In Rumba Rules, Bob W. White unpacks the relationship between politics and popular music in Zaire during Mobutu Sese Seko's rule. White's deft analysis blends the everyday experience of musical performance and band life in late 1990s Zaire with infusions of theoretical and methodological debates to develop his argument that political culture and dance music were deeply entangled. Connections between popular dance music and political culture were symbolic and material. Musicians mediated between audiences and an elite leadership structure while reproducing in band organization and song structure the politics of clientage central to Mobutu's governance. Rumba Rules is based on extensive fieldwork in Brazzaville and Kinshasa (the epicenters of Congolese rumba) that White undertook in 1995–96 and on several follow-up visits that served as the basis for his PhD thesis and a number of articles. The book, more aerodynamic than its dissertation predecessor and accompanied by a website with a wealth of video and sound tracks, transmits the splendor, grind, and stakes of life for musicians in Kinshasa at the end of Mobutu's rule.

Chapter 1 (‘Popular culture's politics’) opens with vignettes that encapsulate the complex relationship between popular music and the state. In the first, the ambivalent response that musicians had to Laurent Kabila's arrival in Kinshasa in 1997 shows that the rules of rumba's musical production under Mobutu, even if limiting, had become familiar. In the second, the mediation by the new Minister of Information and Cultural Affairs in the conflict that spawned the break-up of the popular musical group Wenge Musica exposes the state's preoccupation with the music world. White asserts that it is in this complex back-and-forth of actions and symbols that one can locate the core of political culture in Zaire under Mobutu. In Chapter 2 (‘The Zairean sound’), White discusses the three main genres of music in Kinshasa – modern, traditional, and religious – and their relationship to one another. He then traces the development of Congo's modern dance music – rumba – and the local debates about the definitions of different generations and schools of this music.

Changes in musical performance and Mobutu's cultural policies are the subject of Chapter 3, ‘Made in Zaire’. White links the musical innovations of the seben (extended dance sequence) and the atalaku (the musician whose shouts punctuate the seben), which give the music its distinctive form and style, to Mobutu's cultural policy of authenticité, which used folkloric spectacle to legitimate and perform state power. The state financed traditional music and dance at the expense of the once-thriving popular music industry. But the complicity of some musicians (notably Franco) with Mobutu's regime, and the ubiquity of folkloric shows, helped the migration of forms of ‘political and cultural animation’ – such as libanga (praise singing) – from state rallies to popular dance music. The music scene boomed as musicians adapted the seben and introduced the atalaku to draw audiences to live shows.

White mobilizes his ethnographic material to create a sense of live performance in Chapter 4, ‘Live time’. He concentrates on the interactions of the band members (singers, guitarists, atalakus, bandleader and dancers) and their artistry in creating shows that engage audiences. White's attention to dance – by both band members and audience – and to audience ‘spraying’ (giving money to individual band members) and picture-taking results in a rich sense of live concerts. This reader missed knowing what audience members had to say about shows, but White acknowledged this lacuna in Chapter 1 and his current project on the ethnography of listening may yet limn this terrain and its implications for political culture.

Chapter 5 (‘Musicians and mobility’) considers the social and musical trajectories of musicians in Kinshasa. At the center is White's experience as an atalaku in General Defao's Big Stars band, through which he sketches band hierarchy, band member interactions, and musical training. The message of songs and song lyrics is the focus of Chapter 6, ‘Live texts’. White parsed hundreds of song texts by innovatively using Raymond Williams' concept of ‘keywords’ to capture changes in meaning over time. The results of that labor-intensive analysis are condensed to show how songs do work by commenting on the crisis (through tropes of love and abandonment) and by citing sponsors who, in return, facilitate musicians' survival of the political and economic crisis.

Chapters 7 (‘The political life of dance bands’) and 8 (‘In the skin of a chief’) round out White's argument that Congolese popular music animated key aspects of political culture in Mobutu's Zaire. In particular, band hierarchies and splintering (in which key members leave to create new bands) exemplify the parallel desire to be a leader, among both politicians and musicians, and authoritarian practices of leadership. Bandleaders take titles such as ‘president’ and ‘general’ to bolster their status while shoring up those of political elites. But complexities abound in the ways in which musicians and others interact with political elites to create relations of reciprocity. Even if musicians and popular music have reproduced the worst aspects of authoritarian rule, the fact that followers and dependents can and do demand responsible leadership, together with the existence of some positive forms of leadership within the musical world, offers some glimmer of hope. White ends with a wide-angle view that focuses on other traditions of authoritarian rule, namely the colonial project and US imperialism, that have also shaped Zaire's political culture.

Despite Congolese rumba's status as the continent's premiere music, it has been woefully understudied, as White points out. But Rumba Rules does much more than fill a gap in the literature. It builds on and advances the study of popular cultural practices on the African continent and consolidates a literature that argues for the political import of cultural practice and for attention to the ways in which states and political leaders use and shape culture and tradition (as well as the limits on that). Early on White ponders: ‘is it going too far to suggest that popular dance music can reveal something new about politics in Mobutu's Zaire’ (p. 15)? By the end of the book, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. White demonstrates that popular dance music does not reflect power but is instead a ‘complex field of action’ (p. 250) where musicians, fans, and elites play out questions of leadership and manage the economic, political, and social crisis induced by a ‘modern tradition of authoritarian rule’ (p. 249) that leaves no innocents. White's analysis of popular dance music in Mobutu's Zaire eschews culture as escape, straightforward resistance, or simple propaganda for a complex vision of the beautiful and terrible world of culture and politics.