Sonic Intimacy is a welcome contribution to the interdisciplinary field increasingly referred to as Bass Culture Studies, where reggae sound system music and its many cultural manifestations are analysed. The second monograph by media and cultural scholar Malcolm James, Sonic Intimacy develops the author's investment in using music and sound as a means of critiquing neoliberal Britain, especially its impacts on Black British life in London. The project can be summarised as a hybrid media archaeology and critical sound studies work, exploring a set of relations that James calls ‘sonic intimacies’ in Black British popular music after 1970. This unfolds through three chronological case studies, examining ‘vibe’, ‘hype’ and ‘grime’ as the central sonic intimacy in relation to three pairings of musical genre and technology: reggae sound systems in the 1970s–80s, jungle pirate radio in the 1990s and grime YouTube music videos in the 2000s. A range of other intimacies such as ‘kinship’, ‘craft’ and ‘presence’ are explored throughout, in addition to a Conclusion that meditates on critical Left scholarly discourse: perhaps a tall order for 119 pages.

In the Introduction, James outlines how reggae, jungle and grime are positioned at the centre of ‘an important question about the transformation of alternative black diasporic sound culture in Britain’ (p. 2). This is not ‘an argument of linear decline’ from a pre-digital world to a modern one but rather a general process: of sonic cultures adapting to structural forces such as state-sanctioned racism, neoliberal economics and post-millennial digital media (p. 3). Admitting that it ‘might not be immediately apparent’ how sonic intimacy is the common thread between these forces and the sonics of reggae, jungle and grime, James argues that sonic intimacy can illuminate what exactly ‘the vibe of a dancehall or the hype of pirate radio’ entails sonically, technologically and politically (p. 3). He aims to offer a corrective to Cultural Studies where notions of ‘vibe’ and ‘hype’ have so far ‘tended to provide the atmosphere for scholarly discussion, rather than be the focus’ (p. 3).

James is in dialogue with several scholarly frameworks, from ‘the sonic’ as a key relation of modernity and racial capitalism in studies by Paul Gilroy and Alexander Weheliye to the poorly understood nature of ‘intimacy’ in public discourse. This leads to a definition of sonic intimacy as ‘not a question of public or private but at essence a product of relation’ (p. 13, emphasis original). Intimacy is thus more than mere personal interaction. As James writes, ‘sonic intimacy is socially produced and culturally informed’ and it can engender joy just as it can lead to violence (pp. 20–21) or be ‘maintained through objects’, like sound systems (p. 13). The study thus takes shape with a generally Deleuzian theoretical framework. However, ‘intimacy’ is positioned as so open and relational that I found myself searching for a stronger justification of its centrality, especially given the proclivity of musics like reggae towards ‘sonic dominance’, where the sound system can be as intimate as it is disorientating (Henriques Reference Henriques, Bull and Back2003).

Turning to the case studies, Chapter 2 begins with Mikey Dread's often-cited statement that to know the reggae sound system is ‘to feel it’ (p. 28). Historically, we move from early 1970s to late 1980s Britain. James covers wide ground in exploring the emergence of reggae sound system culture as an extension of the Caribbean migrant family home, a highly technical oral tradition powered by the intimacies of craft, apprenticeship, kinship and wisdom. These threads converge in the ‘mysterious and unknowable condition’ of ‘vibe’ in reggae: ‘the feel of technology, sound and human participants in mutual relation’ in the social environment of the dancehall (p. 46). Crucially, this sonic intimacy worked in constant tension with Thatcherite economics and racist policing: it was a means to ‘vibe’ together in alternative spaces with alternative frequencies. This way, James argues the sound system and its sonic intimacies tell ‘a story of the black experience and a story of Britain itself’ (p. 45).

Chapter 3 turns to jungle and pirate radio in 1990s London. ‘Hype’ is the main sonic intimacy which eloquently captures both the ‘fragile, live and illegal’ nature of pirate radio and jungle music's ‘maximum velocity’ aesthetic (pp. 55–6). Presenting a concise history of stations such as RINSE FM, the chapter identifies a resonance between the deindustrialisation of working-class urban multiculture and the rise of neoliberal buzzwords like ‘entrepreneurism’, which pirate radio re-interpreted as DIY hustle (p. 62). With respect to sonic intimacy, James deftly analyses how pirate radio was both a departure from the reggae sound system's family ties and an essential musical lifeline to thousands of disparate listeners. Jungle DJs and MCs engendered sonic intimacy and ‘helped the multi-ethnic city hear itself’ (p. 69), but James stresses that the practice ‘was not code for a different society’. Rather, ‘It is enough that it was an alternative’ (p. 79).

Finally, Chapter 4 arrives at the late 2000s and the early grime scene. James first sifts through grime's messy media ecology of CDs, MP3s, mobile phones and emerging YouTube channels. A key observation is made that, while ‘alternative expression was built into’ the DIY wiring of reggae sound systems and pirate radio stations, grime videos on YouTube instead operated on a ‘closed-circuit’ labour relation with ‘manufacturer designated’ patterns of expression (p. 92). In turn, James explores a cluster of harsher sonic intimacies in grime music, including ‘coldness’, ‘agonism’, ‘intensity’ and ‘lo-fi’, which effectively continued jungle's reaction against post-industrial neoliberal Britain in the previous decade (pp. 92–102). More broadly, the chapter also urges scholars to reassess entanglements of the visual and sonic in post-millennial sonic cultures like grime, in which MCs’ voices were for the first time ‘heard but now also seen’, the ‘racial and gendered codes of their bodies […] calibrating the hype and the intensity of their wordplay’ (p. 101).

Ultimately, Sonic Intimacy covers wide ground and is satisfying to read in its historical and critical specificity. The length may be frustratingly short to many readers, but the case studies of grime and jungle are also refreshingly original in light of the reassessment of existing scholarly narratives around reggae. James also makes no firm statement of disciplinary allegiance, but I see the work as aligned with the current priorities of affect theory-oriented sound studies, where discourses of ‘vibe’ and other affective intimacies in electronic music are increasingly relevant (Garcia Reference Garcia2020; James Reference James2021). Indeed, I would have liked more clarification about why sonic intimacy was chosen as a leading concept given the brief nods to Julian Henriques, a prolific scholar of the reggae sound system and its epistemologies of ‘sounding’. Nevertheless, Sonic Intimacy is a conceptually rich and interdisciplinary study ripe for discussion at graduate-level seminars in multiple fields, wherever black diasporic sonic cultures (and critique of racial capitalism) are of interest. The media archaeology approach will also be enticing for media scholars, as will be the historical work and occasional moments of musical specificity for musicologists.