Fruity Batidas: The Technologies and Aesthetics of Kuduro. (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Music Review, 2021
In this paper, I demonstrate how studios producing the Angolan electronic dance music (EDM) kuduro (‘hard arse’) in the capital Luanda are usefully investigated as social spaces of collective creativity. I triangulate interviews, observations, close listening and ethnographic participation. Researchers often portray kuduro and other EDM styles in the Global South using what I name the ‘scarcity-resilience narrative’. This narrative gives short shrift to the rich cultural resources that feed into EDM styles. It perpetuates problematic stereotypes about African people and occludes the deliberate labour that kuduro practitioners (‘kuduristas’) invest in their craft. As kuduristas routinely affirm that sociability drives their interpersonal creative processes I portray kuduro studios as social spaces and construe kuduro’s collective creativity through Extended Mind Theory (EMT). In my analysis, I first introduce kuduro studios in Luanda broadly and then focus on two influential kuduro studios: JUPSON and Guetto Produções. I show how kuduristas mobilise their collective creativity inside the studio by tapping into aesthetic strategies and conventions of the rich popular culture that surrounds them. Via EMT, I portray aesthetic duelling, puto-kota (‘elder-younger’) relationships, call-andresponse and urban vocal strategies as collectively maintained social institutions. Inside the studio, kuduristas translate these rich resources into the sonic materiality of kuduro tracks which, in turn, are designed to achieve maximum audience response through mobilising the social institutions when radiating out into the world. This paper provides the first, fine-grained study of kuduro studios in Luanda. It de-centres the ‘scarcity-resilience narrative’ of Global South EDM by focusing on collective creativity and, as such, offers a fresh epistemological position on the study of music studios, Global South EDM and popular music in Angola. Keywords: Kuduro; Luanda; Music Studio as Social Space; Collective Creativity; Extended Mind Theory
Kizomba beyond Angolan-ness andLusofonia: The transnational dance floor
Atlantic Studies, 2020
The partner dance kizomba became fashionable in the eighties in Portuguese-speaking Africa and its European diasporas. Its commodification in Portugal in the late nineties turned it into a global craze, supported by a linear story: Angola is the source of kizomba, and Lisbon, its international capital. This essay moves beyond the methodological nationalism and the post-imperial geographical concept, lusofonia, that supports this narrative. Examining instead the circulation of people and practices through sites conceptualized as "hubs," I present kizomba as a transnational field of practices deriving from deep histories of transoceanic, inter-African connections. Presenting Lisbon as the main hub for kizomba during the eighties and nineties, I develop the idea of the transnational dance floor, webbed across cities and connected through transnational ties that challenge postimperial and linguistic geographies. Thus, despite the essay's ostensible Lisbon-centrism, I propose building collaborative geographies whereby transnational phenomena such as kizomba may best be examined. KEYWORDS Kizomba; lusofonia; transnational field; hub; postcolonial Africa; dance floor; Angolan-ness; postocolonial Lisbon; social dance; popular music [T]he risk of methodological nationalism can only be counteracted if transnational fields are investigated "bottom-up," across the different nodes or hubs that link people, spaces, institutions and organisations in the complex multi-encoded world. 1
Modern and Contemporary Performance Arts of Angola
The Sage International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture (edited by Janet Sturman), 2019
The purpose of this study on Angolan modern contemporary performance is to provide an introductory understanding of the production of music and creative practice in the development of Angolan history and its narrative in the postcolonial context. This contribution represents a groundbreaking creative investigation of Angolan performance and its understanding in ethnomusicology.
Remediations of Congolese urban dance music in Kinshasa
Following the continuing popularity of Congolese rumba music in the 1950s–1970s, I explore the technological spaces in which old songs appear more than 50 years later, and study the agency of those who initiate and actively contribute to the reinsertions of the old music in and on new media formats. By redefining the ‘repurposing’ of the remediations as strategies steered by human intentionality and occurring within social spaces, I investigate the kind of knowledge that an anthropological focus on remediation, repetition and circulation through electronic and digital media can offer about Kinshasa’s society at large. I propose to analyse the various purposes that direct Kinois (the inhabitants of Kinshasa), individual persons, media professionals and international corporations, to copy and insert old (and new) Congolese dance music into a particular media format, such as TV shows, USB sticks or mobile phone ring tones.
From Luanda to Lisboa: Globalization, Hybridity and Identity in Kuduro
Society for Ethnomusicology Conference 2013
An extended version of this paper is forthcoming in an edited collection, contact me via email for a longer version In recent years a range of new music genres have developed in the global South that fuse regional elements with electronic dance music, creating new hybrid forms. Scholars including Hernandez, Manuel, Marshall and Madrid have discussed the significance of genres such as reggaeton, cumbia sonidera and nortek. However, little attention within ethnomusicology has been paid to kuduro, a genre that developed in Angola during the 1990s, and has subsequently become popular in diaspora communities and beyond. Building on fieldwork conducted in Angola and Portugal, this paper explores the role of cultural and economic processes of globalisation in the development, production and dissemination of kuduro. Specifically, kuduro is framed as a syncretic product, created from fragments of music from North American, Caribbean and African traditions. The importance of Angolan communities in Lisbon will be shown to be central to the genre’s dissemination, initially through street-side distribution of tapes and more recently through file sharing and record labels. Through analysis of musical examples, I illustrate how the genre has succumbed to further hybridization practiced outside of Angola. I argue that kuduro musical culture reflects and builds Angolan national identity, while articulating a response to a globalized postcolonial world. By closely examining kuduro, this project sheds new light on Southern contributions to contemporary global popular and electronic dance music discourses.
Pantsula to the Beat: Kwaito Performance and its Reception in the 'new' South Africa
This paper discusses the extent to which Kwaito dance music embodies the socio-cultural practices of urban post-apartheid South Africa. The paper attempts to address the musical and cultural influences behind the conception of the genre; including a look at the significance of technology and the DJ culture in its early developments. The paper will also provide a comparative analysis exemplifying some of the prominent features, both musical and visual, present in Kwaito that demonstrate three pertinent socio-cultural practices of the township youth. The visual analysis is concerned with exploring dance performance and meaning through music videos and further address the significance of dance within the African society. In addition, this paper will seek to understand the genre’s reception during a very significant period in South Africa’s history and a look at the differing views on its enculturation into the society.
Bérose - Encyclopédie Internationale des Histoires de l’Anthropologie, Paris, IIAC-LAHIC, ISSN 2648-2770, 2019
Publié dans le cadre du thème de recherche «Histoire de l’anthropologie et archives ethnographiques portugaises (19e-21e siècles)», dirigé par Sónia Vespeira de Almeida (CRIA/NOVA FCSH, Lisbonne) et Rita Ávila Cachado (CIES-IUL, Lisbonne). http://www.berose.fr/?-Museu-do-Dundo-