Forms of black popular culture, writes Stuart Hall, are always ‘impure, to some degree hybridized from a vernacular base. Thus, they must always be heard, not simply as the recovery of a lost dialogue bearing clues for the production of new musics . . . but as what they are – adaptations, molded to the mixed, contradictory, hybrid spaces of popular culture’.Footnote ¹ Hearing in hybridity the social contradictions of popular culture, Michael Denning presents a cultural history of a recording boom in the urban dance musics of port cities in the late 1920s. In Noise Uprising, he recuperates recordings of kroncong, samba, hula, jazz, and chaabi, and other hybrid genres of popular music long dismissed by cultural elites as commercial, inauthentic, and exoticized. Instead of disregarding these musics, Denning challenges his readers to ‘decolonize the ear’, that is, to hear in these recordings the contradictory and hybrid relations that constitute the global flow of sound media, bodies, and capital.

Central to his study is the historical conjuncture of the advent of electrical recording for phonographs with early twentieth-century colonial modes of production. In Chapter 2, Denning enters the cacophonous ‘edges and borders of the empires of global capitalism . . . the barrios, bidonvilles, barrack-yards, arrabales, and favelas of an archipelago of colonial ports’ (38). He introduces in succession each port's urban dance music, detailing the sites, spaces, histories, and vernacular practices that shaped local musical life. These ports, he argues, map out an ‘archipelago’ that linked settler colonial states with colonies. The port cities were connected by not only the movement of embodied labour across this archipelago but also the global circulation of vernacular musics across three arcs, which Denning dubs ‘the black Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific’ (5). By inscribing ‘noises’ onto the grooves of phonographic records, Denning argues, electrical recording thrust creolized, peripheral, working-class subjects into the public sphere. His narrative arc focuses on how the circulation of vernacular musics of colonial port cities ‘created an entirely new relation between sound and space, music and territory’ (109). Denning details the effects of electrical recording on local musicking practices in order to demonstrate how mobility and media shaped the experience of peripheral colonial modernity. Yet the paradox of his political agenda to reclaim these musics and these networks as generative is that he mutes colonial subjects themselves.

For Denning, noise serves as an acoustic register of the diasporas that emerged through colonial modes of production. By inscribing the noise of ‘outcast and oppressed peoples’ (4), recordings of vernacular music constituted a ‘decolonization of the ear’ that ‘preceded and made possible the subsequent decolonization of legislatures and literatures, schools and armies’ (137). Denning ascribes to noise a prophetic role that not only echoes Jacques Attali's universalist history, but also repeats the latter's problematic conceptual mapping of noise as oppositional to music.Footnote ² As David Novak points out in his ethnography of underground noise scenes in Japan and the United States, this assumes that noise is a ‘totalizing category of difference’ which ‘always precedes, and then eventually becomes, music’.Footnote ³ Accordingly, Denning suggests a telos in which the noisy sounds of the ports transform (through the production and consumption of phonographic records) into urban dance music and, eventually, are remastered as folk music and world music in the late twentieth century. Yet Denning interrupts this Attali-esque narrative, in which the transformation of music into a mass-market commodity anticipates capitalist modes of production, to embrace the late 1920s as a brief but profound historical moment in which noise acquired commodity status. Noise became embedded as sonic difference in ways that would later be heard, paradoxically, as at once authentic and imitative, commercial and anticolonial. What had initially been ‘discounted’ became ‘rediscovered’ and ‘reimagined’ by listeners ranging from folklorists and collectors to art music composers and cultural critics (219).

Denning wants his readers to hear the ‘weird harmonies’ (199), ‘noisy timbres’ (174), and ‘syncopated’ rhythm sections (186) of dance band recordings, less as ‘a new sound’ (215) and more as a ‘remaking of the musical ear across each of the musical arcs of the colonial archipelago’ (215). By changing how we hear these records, Denning proposes, we can hear how working musicians resisted colonial modes of (music) production, such as common practice harmony or traditional melodic modes, and achieved a cultural revolution in the late 1920s. Quoting Walter Benjamin, Denning argues that ‘vernacular phonograph records . . . embodied “the human being's legitimate claim to be reproduced”’.Footnote ⁴ The sonic ‘clashes’ of colonial encounter (202) that were recorded onto phonographs in the late 1920s are a means towards recuperating commodity culture as a site for political and social emancipation. This is a refreshing approach to commodity culture that locates resistance in the material culture of phonographs and their modes of production rather than in practice theory, as is commonly applied in studies that focus on the strategic negotiation of social structures by situated individuals.

Denning demonstrates in Chapter 3 how major record labels, including the Gramophone Company (UK), the Victor Talking Machine Company (US), Carl Windström A.G. (Germany), and Pathé (France), saw an opportunity to channel the natural resource of shellac into 78 rpm discs at the same time that electrical recording became widely accessible. The labels sent recording directors on extended tours to port cities to record local musicians barracked in these spaces, seeking out performers in bars, canteens, and shebeens rather than those associated with orchestras, hotels, cabarets, and other tourist venues. Records were pressed in large factories in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Exports soared, particularly in the areas where these musics were recorded, resulting in a dramatic shift in distribution with the bulk of exports sent to ports such as Athens and Lisbon, Java and the Straights Settlements, or British West Africa.

