Journal of World Popular Music

Sounds in the City

2021-08-13T09:41:56+00:00

Amplifying Street Knowledge through Practice-as-Research

2021-08-13T09:50:33+00:00

Based on a first-hand account of the SSO#5 event, the authors discuss the challenges of grounding the organization of an international academic event in the local environment of Naples, a Southern Italy city with a strong sound system tradition. An ethnographic account of the Italian and Naples scene, including interviews with local sound system pioneers, will provide the context. The overarching intention animating the planning of the event was to acknowledge the way academic research can interact with local and global grassroots music movements in a transformative way, establishing connections, nurturing skills and promoting mutual recognition. More specifically, the event was aimed at amplifying the value of the already-existing scene, turning up the self-confidence of its practitioners and boosting the acknowledgement of sound system practice as an academic research field. This was achieved through the active involvement of local practitioners and activists in the conception of the event, to achieve the mutual trust and respect between participants from different backgrounds, which made the event itself a form of practice-as-research in terms of adding to an ongoing learning process.

Return to the Echo Chamber

2021-08-13T10:00:37+00:00

Jamaican sound system culture has long grounded my work because it foregrounds race due to much of the lyrical and ideological content, and technology via the obsession with sonic reproduction. Over twenty years after first establishing these connections, a return to them is clearly overdue given their rootedness in immigrant sub-cultures and counter-publics. However, as described by Martiniquan theorist, Edouard Glissant, this return cannot be motivated by “a longing for origins, to some immutable state of being”, but instead must be towards “the point of entanglement”, to where we discovered the complexities and contradictions in the first place. For me that tangled knot has always featured a contentious weaving of two primary threads, two elements that historically make each other sensible but which still have no essential or satisfactory relationship to each other—race and sound.

“suh won’t we step inna hxr class”

2021-08-13T10:08:54+00:00

“Sounding” the System

2021-08-13T10:15:23+00:00

The instruments of nation, their creators and enforcers (the system) in the postcolonial Caribbean have never been favourable in their intentions toward the way the masses have lived and had their being. In various sectors of life, particularly entertainment, little or no space was made available through this system which included legislative suppression tantamount to cultural erasure. However, another system emerged. Blacks have always had their bodies, creating sounds, often significantly amplified, in contravention of the system supported by state laws. Accounting for systems of eradication which surrounded black entertainment, this article foregrounds the sound system as representation. Sound is used as a signifier, mobilized in opposition to the politics of “noise” and thus an act—as in “sounding”, a verb, a philosophy of doing, of resistance, much like “grounding”. “Sounding” is articulated as a practice, a form of productive labour, complementary to the labour of citizenship, of nation-building, and celebration of the human. Drawing on examples from Jamaica, and located at the intersection of cultural history, cultural geography, and cultural studies more broadly, this article continues exploration of Black Atlantic performance geography by placing entertainment practice in a wider comparative and analytical field at the heart of sound revolutions across the African Diaspora.

Dub Essay #1 - Tikur Sound System

2021-08-13T10:35:33+00:00

The Roots of Digital Cumbia in Sound System Culture

2021-08-13T10:41:40+00:00

Digital cumbia was celebrated globally in the late 2000s as a new form of Latin American electronic dance music mixed with the Colombian folk music of cumbia. Celebrated by the media as a new phenomenon due to new computer software and internet access, this article instead establishes how cumbia had already become digital in the sonidera (“sound system”) culture of Mexican barrios (“ghettos”). The author is a DJ/producer with more than fifteen years of practice linked to cumbia, global electronic popular music, and sound system culture. The implications of this double-background as practitioner and researcher are reflected in a DJ-as-researcher approach to multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and musical analysis. The theoretical framework is based on “sounding”, a model for understanding the interaction of corporeal, material and sociocultural elements in sound system culture. This reveals how Mexican sonideros (“sound system operators”) created cumbia sonidera (“sound system cumbia”) by slowing the tempo of the original Colombian recordings in response to the dancing public. To hear this transformation of cumbia, several examples of the seminal cumbia track ‘Cumbia Sampuesana’ are presented, from its origins in 1940s Colombia, to cumbia sonidera in 1990s Mexico, and cumbia villera (“ghetto cumbia”) in early 2000s Argentina.

Making Music from Below in a Southern Italian Metropolis

2021-08-13T10:55:10+00:00

Postcolonial studies literature considered Neapolitan social centres as spaces of hybridization of music styles from the global South, observing their deconstructing potential against racist discourse. More recent cultural production in Naples shows elements of continuity and innovation: organizing self-managed music festivals and mixing-up Latin American rhythms and sound system culture with folk music, Neapolitan social movements keep re-elaborating music genres of different Souths. The result is an original combination of resistant musicalities, vehicles for political messages. In the light of our active participation in these movements, we describe the evolution of the countercultural landscape of Naples, which is related to the evolution of Neapolitan urban commons. These are political projects based on the principles on collective use of urban areas, in which autonomous cultural production is realized through self-organization and sharing of spaces and means of production. Secondly, we aim to describe the experience of the NaDir Collective, a cultural project born within the commons “Scugnizzo Liberato”, re-shaping it as an open space for music self-production. The purpose of the activists is to combine skills and passions to build inclusive spaces for social aggregation, promoting underground and independent music production.

Dub Essay #2 - U.N.I.T.Y. Sound System

2021-08-13T11:07:09+00:00

Feminine Frequencies

2021-08-13T11:13:27+00:00

This article recounts a critical conversation between two Black British sound women, conducted by a Black British female scholar. Together DJ Ade and Junie Rankin (real names Lynda Rosenior-Patten and June Reid) form Nzinga Soundz, one of the UK’s longest running, all-women sound systems. Thali Lotus owns and runs CAYA Sound System, established and built in 2016 with the aim of promoting reggae music as an educational, charitable, entertaining and entrepreneurial tool. Resulting from an extensive double interview conducted by Dr Monique Charles, leading scholar on grime and Black Atlantic performances, the piece offers an insight into issues of race, gender, knowledge transmission and use of technology as reflected in the work of two female reggae outputs. Combining the critical insight of a scholar with the self-reflection and self-articulation of music practitioners, the article explores the way in which the practice of reggae sound systems is constantly rearticulated as a work of art, business enterprise and tool of empowerment for oneself and the wider community in the British context.

Spectral Vibrations

2021-08-13T11:34:24+00:00

This article researches the linkages between processes of colonialization/self-colonization, the de facto nationalization of ubiquitous sound and the structural processes of identity formation within the Jamaican Diaspora. I theorize that the Jamaican sound system is a spectral unit—through which emancipatory, liberationist and identity struggles can be heard and measured. In considering the “living-on” of such struggles, I draw from Jacques Derrida’s theory of “hauntology”, highlighting the hauntological “traces” of the colonial past found in the present and future of the Jamaican dancehall and its culture. In thinking “through sound”, I draw from Julian Henriques’ work, Sonic Bodies. Considering Henriques’ assertation that “sonic bodies” are bodies “saturated” in sound, I question whether sound (that of Jamaican dancehall music) can be considered to have a body (ghostly) and an actual life; being of a form, alike the bodies it impacts. I conclude that the presence of a sound-life allows us to speak of dancehall music sontologically, of being and bodily presence (subject to control and restraint). Such being is relative to those absent—the bodies of those lost but discovered/recovered in migration. I present an analysis of dancehall culture, dancehall participation and live performance while exploring such ideas.

Dub Essay #3 - Feminine Hi Fi

2021-08-13T11:43:31+00:00