Popular Culture and Noise

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian describes his first night in the field and his first contact with Congolese popular music:

I was in bed in a room at a mission in the middle of Dendale township [in Leopoldville], trying to get some sleep. Around the square where the mission’s building lay loudspeakers from what seemed at least four different bars or dancing halls blasted Zairian music into the night air; each playing a different record yet creating in my tortured head a common effect, a kind of pulse caused by seemingly never-ending repetition of guitar riffs. Here was African life that assaulted me physically, made its presence painfully felt. I was about to go out of my mind, as the saying goes, when a tropical downpour swept all sound from the square. (1998, 82; c.f. Fabian 1990, 79)

This passage is cited not to single out Johannes Fabian—who has done a great deal to advance our understanding of popular culture in Africa—but because his confession speaks to a common experience among first-time visitors to the Congo: the feeling of being overwhelmed by unfiltered noise. Many things have changed since Fabian first left for the field, not the least of which is that popular music in the Congo has itself become the object of serious study. Fabian himself admits to being “privately embarrassed that it took me so long to recognize [the music] as perhaps the richest and most distinctive gift to the continent, and indeed the world, to come from Zaire” (1998, 82).

And yet this increased attention on the part of researchers has not stripped the music of its status as a source of noise. Congolese popular music has multiple uses and divergent meanings: it is a symbol of national heritage, a means of gaining access to wealth and power, an expression of violence, a symptom of widespread moral decay, a space of memory, and a way of forgetting. My intention is not only to explore the noisiness of this particular form of popular culture, but also to talk about this “noise” as a form of “meaningful sound” (Fabian 2000, 115). If it is true, as Achille Mbembe suggests that “Noise, here, is part of the practice of joy” (2006, 82), then what are the components that make up this noise and how are they combined to create a collective experience of transcendence through music, that indescribable feeling that people in Kinshasa attempt to describe with the Lingala expression “eloko mosusu” (literally “something different”)?

For many academics, the idea of doing research on popular culture can be unsettling. Not only is popular culture diffuse and difficult to characterize, but it is also tainted by its proximity to city, mass media and the market. If anthropology has traditionally shown resistance (or indifference) to popular culture (Fabian 1998), it is as much out of fear as from any theoretical or scientific justification. First, there is the fear that studying popular culture will have a negative impact on the researcher’s reputation as a “serious” scholar. Second, the screaming sensuality of popular culture—especially popular music, and Congolese popular music in particular—triggers an intellectual response that calls up (again) the separation between mind and body, and clearly relegates popular culture to domain of the latter. In the words of Simon Frith: “The danger…is not so much the absence of mind as the presence of body” (1996, 260). But there is also the more pragmatic fear that the diffuse and protean nature of popular culture makes it impossible to manage from a research perspective. Even those who might acknowledge popular culture as a valid object of anthropological inquiry may feel limited by the methodologies that we have at our disposal to make the complexity meaningful and thus are in many ways intimidated.

Popular Culture and Aesthetics

If there is something slightly strange about an anthropologist writing on the question of aesthetics, it is probably because anthropologists spent the better part of the last century trying to explain cultural practices and products in terms of their social function, and this intellectual tradition, despite numerous critiques, is alive and well. Kofi Agawu (2001) criticizes the asymmetry of Western musicological analysis, which sees African traditional music as “utilitarian” and elite or art music as contemplative and thus autonomous from society. While I am interested, as Agawu suggests, in concentrating on “music itself”, my use of the term “aesthetics” must be taken with a grain of salt. I am not attempting, as Jean During has done for traditional music in the Middle East, to construct a theory of beauty, a task that is outside of my expertise and my data. Nor am I attempting a form of “aesthetic description” in the terms laid out by Achille Mbembe (2006)—to “put into words the totality of sensations, pleasures and energies provoked by a particular work”—since I am more interested in form and perceptions of form, than I am in experience per se.

My primary interest is in what urges people to move when listening to this music, or why, to put it simply, the music is so moving. In my opinion, these are questions that are part and parcel of an aesthetic analysis, albeit one that is more informed by popular perceptions than the views of those with expert knowledge of music or aesthetics. As Simon Frith (1996) has shown, scholars of popular culture have ignored aesthetics for a long time. And yet there is nothing in a sociological or anthropological approach to the study of music that keeps us from being able to talk about the relationship between aesthetics and culture. In fact, in this article I would like to argue that whether or not we believe in the possibility of an experience with art that is unmediated by culture, we can still attempt to explain why Congolese people think their music is beautiful, and this analysis can tell us about more than just music.

