm carries shrieks and clonks and nervous tics, the anarchic sounds of turbulent movement, of irrepressible play in the midst of this death, created between bodies suspended in a wounded state, held in the half-life of poverty and war.

As I argue elsewhere, the music and the movement embody what


I am provisionally calling an alter-human condition. I distinguish this state of being from that shaped by the techno optimism of Western trans-humanism, a science-fiction condition not far from fact in which the hyperdeveloped world imagines equally hyperdeveloped bodies, those in rich territories capable of extending their life spans and their reproduc-tive lives. These bodies profit from the wars held elsewhere and from wars conducted by remote, radar and robot, night- and distance-enhanced vision. Technology is an extension of their bodies, leaving the flesh intact. The alter-human condition calls into question just how far the promises of liberal humanism reach, which bodies it hails as whole or worth healing. These were the bodies where the cold war ran hot, these young bodies the proxy battle sites.

Yet Les Princes, Os Lambas, Dj Znobia, and others have succeeded in extending themselves into netted airspace. Through inexpensive modes of production, homemade video, Web sites, Internet downloads, and file sharing, the music and dance of kuduro spreads and mutates uncontrollably through the nervous system of an electronic net. But it is ephemeral; by the time this is published, the form may well have died, been repurposed to serve particular agendas, or resisted ossification by mutating into some-thing else entirely.

Another example illustrates a more resilient, playful embodiment of kuduro. “Os Marteleiros,” by DJ Rei Helder, is video footage from Luanda uploaded in 2006, played with a segment of Helder’s dance music.46 In the footage, Helder and groups of young men from the neighborhood improvise together across a recreational park. The dance is shaped by humor, and the relationships between the all-male dancers are neither combative nor adversarial. It is marked by a decided lack of competition. These boys are not fighting; in fact they are involved in distinctly antisoldiering activity. These are collective male bodies in alternative relation to each other. There are certain movements of feigned violence, but they are not sustained and are accompanied by laughter. Most notably, the experience of disability is shared between them and gestured to in the dances. In this and other earlier video clips from Luanda, physical spaces are repurposed by the dancers: vacant lots, streets, empty bathrooms, hallways, bedrooms, the ruinous structures of poor cities — perhaps demanding that we consider occupation from an alternate view. This interaction with environment is lost in the footage from Lisbon, as is the heterogeneity of the dancing male bodies.

As the late Lindon Barrett argued, a fully liberatory state is enacted when the body is not defined by its use value, when it moves together with others in contrast with what is simply necessary or useful — “Freedom [should be] understood as the ability to play” — and such play holds within it glimpses of what life could feel like, just beyond the horizon.47 Utopian


theorists have a range of debates over what a life of leisure and abundance would be like, and if it would be possible at all. Surely humans would devolve into a stupor of hedonistic indulgence and dissipation followed by ennui, naysayers insist. Pleasure is only understood in relation to pain, as compensation of lack, others add. But I adopt the argument that fulfillment is not synonymous with consumption, and it is through play that we are able to touch the idea of life free of such an economy.

Coda

I am not alone in searching for ways to affirm alternate forms of human contact not based in violence. There is the conviction that we can create, as Lindon Barrett put it, “a state of leisure and ease,” where freedom is not abstract nor an absurdity. I shared with Lindon the conviction that violent struggle is not a fundamental condition for social transforma-tion. For him, violence was not intrinsic to a dialectic of revolution. His radical belief was in the powerful praxis of bliss, play, and pleasure. He found emanation of the condition of freedom, this utopian pulse, as cre-ated collectively in the club, spaces shaped by dance and music, but with the implications much broader than escapism or self-gratification. These relationships of cooperation are forged in spite of, or from within, coer-cive and violent material relations. Lindon was murdered in July 2008, days before I was to show him this essay. I continue to share his stubborn optimism and dedicate this essay to him in that spirit.

Notes

1. Zygmunt Bauman, “A Century of Camps?” in Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 192 – 205.

2. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 22.3. Zygmunt Bauman, “Wars of the Globalization Era,” European Journal of

Social Theory 4 (2001): 144. Interview with a National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter,

Cotonu, Benin, 29 July 1994. Quoted in William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1998), 15.

5. Quoted in Liberia — The Cannibals’ War, a film by Mark Stucke, Journey-man Pictures, 1 August 1996, reference no. 229, www.journeyman.tv/?lid=9809. Available on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrkTi3EHqk (accessed 21 September 2009).

6. As in other African countries, a dictatorship flourished in Liberia during the cold war, fed by U.S. cold-war policies and private interests. Charles Taylor, leader of the NPFL, came out of this environment of violence and brutality and ruled over two civil wars, from 1989 until his exile in 2003.

7. Achille Mbembe, “Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound,” in Beautiful/Ugly, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham, NC: Duke University press, 2006), 74.


8. Banning Eyre, “The Congotronics Story,” interview with Vincent Kenis and Mawangu Mingiedi, October 2005, www.afropop.org/multi/feature/ID/596/The+Congotronics+Story.

9. Phillip E. Wegner, “Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson,” Utopian Studies 9, no. 2 (1998): 61.

10. Ernst Bloch’s critique of Marxism should be considered here. He argued that the fascists were successful because they very effectively manipulated the needs and yearnings of differing populations and offered them immediate relief, while the Left was occupied with offering only negative assessments of capitalist ideology.

11. I refer here to Bloch’s concept of the “Not-Yet Conscious . . . which is carried by a rising class.” Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 15.

