Kwaito promises a sensory world unburdened by the struggles of the present; kwaito promises freedom by imagining what it would feel like to be free. Gavin Steingo argues that kwaito, a style of electronic dance music in South Africa that emerged out of contact with ‘house music’ from beyond its borders, creates an alternate reality through sound. This alternate reality may be illusory – that is, creative and counterfactual – but it is nonetheless necessary for any hope of social, cultural, or political transformation. In this sense, one might argue that kwaito's politics are aspirational and utopian, based on imagination and affirmation rather than disenchantment and negation. In Kwaito's Promise, Steingo invites readers to reconsider how politics and aesthetics intertwine in musical life, arguing against the dismissal of aesthetics as merely an ideological obfuscation of power.

The problem that animates this book is a problem that should not be a problem: since its emergence, kwaito has been attacked by South African politicians and cultural commentators as an irresponsibly apolitical distraction from the struggles of the post-apartheid era. Although the style first coalesced as a musical scene and style under the institutionalized racial segregation (i.e. apartheid) of the 1980s, after its abolition kwaito took prominence as an emblematic sounding of freedom. Euphoric and celebratory, kwaito indexed a moment when non-white South Africans could enjoy imagining a life not defined by oppression, immobility, and isolation. The hope and optimism that prevailed during the transition from white supremacist majority rule to multiracial universal suffrage was gradually replaced by frustration and stasis, as apartheid-era atrocities went unpunished, wealth remained concentrated in white hands, and the new political regime proved to be no less susceptible to corruption. As Steingo writes, ‘Dealing with freedom is hard: if music during apartheid expressed the struggle for freedom, then kwaito expresses the struggle of freedom’ (2). Kwaito's Promise is thus devoted to examining the various ways that kwaito articulates this struggle of freedom, responding to contemporary critiques that fault its apparent lack of engagement with ‘real-life’ struggles. Although Steingo does not make the resonances explicit, this book's argument fits into a longer and broader genealogy of thought that reconsiders the power of utopian transcendenceFootnote ¹ and postcolonial cosmopolitan imagination.Footnote ²

The township of Soweto, a black enclave situated adjacent to Johannesburg and a key site for both anti-apartheid struggle and the emergence of kwaito, serves as the book's primary ethnographic site. Steingo's vivid portrayal of musical life in this township draws upon a rich archive of materials gathered from participant observation, interviews, analysis of sound recordings, television, film, urban cartography, and journalism. Although his fieldwork seems to have been spatially restricted to Soweto and the Johannesburg conurbation, he traces kwaito's circulation through regional, national, and international networks. Steingo's writerly voice is at its strongest when he delves into ethnographic detail, such as in Chapter 4, where he explains how apartheid-era urban planning impacts the way in which Sowetans make, distribute, and listen to music. His prose is lucid and engaging, but marked by a polemical style that relies on staging battles with caricatured representations of other scholarship. This rhetorical strategy is most notable in the first chapter's sustained invective against ‘the New Musicology’ of the late 1990s/early 2000s (and its legacy in current ethnomusicology and Adornian ‘critical musicology’), but it returns in more muted form throughout the book. Furthermore, his tendency to focus on older music scholarship as a rhetorical foil prevents him from acknowledging more recent research that would contextualize his work as part of a broader trend in scholarship to re-examine the intersection of aesthetics and politics.Footnote ³

Steingo's polemic arises out of his concerns about the risks of contextualism, which he renders in its most extreme form: contextualists dismiss musical aesthetics as a mere epiphenomenon of power and socio-historical context. In so doing, they reduce music to an empty vessel for external forces and condescendingly cast those invested in aesthetic autonomy as dupes of culture-led political manipulation. Notably, Steingo introduces this characterization of contemporary music scholarship by way of kwaito's most sanctimonious detractors: he first relates how ‘politicians and cultural watchdogs’ (4) accuse fans and musicians of politically irresponsible escapism – of failing to engage with their actual social circumstances – which is illustrated by a series of derisive quotations drawn mostly from South African newspapers. He then transitions to his critique of contemporary music scholarship by projecting these statements onto music scholarship, claiming that they ‘replicate and reaffirm the mainstream (ethno)musicological idea that no musician or listener can ever successfully evade his or her actual social conditions’ (4). Steingo construes this idea from the critiques of aesthetic autonomy and transcendence mounted by both the New Musicology and ethnomusicology, suggesting that most scholars in these fields drew upon Bourdieu's critique of taste as a proxy for social distinction (more on this later).Footnote ⁴ Although he acknowledges that the use of musical aesthetics to support discourses of cultural superiority merits critical reckoning, he nonetheless argues that contemporary music studies labours under two problematic assumptions:

1. 1. That music is a function of power: ‘there is no aesthetic judgment that is not simultaneously a social and cultural evaluation based on material interest’ (5).