One of the first intellectuals to write about popular culture critically will not necessarily be remembered for helping the cause: Theodor Adorno. As an important early player in the group of critically minded social theorists that later would become known as the Frankfurt School, Adorno espoused a position (most generally associated with his writing about American popular jazz, but also cinema and television) that relied heavily on the notion of standardization, by which the products of culture are subsumed in the capitalist system of goods, flattened out in their form and content, thereby becoming commodities just like any other product, and reinforcing a social hierarchy in which inequality is perpetuated and its mechanism of operation fetishized. Indeed, it has become quite common for researchers working in the area of popular music or popular culture more generally to use Adorno’s biting critique of the culture industry as a sort of strawman against which they can rally support from the reader, already inclined to support popular culture, either as a form of resistance, or a kind of souped-up populism.

Achille Mbembe’s writing on Congolese popular dance music is a good example of this usage. “Adorno would have no doubt disliked Congolese music”, writes Mbembe (2006, 71), which he would have likely found vulgar, frivolous, and repetitive. But according to Mbembe, Adorno “would have been wrong” (ibid., 72). He goes on to situate Adorno by claiming that “the aesthetic signification of the musical work cannot, as Adorno would have us believe, be measured simply by its ability (or its inability) to expose social alienation” (ibid.). But at a closer look, Adorno’s thoughts on this subject would seem to be considerably more complex. Adorno was not arguing that art is only aesthetic to the extent that it exposes social alienation, but rather that in order for art to expose social alienation it must express itself in aesthetic terms. In other words, Adorno was not arguing that art needs critical theory, but that critical theory needs art. His theory of aesthetics was primarily concerned with how formal properties of performance and composition are brought to bear on praxis and by extension on changing modes of consciousness: “Cultural products, in so far as they evinced particular modes of praxis in their formal arrangements, could, for example, heighten or suppress human critical, perceptual, and expressive faculties” (DeNora 2003: 10).

Clearly Adorno was no fan of popular culture. The critique lodged by Adorno and his colleague Horkheimer (1972) is not only the most important early attempt to critically engage with what was becoming the archetype for the global culture industry, but it was also oddly prophetic. Even today students who read Horkheimer & Adorno for the first time are surprised at the audacity of their critique and are swayed by its rhetorical turns and tone, one that can only be described as angry. But there are just as many readers who find Adorno’s critique condescending, elitist, and demeaning, primarily because it implies that consumers have no knowledge of the banality of their consumption, as if the very act of consumption strips consumers of their capacity for self-awareness or irony. It is important to remember, however, that Adorno was just as critical of mass culture as he was of culture for a bourgeois elite, since according to Adorno they both reinforce the ideology of a capitalist mode of production, one through mindless hedonism and the other through the dogmatism of beauty. He even criticized politically engaged or “committed” art forms, for being aloof with regards to aesthetics. In every sense, Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1997), a book that according to Robert Hullot-Kentor (the English translator) literally killed him, was concerned with broadening the very notion of aesthetics in order to breathe new life into aesthetics as a domain of critical analysis.

And given that one of Adorno’s main aesthetic concerns was the standardization of the products of culture through what he termed the “culture industry”, in the Congo we have a fascinating case in which music becomes standardized in the absence of, or perhaps because of the absence of a fully functional commercial apparatus. Elsewhere (White 2008) I have tried to explain the complex relationship between the decline of the Congolese music industry and the emergence of a certain degree of repetitiveness in the music—generally referred to locally as “la monotonie”—that expresses itself not only through clichés in song lyrics, but also through the cyclical nature of the music’s signature guitar sound. As the argument goes, musicians, no longer able to earn an income through the formal sale of cassettes and CDs, have placed increasing emphasis on live performance (spectacular dance formations, high-fashion wardrobes, and heightened interactions with audiences), since it is through the liveness of the concert atmosphere (ndule) that they are able to solicit financial support from wealthy fans and sponsors. So maybe Adorno would have liked Congolese music after all.

Gadamer and the Metaphor of Listening

But why rely on Adorno to teach us something about the aesthetics of popular culture, since in some sense we already know how his story will end? Adorno believed that unorthodox compositional practices lead the way to social and political transformation and that these practices cannot thrive in the context of an industrial cultural complex. For Adorno, then, artists are (or should be) constantly challenging the aesthetic norms of their art form and of their discipline. In this model, social change is the result of the artist’s private intellectual activity that occurs outside of her relationship with her audience. This is one of most important differences between Adorno and another important 20^th century German philosopher of aesthetics, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Despite the fact they both made the case for subjective experience as a central aspect of any theory of aesthetics, and that they both set out to criticize the bourgeois notion of aesthetics embodied in the formula “art for art’s sake”, Adorno and Gadamer rarely share the same stage. Gadamer criticizes bourgeois art since “here there is no progress in any absolute terms, neither is it possible to exhaust the content of a work of art” (1996, 118) and opposes this “aesthetic consciousness” to the lived experience (erlibnis) of art, working through a model of understanding that is fundamentally intersubjective. “Understanding,” in Gadamer’s terms, “is part of the encounter with the work of art” (ibid).