12. Josh Kun, Audiotopias: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22. Kun has developed the useful concept of audiotopia. He argues that because studies of music focus on performance and composition, the power of private listening practices is often ignored. I appreciate his emphasis on the manipulation of hard copies — CDs, vinyl, and recordings — but there are important differences in my conception of musical utopian ground. I wonder what is at stake in separating private listening practices from performance and other forms of collective participation. The caution here is to avoid letting individual consumption stand as some sort of insurgency in itself. Too often a corporate model consumerism stands in for sociopolitical engagement.

13. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xii.

14. Ernst Bloch, “The Artistic Illusion as the Visible Anticipatory Illumina-tion,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 146. “Vor-Schein” is translated as “anticipatory illumination” from Bloch’s original German-language essay, “Kunstlerscher Schein als sichtbarer Vor-Schein,” Das Prinzip Huffnung (Frank-furt am Main, 1959), 242.

15. Fredric Jameson, “Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Produc-tion of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 6.

16. Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Jameson and Utopia,” special issue on Fre-dric Jameson, Utopian Studies 9, no. 2 (1998): 5.

17. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 209. As Ruth Levitas explains in The Concept of Utopia (New York: Allan, 1990), “Bloch denied the existence of a fixed nature. ‘There is no fixed generic essence of man . . . rather the entire history is evidence of a progressive transformation of human nature’ ”(104).

18. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37.

19. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 22.20. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean,

1492 – 1797 (London: Routledge, 1996), and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1997).

21. See Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World Musics, World Markets (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.

22. Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27. For more trenchant criticism of ethnography, see Fatima Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), and Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: The Indian in the American Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).


23. Bohlman, World Music, 38.24. David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Dur-

ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.25. See Bohlman, World Music, 1 – 2.26. See Kun, Audiotopia, 23. Kun takes the concept of “contact zones” from

Mary Pratt; see Imperial Eyes: “ ‘contact zones’ [are] social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other often in highly asymmetrical rela-tions of domination and subordination, like colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4).

27. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 28. I ignore here the dialogues around the digital divide, choosing instead to

look at the way the world is littered with communication and information devices and the ways black people are inventing new forms of computer literacy. As Alexander Weheliye argues: “Recent debates about the ‘digital divide,’ while surely drawing much needed attention to certain politicoeconomic inequities, cannot but reinforce the idea that Afro-diasporic populations are inherently Luddite and therefore situ-ated outside the bounds of Western modernity.” Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afromodernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.

29. These Mbuti pygmy tribes were most famously written of by Colin Turn-bull in The Forest People (New York: Touchstone, 1987). I am referring here to their chanting techniques, particularly the recording done in the forest by Simha Arom and Genevieve Taurelle, The Music of Ba Benzélé Pygmies (Basel: Bärenreiter-Musicaphon, 1966). See Stephen Feld, “Pygmy Pop: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996): 6; “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 145 – 72.

30. Mingiedi, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.”31. Ibid.32. See Gary Stewart, Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the

Two Congos (London: Verso, 2002), 198.33. Ibid., 171.34. “Hidden Meanings in Congo Music,” Afropop Worldwide, www.afropop

.org/multi/feature/ID/598 (accessed 21 September 2009).35. See Stewart, Rumba on the River, 207.36. Kenis first heard the Konono sound in 1980, on a friend’s recording, and

later from the archives of Bernard Quersin. Conditions were different when Kenis returned to Zaire in 1989, looking for traditional music, hoping to find Mingiedi, who was touring the villages. (Musicians like Tabu Ley had moved to France and shaped their new sound, soukous, for West African and European audiences.) Kenis didn’t meet Konono until 2000, when he went back to record other musicians.

37. Kenis, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.”38. Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African

Studio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8.39. Kenis, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.”40. “Afropop Worldwide Travels to Seville, Spain, for WOMEX 2007” (audio

file), Afropop Worldwide, www.afropop.org/radio/radio_program/ID/694/Afro pop%20Worldwide%20Travels%20to%20Seville%20Spain%20for%20WOMEX %202007 (accessed 21 September 2009).

41. Lyrics from M.I.A., “Bamboo Banga,” Kala (London: XL Recordings, 2007); “20 Dollar,” ibid.; “Paper Planes,” ibid.; “World Town,” ibid.

42. Anthony Carew, “Interview: DJ Riot of Buraka Som Sistema,” About


.com: Alternative Music, 25 November 2008, altmusic.about.com/od/interviews/a/burakasomsistema.htm. This interview is an audio file; click on “Listen online” to access, beginning 25 minutes and 45 seconds in.

43. Ibid.44. The three organizations are: Popular Movement for the Liberation of

Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola — MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola — FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola — UNITA). The Soviet Union and Cuba sup-ported the socialist MPLA, while the FNLA turned to the United States, as would UNITA. For a full history of Angola, see Patrick Chabal et al., A History of Postcolo-nial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal, eds., Angola, the Weight of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965 – 1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (London: Routledge, 2006).

45. Videos featuring amputee dancers include Kuduro, “Qui na Mata,” www .youtube.com/watch?v=DfwO6oDMFm0 (accessed 21 September 2009); Cos-tuletas’s party hit “Tchiriri,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfA7N2SISCM (accessed 21 September 2009); Dj Nays and Costuleta’s “Mama Kudi,” www.you tube.com/watch?v=c94a_BAy47k (accessed 21 September 2009); and MC Andre-zinho, “Novo sucesso,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNUDeq7xAqM (accessed 21 September 2009). Much more needs to be analyzed about the relationship between gender, masculinity, and injury in postwar African nations.

46. Rei Helder, “Os Marteleiros,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMxbS86a4E (accessed 21 September 2009). See also canalangola.net.

47. George Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 246.

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Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse

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