2. 2. That there is only true or false knowledge, that is, the arch-Marxist ‘false consciousness’ critique: ‘there is a true knowledge that is aware (and thus liberatory) and a false knowledge that ignores (and therefore oppresses)’ (5).

Steingo complains that these axioms are ‘too simple’. But one could also argue that in arriving at them, he over-simplifies one side of musicology's own ‘culture wars’, stripping a variegated discursive field of its dialogic ambivalence. He takes a more moderate position in a footnote, where he explains that his main complaint is that ethnomusicology ‘has too often assumed an unproblematic relationship between music and society’ (224, n. 12) while the New Musicology of the 1990s raised important questions when engaging with the legacy of nineteenth-century aesthetic theory but then answered them too quickly, foreclosing on alternative accounts of the relationship between aesthetics and social context.

This book's primary theoretical contribution is a reframing of music's politics via Rancière's reconsideration of the politics of aesthetics.Footnote ⁵ This begins not with aesthetics per se, but with an epistemological point: in response to critical theory's assumption that awareness liberates and ignorance oppresses (see above), Rancière suggests that there is also a kind of knowledge that represses and an ignorance that liberates.Footnote ⁶ In particular, he is interested in how the knowledge of social roles and hierarchies – to ‘know your place’ – can constrain freedom and agency. He then goes on to argue that aesthetic experience deregulates the link between practical creative knowledge (e.g. knowing how to make music) and knowledge of the conditions of creativity (professional roles, class, race, gender). Steingo takes up Rancière's theoretical framework to define aesthetic experience as a mode of sensory perception that deviates from normative modes of perception; making the assumption that ‘critical listening’ is now the hegemonic mode of perception, he arrives at the conclusion that enjoying music without regard for its political ramifications is a form of liberatory aesthetics. There's no doubt that enjoying something without thinking about its politics can feel like a relief – especially for stigmatized groups whose everyday experiences of oppression force them relentlessly back into the realm of the political – but I wonder if such tactical and contingent claims to aesthetic autonomy should be conflated with the Romantic and Modernist ones that sparked the New Musicology in the first place; there may be some nuance to be found between the temporary reprieve of such experiences for marginalized listeners and the refusal of elites to consider the political dimensions of their musical practices. We should also be wary of assuming a monolithic orthodoxy of normative listening, which would overstate both the degree of consensus in ethno/musicology and these disciplines’ power to dictate ‘proper’ listening practices to the wider world. This line of argumentation leads to an odd metonymy between music and its listening communities: seeking to anchor musical interpretation in its contexts becomes tantamount to imprisoning musical participants in their socio-economic circumstances.

Although Steingo draws upon Rancière for his understanding of aesthetics and liberating ignorance, he tends to elide the debates out of which those ideas emerged, debates that pitted negative critique against affirmative critique. It is worth reviewing these disputes, as they provide some insight into why he is so antagonistic towards the New Musicology and critical musicology more broadly.Footnote ⁷ Rancière was a fervent critic of Bourdieu's critical and demystifying approach to art and cultural capital, arguing against the latter's denigration of aesthetics as no more than ‘a misrecognized form of social difference’.Footnote ⁸ As part of this debate, Rancière was invested in developing an account of aesthetics that highlighted its potential for affirmative emancipatory politics (e.g. the freedom that kwaito promises and enacts sensorially) beyond the limits of what counted as ‘political’ within conventional Marxist cultural critique. Since Bourdieu's writings on distinction and cultural capital were influential in some of the New Musicology debates at the time, Steingo's polemical self-positioning in a sense replays the Bourdieu–Rancière debate on the terrain of music studies. Additionally, since Rancière's Aisthesis has been received as one of the most prominent responses to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, a similar dynamic seems to be at play between Rancière's rebuke of Adorno's cultural critique and its formidable legacy in critical musicology.Footnote ⁹ In any case, a review of Rancière's political and theoretical stances helps to contextualize those of Steingo.