It is this notion of “encounter” that points most clearly to the weakness in Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that I would like to examine further in the context of an anthropological analysis of popular culture. According to Gadamer, the dialectical nature of understanding resembles the back-and-forth movement of a game, where two or more players engage in non-goal-oriented play, absorbed in the immediacy of exchange, without concern for rules, procedures or techniques. This play is characterized by a certain degree of “buoyancy”, or a quality of being borne along by the subject matter (subjectum), and it is based on the simple but elegant premise that each player has something to learn from the other. Transposing this analytical model to the domain of literature and theater, Gadamer’s discussion of tragedy raises the question of how works of art create effects in audiences. His answer to the question “What is the spectator saying ‘yes’ to?” (Gadamer 1996, 150) has something to do with the pleasure and pain of identifying with tragic figures, not only confronting the terror of injustice, but also accepting the hegemony of destiny.

What Are People Saying “Yes” To?

Animation, or From Melancholy to Joy

Libanga or an Aesthetic of Buzz

Listen Up! We’re Working Here…

So what, if anything, can we say about the aesthetics of popular culture in this context? It seems obvious to say that popular culture has its own forms and its own way of knowing the world, in other words, its own aesthetics (Frith 1996), but this is only part of the work that we have to do. Among the various formal aspects of Congolese popular dance music, I have chosen to discuss those that stand out in my listening and in my conversations with people in Kinshasa. Here I have only focused on two, none of which correspond neatly with the conventional units of aesthetic analysis: changes in song structure and commercialized praise-singing. I could have also addressed other important aspects of the music as they relate to questions of form: the counterpoint of interlocking guitar lines, the percussive nature of shouts, the layering of vocal harmony, creative discrepancies in the motion of dance steps, diglossia and patterns of voicing in song lyrics, the use of metaphor, etc. Clearly more research will need to be done to explore these questions of structure and form, but this work will have to be undertaken by scholars with training in musicology and linguistics. It is also important to keep in mind that throughout my analysis I have been referring primarily to popular perceptions of musical practice and sounds, not the analysis of aesthetics from a philosophical or musicological perspective, or even from the point of view of professional musicians, but conventional wisdom about the way music sounds and what this sound means.

Despite these limitations, there are several observations that can be made about the relationship between popular culture and aesthetics in this context. First, it would seem that the aesthetics of popular music is fundamentally a generational phenomenon. This means that what sounds good varies from one period to another and that music, as a privileged domain of aesthetic activity in an African context, is one of the terrains on which generations debate the eternal questions of what is beautiful, what is good, and what is true. Second, and this only confirms what Africanist scholars have known since Jan Vansina’s important work on oral tradition (1965), the analysis of popular aesthetics in an African context should never underestimate the importance of language. The non-verbal aspects of music (rhythm, tone, melody, etc.) are obviously important to the music’s sound, but listeners tend to emphasize lyrics more than the non-verbal aspects of music, even implying that the most beautiful songs are those whose lyrics provoke strong emotions and vivid personal memories. Third, the nature of aesthetic changes in the music is linked in important ways to what is going on in the larger political economy and this relationship, always embedded in a particular historical moment, is something that needs to be explained. In the examples I consider here, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of libanga without the autonomous development of the seben, and just as difficult to imagine the seben without significant changes in song structure. But what led to these structural changes in the music? The answers to this question lie in the complex evolution of cultural policy under Mobutu, which promoted the idea of “authentic” African culture as a means of covering up a looming economic crisis that was primarily due to the opportunism and mismanagement of a newly entitled state-based elite (White 2006b). As I have argued elsewhere (White 2008), musicians tried to resolve this crisis through their music, and not surprisingly their efforts only had limited benefits for the economy as a whole.

