This dissertation examines the history of popular music in Lomé, the capital city of Togo, a small West African country that has thus far been largely excluded from ethnomusicological inquiry. Through ethnographic and historical research, it explores shifting practices of, ideas about, and sentiments towards, local popular music and their articulations with state power and political culture during the nearly four-decade lasting regime of late President Eyadéma. It divides this long timespan into three distinct periods of political domination. The first period covers the years between Eyadéma’s inception of power in a military coup d’état in 1967 through the rise of his charismatic authority in the 1970s. The second period covers the 1980s, a time of economic decline and growing socio-political tensions, during which the state relied increasingly on terror and violence to solidify its power. The final period covers the last years of Eyadéma’s regime, from the people’s struggle for democracy in the early 1990s through a forged political reconciliation, followed by a gradual process of economic and social liberalization leading up to Eyadéma’s death in 2005. Within this political framework and chronological outline, this dissertation captures an essentially disjointed history of local popular music, which involves musical characteristics and socio-musical processes that remain substantially unaddressed – as is Togo itself – in the extensive literature on African popular music. These characteristics and processes include the stifling of musical creativity and musical evisceration under state patronage, subtle dynamics of subversion among socially alienated musicians involved in seemingly unremarkable generic musical styles, and an overall predominance of imported popular music styles, rather than the hybrid national popular musics prominently featured in the ethnomusicological literature on West Africa. This work is structured around the theme of “absence,” a concept that was dominant in the local discourse on popular music in Lomé towards the end of Eyadéma’s regime. The young generation of urban Togolese, especially, mourned the absence of a set of local musical conditions, principally that of an identifiably Togolese popular music sound. By theorizing “absence” as a phenomenon of perception, rather than an objective state of non-existence, the analysis centers on the nature of the disjunctures between that which is desired and expected, and that which is. In addition to probing various political, economic, cultural, ideological, and discursive trajectories that led up to, and informed, the emergence of perceptions of absence around the turn of the millennium, this work also critically engages with the absence of Togo in the ethnomusicological literature. It identifies, analyzes, and historicizes paradigmatic trends and epistemological conventions that engendered a scholarly concentration on socially vital, stylistically innovative, and audibly “African” popular music cultures, the legacies of which, I argue, have not only inadvertently reinforced celebratory tropes of otherness that parallel those circulating in the context of the World Music market, but have also rendered a place like Togo invisible and inaudible to ethnomusicologists. The larger aim of this dissertation is thus to broaden the scope of the Africanist project on popular music towards the representation of a fuller spectrum of socio-musical experiences in postcolonial Africa through the inclusion of a place whose popular music history is characterized more by absence and alienation than it is by a tangible and assertive musical presence. The ethnomusicological analysis of post-independence popular music practice in Togo also contributes to the broader literature on this generally understudied country in Africa, by revealing and analyzing larger social and cultural responses to, and articulations with, Eyadéma’s autocratic regime, most importantly the absence of a genuine cultural nationalism in the context of Togo’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, a pervasive political disengagement among Togolese in the 1980s, and a short-lived search for a national identity around the turn of the millennium. This dissertation can thus be situated within the larger Africanist body of literature on postcolonial state power. By illuminating the complexities inherent in state-subject relations through an investigation of musicians’ modi operandi across various stages of Togolese political domination, it especially resonates with a body of work inspired by Achille Mbembe that has complicated interpretations of domination in the context of postcolonial totalitarian regimes.