After the disciplinary and theoretical positioning of the introductory chapter, Steingo devotes the rest of the book to exploring what is made possible when the conventional mappings between music, identity, and politics are destabilized. Chapter 2, ‘The Experience of Outside’, surveys the origins and early history of kwaito in the late 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on how the style served as a link to sensory worlds beyond the immediate socio-political context of those involved in it. Steingo notes that kwaito was often dubbed ‘house music’ and ‘international music’ by South African listeners, and he argues that this international imaginary contributed to the style's popularity, since it involved a set of sounds that ‘bore no determinate relationship to their actual social condition’ (27). He recounts several origin stories of kwaito, all of which feature protagonists who had exceptional access to popular music beyond the apartheid-era cultural boycott. According to Steingo, it was not until the early 1990s that kwaito came to be seen as a specifically South African style, but even at this point it continued to have an ambiguous identity that destabilized the distinctions between local and non-local musics; even in the post-apartheid period, kwaito still represents ‘the experience of an autonomous outside’ (56).

Chapter 3, ‘Platform, or the Miracle of the Ordinary’, considers the conditions of kwaito production in Soweto through the framework of ‘platforms’, assemblages that produce cultural artefacts that float ambiguously between aesthetic imagination and ‘real life’. Steingo grounds his account of these platforms in the historical context of the early post-apartheid era and what he characterizes as a ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ (58). After the emergency rule of apartheid's final years, the years immediately following its dismantlement were characterized by a remarkably swift return to ordinary life as well as a sense of interrupted revolution, where many of the problems associated with the prior regime remained. Steingo argues that kwaito's platforms also engaged in this rediscovery of the ordinary, pointing to musical examples that aestheticize everyday life, such as the use of tsotsitaal (creole language associated with Soweto), speech-like vocal delivery, and the schizophonic juxtaposition of sonic fragments in a manner that blends local and non-local sources. His survey of kwaito platforms traverses a range of case studies, including ‘stables’ (independent labels run primarily by black South Africans), a radio station (Yfm) as a regional platform, a television series (Yizo Yizo) as a national one, as well as the gendered personae of kwaito performers Brenda Fassie and Lebo Mathosa. Steingo highlights how these platforms generate musical performances that seem to both reference and diverge from everyday life, suggesting that ‘kwaito does not dissimulate reality as much as it doubles it’ (63). In his analysis of the ambiguous relations between soundtrack and dramatic action in the high-school television series Yizo Yizo, he suggests that it is ‘either part of life or apart from life’ (80) – and it is the impossibility of deciding between these two that he dubs aesthetic undecidability. In other words, kwaito presents an alternate sonic account of reality that seems to waver between realism and imagination.

Steingo turns to themes of urban immobility and technological failure in Chapter 4 (‘Immobility, Obduracy, and Experimentalism in Soweto’), arguing that an important part of what marks kwaito's origins in Soweto is its conditions of storage, mobility, and exchange. Despite his earlier critique of contextualism, this chapter's strength is to be found precisely in the highly detailed and localized ethnography that he presents of musicking in Soweto. He describes in great detail how kwaito's platforms work within ‘a context where musical equipment and storage devices constantly break down and where movement is constrained’ (92), resulting in music that is substantially determined by factors such as the proximity of musicians and resources as well as the material degradation of digital sound recording formats. His analysis tracks four factors, including the physical layout of urban spaces, theft, the breakdown of equipment, and the interruption of storage and transfer. Due to the way in which townships under apartheid were designed to restrict the mobility of non-whites outside of and between urban areas, much kwaito production was characterized by what Steingo terms an ‘aesthetics of propinquity’ (103), where musical decisions were shaped by who and what was nearby. This restricted mobility narrowed into immobility for kwaito studio producers, who protected their valuable music-making equipment through their constant presence in the home studio. Steingo demonstrates how kwaito production is both constrained and enriched by precarious technologies of storage and transfer, as computer hard drives are passed between friends and collaborators in the place of removable storage devices. These hard drives accrue additions and modifications as they circulate, and in contrast to the commonplace assumption that digital reproduction does not impact the original, the data on these storage media are constantly subject to corruption and loss due to frequent power outages and operating system crashes. At the nexus of all of these factors, Steingo identifies experimentalism as a common creative tactic amongst kwaito producers, enabling them to engage productively with the riskiness of their circumstances while also creating opportunities to access the ‘outside’ of their lived worlds.