The elements I have chosen to discuss in my analysis apply primarily to the third and fourth generations of popular music in Kinshasa, a period that begins in the early 1970s and according to most accounts continues to the present day (Makobo 2010). Before this period, popular music in the Congo was different because “l’esprit de l’époque” or Zeitgeist was different, what Raymond Williams refers to as the “structures of feeling” (1976). In fact, one could argue that while popular music today is much more prone to monotony than popular music forty years ago, in some ways it is also more complex. Take, for example, the simple observation that songs today are much longer than they used to be and that their structure is based on three parts instead of only two. Or look at the way that musicians combine strategies to implicate listeners in the process of consuming music, not only song narratives playing on emotion, but also an increased emphasis on live spectacle and the emergence of the libanga phenomenon. I am also inclined to argue that the lyrics contemporary popular songs do part of the work required of music and the music does something completely different, even though the two work hand in hand to create complex aesthetic experiences that keep Congolese audiences interested. By this I mean that lyrics set the stage for intense feelings of sadness and loneliness while music, operating at a completely different register of experience, offers a kind of resolution to this problem, pulling the listener out of emotional paralysis and re-integrating him or her into a community of exchange.

But this interpretation is mine and mine alone. In the best of worlds, I see my analysis as an attempt to listen to people listening, an attempt to figure out if when we listen, we are hearing any of the same things (Szendy 2001). From the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics (at least in Gadamer’s terms), the fact that we can only ever hear from a particular point of view does not mean that we should give up altogether on listening. Of course, to listen to others, truly listen to others, we have to be capable of listening to ourselves, and this means separating our own perceptions, interpretations, and desires from those of our subjects. Not in order to remove these pre-judgments from the equation as the modernists would have us do, but so that we might mobilize them to our advantage in the long and tedious process of question and answer that only rarely makes the leap from conversation to dialogue. So when we talk about the “experience” of listening, whose experience are we referring to? What aspects of this experience are unique to the individual listener and what aspects does she share with other listeners? From my own experience, the power of Congolese music comes from its ability to allow listeners to completely lose themselves in the music. This interpretation is based on many years of listening to this music, but on relatively few conversations with Congolese about how they experience this “thirty seconds of joy”. What status should I give this interpretation, especially in light of the fact that I am an outsider—albeit with some status as initiate or apprentice—looking in?

The lesson for the study of popular culture is simple: popular culture is certainly more accessible than “culture tout court”, since very often it comes in the form of a text, a CD or a DVD, but these objects often run the risk of coming between us and the people who produce, distribute and consume them. Take for example Achille Mbembe’s (2006, 90) analysis of “song and melody” in which he describes in detail what he hears in a recent recording by Koffi Olomide:

This interweaving of sounds paradoxically produces a strongly syncopated rhythm, which is interrupted by spasmodic phrases. Nothing is stable in the composition. There are no sustained breaks. Each instrument interrupts another, taking its turn before being extinguished by another instrument, by the atalaku, or the chorus. Then, it all ends as it began, without ever reaching a peak and with no clear conclusion.

References

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Madoda, Doudou. 2010. “Monotonie dans la musique congolaise d’aujourd’hui : Manque de créativité des artistes musiciens ou goût monotone des mélomanes?” In Bob W. White and Lye Yoka Mudaba (eds.), L’Ethnographie de l’écoute : Culture et société à travers la réception de la musique populaire de Kinshasa. Paris: L’Harmattan.

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_____. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

_____. 2006. “Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds”. Politique Africaine 100: 71-92.

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_____. 1992. “La chanson de la rupture dans la musique zaïroise moderne.” In Marc Quaghebeur and Emile Van Balberghe (eds.), Papier blanc, encre noire : Cents ans de culture francophone en Afrique centrale (Zaïre, Rwanda, Burundi). Bruxelles: Editions Labor.

Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. 1996. De l’art africain et de l’esthétique: valeur d’usage, valeur d’échange. Cahier d’Etudes africaines, vol. 141-142, XXXVI-1-2.

_____. 2002. “Vers une impossible representation de soi”. Les Temps Modernes 620-621 (août-novembre): 101-114.

Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham. NC: Duke University Press.

Szendy, Peter, 2001. Écoute : une histoire de nos oreilles. Paris: Les éditions de minuit.

Vansina, Jan. 1965. Oral Tradition. A Study in Historical Methodology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

White, Bob W. 2000. “Soukouss or Sell‑Out? Congolese Popular Dance Music on the World Market.” In Angelique Haugerud, M. Priscilla Stone, and Peter D. Little (eds.), Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

_____. 2006a. “Pour un lâcher prise de la culture”. Anthropologie et Sociétés 30 (2): 7-26.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael McGovern for our ongoing conversations on Adorno, popular culture and the politics of anthropological inquiry and to my colleagues in Kinshasa without whom my research on listening would not be possible. I would especially like to thank Lye M. Yoka, Serge Makobo, Doudou Madoda and Jean-Claude Diyongo. Funding for this project was made available by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), le Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s International Collaborative Research Grant. Thanks also to Michael Barrett for the invitation to participate in a conference he organized at the Museum of Cultural History, in Oslo, Norway in September 2007. All translations are my own.