This dissertation offers an aesthetic and historical overview of crunk, a hip- hop subgenre that took form in Atlanta, Georgia during the late 1990s. Get Crunk! is an ethnography that draws heavily on methodologies from African-American studies, musicological analysis, and performance studies in order to discuss crunk as a performed response to the policing of black youth in public space in the 1990s. Crunk is a subgenre of hip-hop that emanated from party circuits in the American southeast during the 1990s, characterized by the prevalence of repeating chanted phrases, harmonically sparse beats, and moderate tempi. The music is often accompanied by images that convey psychic pain, i.e. contortions of the body and face, and a moshing dance style in which participants thrash against one another in spontaneously formed epicenters while chanting along with the music. Crunk’s ascension to prominence coincided with a moment in Atlanta’s history during which inhabitants worked diligently to redefine Atlanta for various political purposes. Some hoped to recast the city as a cosmopolitan tourist destination for the approaching new millennium, while others sought to recreate the city as a beacon of Southern gentility, an articulation of the city’s mythologized pre-Civil War existence; both of these positions impacted Atlanta’s growing hip-hop community, which had the twins goals of drawing in black youth tourism and creating and marketing an easily identifiable Southern style of hip-hop for mainstream consumption; the result was crunk. This dissertation investigates the formation and function of crunk methods of composition, performance, and listening in Southern recreational spaces, the ways in which artists and audiences negotiate identities based on notions of race, gender, and region through crunk, and various manifestations of aesthetic evaluation and moral panic surrounding crunk. The argument here is that the dynamic rituals of listening and emergent performance among crunk audiences constitute a kind of catharsis and social commentary for its primarily black youth listenership; one that lies beyond the scope of lyrical analysis and, accordingly requires analysis that incorporates a conceptualization of listening as an embodied, participatory experience expressed through gesture. The first chapter begins with a historical overview of race, segregation, and the allocation of public space in Atlanta, Georgia in order to establish the social topography upon which Atlanta hip-hop was built; it ends with a social and historical overview of yeeking, Atlanta’s first distinct hip-hop party dance style and marked precursor to crunk. The second chapter delves into essentialist constructions of Southern identity and hip-hop authenticity, from which Atlanta hip- hoppers constructed novel expressions of Southern hip-hop identity through a process akin to Dick Hebdige’s theory of bricolage. Chapter three discusses the history and sociopolitical significance of Freaknik, a large Atlanta spring break event that catered specifically to students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. At its peak, Freaknik became the focus of a moral panic, which led to increased policing of black youth in public space and ultimately the dismantling of the event due in large part to harassment; it is this moment in Atlanta’s history which gives context to the performative abandon of crunk. The fourth chapter discusses the aesthetics of crunk music and imagery, focusing on the subgenre’s embrace of Southern gangsta archetypes, timbral dissonance in compositional methodology, and crunk’s corporeal and vocal catharses illustrated by performative violent embodiment (i.e. moshing) and the centrality of screams and chants. The fifth chapter focuses on gender performativity in Southern hip-hop party spaces. The chapter begins with a discussion of gender normativity in yeeking and how insincere non-normative performances of gender are incorporated as a means of reinforcing the gender normativity; this is framed by analyses of a yeek dance move called “the sissy” and the trap era dance, the nae nae. As is argued in the latter half of this chapter, women performers in crunk engaged in the same kind of bricolage outlined in chapter two in order to transform traditionally male-centric crunk music into something specifically and performatively woman centered. Ultimately, these discussions of gender indicate a kind of performative fluidity that echoes the kind of performance-based subversion that this dissertation argues crunk represented for black youth laying claim to public space in the years following the decline of Freaknik. The conclusion holds that, while the era of the crunk subgenre has passed, many of the underlying performative political subtexts persisted in subsequent subgenres of Southern hip-hop (e.g. snap, trap, etc.), which lays the foundation for discourse on methodologies of performative resistance in other hip-hop formats.

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This ethnographic study concerns itself with the role that local rap performance plays in either reinforcing or challenging perceptions of 'race' amongst the participants of hip-hop culture in Durban, South Africa, and what this implies for the prospects of reconciliation. Using Cohen's (1989) theory of community and Grossberg's (1996) theory of affective alliances, I explore the ways in which music may create and maintain differences and commonalities between groups of people. It is my hypothesis that genre conventions and connotations, and the discourses that circulate about rap music (for example, rap music as a form of expression particular to the 'black Atlantic' diaspora and conditioned by a racially segregated society [Rose 1994]), allow hip-hop to either reinforce or challenge participants' perceptions of 'race'. I examine how musical and lyrical utterances thrust into a semantic historical and socio-political context limit how rap performance can mean and how, as a dialogic speech genre, rap can uphold, subvert or negotiate its genre associations, including, through the use of double-voiced discourse, dominant ideas concerning 'race' and cultural identity. Acknowledging the idiom as of a form of black cultural expression (Rose 1994), interviewees mention narratives of hip-hop's historical origins, rap artists' use of Five Percenter and Black Nationalist ideologies, and poverty, as factors that either reinforce or challenge notions of 'race'. The simultaneous transgression of and/or adherence to, racialized space and spatialized 'race' (Forman 2002) by different 'races', as well as the presence or absence of multilingualism, are viewed as indicators of the level of commitment to the notion of a democratic place for all 'race' and language groups in post-apartheid South Africa. It is the aim of this thesis to add to the body of knowledge concerning the nature of our post-apartheid identities, what influences them and in what way. And in a broader context, to explore the role of music in societies in transition and the role it might play in facilitating an ability to 'imagine culture beyond the colour line' (Gilroy 2000). / Thesis (M.Mus.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