As urban dance musics became part of ordinary life in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Denning argues in Chapter 4, gramophone culture increased working-class access to vernacular musics (111), and benefited musicians as well. Records allowed female singers who rarely performed publicly to become widely heard. Phonographic media became part of everyday life as local spaces shifted in relation to listening practices, with bars, coffee shops, bodegas, barbershops, and streets constituting a transcolonial public sphere. Gramophone culture transformed musical practices by ‘turning songs and dances into “records”’ (126). Music journalists Abbe Niles (US) and Rodney Gallop (Britain) captured this shift in their ‘record reviews’ (122) that evolved from describing songs, their history and variation, to capturing performance style, particularly that of singers. Moreover, gramophone culture shaped the emergence of the ‘dance band’ (174), a vernacular recording ensemble comprising a front melodic section and back rhythm section. In Chapter 6, Denning elaborates on exactly how this ‘turnaround’ period of the late 1920s impacted musicking among dance bands. For instance, ‘chord cycles’ – a category that refers to repeating harmonic patterns that ‘marked time’ and ‘enabled improvisation’ (198) – became part of what differentiated urban dance music bands from other forms of popular music. Along with rhythm sections and timelines performed by percussionists, the performance of chord cycles produced ‘syncopated’ rhythms that came to be associated with dance bands. As chord cycles, syncopated rhythms, and other vernacular musical idioms circulated through the port cities in the form of phonographs, they expanded the very categories that enabled their cultural flow.

It is important to note that Denning is writing against ethnonational narratives that ascribe cultural sovereignty through music or anticolonial narratives that reclaim popular music as a site for liberation (138). While he does note that recordings enabled acts of resistance against colonial authorities – musicians could evade ‘pass laws’ (158), in which British rule required a pass for musicians to perform in public, by circulating their recordings to listeners – he is generally more interested in critiquing discourses of resistance than tracing actions taken by social actors in everyday life. In Chapter 5, he highlights the ambivalence that anticolonial activists (including Mahatma Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant) expressed towards the urban dance bands of port cities as an example of elitist attitudes towards these ‘noises’. He also discusses the asymmetry of who was rendered audible within this gramophone culture, particularly when national sovereignty ‘coincided with racial disenfranchisement’ in the recording of ‘black musics’ (115). Inequities across race and class are not unrelated; across the archipelago, Denning maps what he identifies as the ambivalent status of musicking among migrant labourers, the repudiation of authenticity, and the deracination of urban vernacular practices. For instance, in Chapter 3, Denning confronts the oft-discussed question of Roma identity in the discourse of European nationalism. He considers the reception of tzigane dance bands in which cultural elites perceived Roma musicians more as commercial musicians than authentic ‘folk’ performers. Like the discourse surrounding African-American musicians, who were characterized as ‘outcast urban entertainers’ rather than as a ‘rural national peasantry’ (101) with a folk music to claim as their own, this discourse deracinated tzigane musicians by projecting them as performers of a collective repertoire, yet without their own.

Despite Denning's attention to the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in popular culture (likely indebted to his training with Stuart Hall at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1978–9), the book suffers from its own ambitions, in particular its attempt to show that sounds should be grouped together according to their mode of production rather than differentiated into distinct ethnonational narratives that, he argues, reinforce the logic of settler-colonialism. Denning depends on juxtaposition, in prose and argumentation, to engage with a vast amount of territory and an immense written archive drawn from both writings of this historical period and scholarly accounts of musical performance in these places. However, cluttered sentences tend to jumble disparate events, sites, phenomena, and perspectives, and, more importantly, obfuscate historical contingencies and local discourses that potentially complicate any singular analysis. Other writing issues that weaken the potential impact of his work include a proclivity for broad brush strokes and hyperbolic language – one passage describes colonial ports as ‘not only a counterpoint of products . . . but a polyphony of peoples, elaborately distinguished by color, caste, language, and religion’ (44) – and the tendency to blur the authorial registers of his sources. In a paragraph about the conflation of jazz, kroncong, and marabi with ‘noise’ in the 1920s that zigzags between music journalists of that time and contemporary scholars writing about this period (94–5), he does not clearly distinguish between the cultural politics of the period and critiques of these discourses that situate their meaning within broader historical contexts.

More fundamentally, Denning's commitment to material culture – records, rhythms, and timbres – rather than lived experience obscures the emergent and contingent dynamics of musicking as a social process constituted through individual actions. The effect of this approach is to muffle voices that would not only infuse a sense of agency into his narrative but also challenge presumptive ontological relations between sound, persons, and space at this key moment in sonic cultural modernity. Perhaps more contentious is the author's approach to media and technology, one that considers electrical recording a modern Western practice that reproduces sound but does not attend to the infinitely variable ways in which listening subjects emerge from the ‘relationship between listener and something listened to’ and the challenge that this presents to Western ontologies of sound, media, and capital.Footnote ⁵

This work encourages its readers to listen anew to musics made familiar by their own popularity. As a teaching text, it provides an entry point into discussions of sound media, recording practices, commodity culture, and decolonization theory that can be engaged at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Readers may also visit the Spotify playlist that accompanies the text to listen to the remastered versions of these recordings and, so Denning hopes, hear in these recordings the promise of decolonization. For instance, rather than dismiss the steel guitar in contemporary Hawaiian hula music as a borrowing from American country music that affirms the commercial nature of hula, Denning hopes that listeners hear the steel guitar as a reverberation of anticolonial struggles in the 1880s and 1890s and a sign of Hawaii's sovereignty struggles in the 1970s. That highly commodified sounds are also the site for decolonization is the paradox of commercialized popular musics that Denning opens for discussion. If we can change how we hear these recordings, then we can also imagine new affinities and solidarities, no matter how raucous and clashing.