Chapter 5, ‘Acoustic Assemblages and Forms of Life’, shifts focus to kwaito artists and platforms that have circulated beyond Soweto, examining the modes of interaction between the township's music scene and various ‘outsides’: the greater Johannesburg conurbation, the nation, and global networks. Drawing upon Ana María Ochoa Gautier's notion of acoustic assemblages,Footnote ¹⁰ Steingo argues that the networks that ‘commercial’ kwaito artists develop are topological rather than scalar, often maintaining few connections to regional or national music networks while interfacing intimately with North American and European ones. As he traces the ways in which music and sound in Soweto intersect with history and culture, he identifies a difference between a ‘cosmopolitanism of extraterritoriality’ and a ‘cosmopolitanism of dependency’. With the former he suggests that non-professional kwaito artists articulate cosmopolitanism by foregrounding traces of the global ‘outside’ within townships, while the latter designates professional ‘commercial’ artists that project the sounds from the townships towards audiences on the outside. In both cases, he perceives a ‘radical openness’ to multiple outsides, rooted in a cosmological framework that recognizes multiple realms of reality and efficacy.

Representative of postcolonial cosmopolitanism, South Africa's ‘Black Diamonds’ (black middle class) are at the centre of Chapter 6, in which Steingo maps the distribution of labour and resources in kwaito production. He argues that, despite the advantages of the more affluent and mobile group, a network of powerful kwaito actors extends across both Black Diamonds and Sowetans, producing kwaito by creating connections between them. He identifies and profiles three groups of labourers, who produce most of kwaito: organizers (who have the resources to organize human infrastructures), programmers (who produce kwaito tracks), and ‘faces’ (vocalists who sing over the tracks and provide a public persona). Describing kwaito as an ‘affirmation of sonic equality’ (162), Steingo argues that it taps into a shared realm of aesthetic sensory experience, an autonomous sensorium shared between poor township residents and middle-class black suburbanites, which enables kwaito to traverse the socio-economic abyss between them.

In the subsequent chapter, ‘Times & Spaces of Listening’, Steingo looks for this shared sensory world in three sites of listening in Soweto: the tavern, the outdoor party, and the automobile. He tracks temporal and spatial dimensions across all three of these sonic sites, noting how Sowetans are both constantly listening to music, and often listening to more than one musical source at the same time. He characterizes the listening at local skyf taverns as one of active engagement with a heterogeneous soundscape, while the shinsanyama (outdoor barbeque) involves a porous sonic assemblage that constantly pushes to extend the boundaries of aesthetic experience. He links automobile listening to the local practice of ‘spinning’, an extreme driving technique related to Tokyo ‘drifting’ that valorizes nearly uncontrolled turns in a constant circle, thus combining movement and immobility. Throughout this chapter, Steingo highlights the contrast between the relative immobility of most Sowetan kwaito listeners and the openness of their engagement with external acoustic environments.

In the epilogue, Steingo returns to the question of Kwaito's Promise: by engaging in an aesthetics of openness, kwaito holds on to the promise of radical freedom that hovered under the horizon of the anti-apartheid movement. The power of this promise, however, is paradoxically dependent on its foreclosure: ‘music holds out the promise of a postcolonial dream only so long as the fulfillment of that promise is deferred – held out’ (219). In this sense, music does not so much fulfil its promise as flourish in the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Steingo turns briefly to Louis Althusser to suggest that kwaito's promise is perhaps a ‘necessary illusion’, in the sense that it engenders the hope that is necessary for revolutionary transformation.Footnote ¹¹ He concedes that Bourdieu may have been right in claiming that aesthetic experience is illusory, but he was wrong to overlook the political potential of such illusions. Although not mentioned explicitly in his book, with these insights Steingo approaches a familiar account of utopian politics, where utopia serves not as escapism but as a shared aspirational imaginary for political action.Footnote ¹² Kwaito's Promise provides a detailed, contextualized, and sensuous account of the utopian imaginary that still thrives in the sonic world of Soweto township.