A research report submitted to the Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in partial fulfilment of a Degree of Master’s of Arts. Sunday 11 October 2015 / This qualitative research report explores the motivations for, and barriers to, young people attending and consuming live music in small to medium venues in Johannesburg. With the average age of South Africans being just 25 years, young people represent a large, existing and potential new audience for live music venues looking to grow new audiences. Yet there are challenging racial, spatial and economic legacies of apartheid which live music venues need to overcome to reach out to more young people. Young South Africans are often described as one entity, defined by their ‘race’, age and education level. This research uncovers new insights into what motivates young South Africans to attend live music from socialising with friends to deeper emotional connections with music and artists. Broader themes such as young people’s desire for authenticity, uniqueness and self-identity are explored in the context of live music as well as their preferences for open spaces and freedom of movement during their live music experiences. This research explores how to segment South African live music audiences based on motivation and consumption patterns, to understand if it could help inform future audience development strategies in South Africa. Live music venues’ understanding and practice of audience development has been analysed to better understand how embedded the arts marketing profession is within the sector and what appetite there could be for the introduction of a motivation-based audience segmentation tool. Finally, the report reflects on the findings and makes recommendations on how live music venues could authentically engage with young audiences; what measures could be taken to cultivate more artistically-led, but audience-focused venues; and ultimately, how to attract more young audiences to their venues. Keywords Audience development, arts motivation, arts marketing, arts consumption, arts audiences, hedonic consumption, authenticity, live music, live music venues, barriers to arts attendance, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa, young people, Morris Hargreaves and McIntyre, Concerts SA, The Orbit, Niki’s Oasis, Afrikan Freedom Station and the Soweto Theatre.

Lee Ying Chuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-110). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.6 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Literature Review --- p.13 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Mapping the Local Sound Scape --- p.29 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Blackbird: A living Song --- p.54 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Freedom of Art as Freedom of Life --Cultural Discourse as Political Activity --- p.80 / Chapter Chapter Six --- Concluding Remarks --- p.95 / Postscript --- p.98 / Appendix --- p.101 / References --- p.104

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This dissertation is an ethnography centered around two bands based in Guangzhou and their relationships with one of China’s largest record companies. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, media studies, vocal anthropology, and the anthropology of infrastructure, it examines emergent forms of musical creativity and modes of circulation as they relate to shifts in concepts of self, space, publics, and state instigated by China’s political and economic reforms. Chapter One discusses a long history of state-sponsored cartographic musical anthologies, as well as Confucian and Maoist ways of understanding the relationships between place, person, and music. These discussions provide a context for understanding contemporary musical cosmopolitanisms that both build upon and disrupt these histories; they also provoke a rethinking of ethnomusicological and related linguistic theorizations about music, place, and subjectivity. Through biographies of seven musicians working in present-day Guangzhou, Chapter Two outlines a concept of “musical subjectivity” that looks to the intersection of personal histories, national histories, and creativity as a means of exploring the role of individual agency and expressive culture in broader cultural shifts. Chapter Three focuses on the intertwining of actual corporeal mobilities and vicarious musical mobilities, and explores relationships between circulations of global popular musics, emergent forms of musical creativity, and an evolving geography of contemporary China. Chapter Four extends these concerns to a discussion of media systems in China, and outlines an approach to “sonic infrastructures” that puts sound studies in dialogue with the anthropology of infrastructure in order to understand how evolving modes of musical circulation and the listening practices associated with them are connected to broader economic, political, and cultural spatialities. Finally, Chapter Five examines the intersecting aesthetic and political implications of popular music sung in local languages (fangyan) by focusing on contemporary forms of articulation between music, language, listening, and place. Taken together, these chapters explore musical cosmopolitanisms as knowledge-making processes that are reconfiguring notions of self, state, publics, and space in contemporary China.

This study offers an ethnographically contextualised close reading of the music played by three 'jazz' groups in eight concerts held in Durban and Johannesburg between June 1994 and December 2003. These performances were videotaped and then analysed with reference to 1) the compositional and improvisational techniques employed in the creation of the performances; 2) the stage behaviour of the musicians; 3) audience behaviour, and 4) the physical contexts in which the performances occurred. The performances constitute the primary texts on which this study is based. Secondary texts, in the form of discourse produced because of the concerts, are also examined. These take the form of open-ended interviews with thirteen participant musicians and twelve audience members. The primary and secondary texts are then compared with each other and situated within their broader musical and social contexts. This exploration of the ways in which social processes inhere in musical processes draws on a notion of expressive discourse as 1) a multifaceted practice in which textuality, subjectivity, place, history, and power function as interdependent parts of a complex social ecology and 2) a dialogically-constituted system of utterances. The study then argues that musical details articulate social meanings - and thus function as utterances - because of their dual existence within 1) systems of intra- and intertextual relationships and 2) processes of dialectical interaction between texts and socio-historical contexts. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the exiling from South Africa of jazz musicians, including The Blue Notes, brought the discourses of local jazz, its performance culture and repertoires, to international attention. This process points to jazz’s global reach and raises questions about its adoption by differently constituted cultural subjects. Arjun Appadurai’s arguments about global homogenisation and heterogenisation come into play here, and have special significance today, when the study of jazz performance and history is increasingly part of the music education of young South Africans. Questions about who ‘owns’ jazz and what constitutes its authenticity loom large, as do questions about its global entanglement. The careers of The Blue Notes emerge from a background of South African syncretic musical performance; as such, they belong within the protracted history of African cultural engagement with European and American mediations of modernity. Among other issues, my thesis examines the use of jazz-influenced repertoires in the narration of cultural identities in postcolonial South Africa, under apartheid, and in exile. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.