Sometime in 1961, at a time when the South African apartheid regime sought to contain the mounting wave of popular resistance through a spate of massacres, the banning of African political movements, and forced removals, a couple of white producers in Johannesburg put on a show they called Drums of Africa, which featured the “sexulating rawness and glamour of some of the most beautiful non-European women.”

Despite its sensational title, Sound of Africa! is not about Africa’s tribal traditions, scantily clad, stomping Zulus, and skin-covered drums. It is about how Africa, being Zulu, sound, technology, making music during an especially tense moment of South African history—the transition from apartheid to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994—and writing about all these of things impinged on one another, how they “made” each other. The convergence and interaction of these entities and forces were refracted in the production, in a Johannesburg studio, of an album of mbaqanga music by the female vocal group Isigqi Sesimanje.

The book contains six chapters or, rather, “cuts.” In the first cut author Louise Meintjes introduces the key characters—producers and musicians—and the genre of mbaqanga, adroitly avoiding essentializing either by presenting biographies and genre as emergent categories, “co-constructed” in metacultural and metamusical discourse (p. 69). In cut 2, the reader is taken into the secluded, magical sphere of the studio, which is described as both a source of creative symbolic power and the locus of a means of social control. In cuts 3–5 Meintjes discusses a variety of timbral and linguistic aspects of the album being produced to highlight the contested elaboration of mbaqanga’s presumed authenticity within parameters such as its “liveness,” Zuluness, and difference from “white” music. The intersection of local and global spheres in South African musical production is the topic of cut 6.

Sound of Africa! is a fascinating read, but it stands out (and will endure) for three main reasons. For one thing , it is the first scholarly treatment of what arguably is (or used to be) one of South Africa’s most vibrant musical traditions. In addition, and potentially more important, Meintjes’s work is one of the first ethnographies to examine the complexities of today’s media-driven forms of popular culture, not, as is so often the case, from the perspective of the consumer, but at the site of production itself. Meintjes does not chime in with the chorus of scholarly critics who still disparage the industrial production of music as inherently alienating and impeding listeners’ agency. And, finally, Meintjes is the first scholar ever to explore the studio production of popular music within an African setting. This conjunction of methodology and research locale is as significant as it is carefully chosen. With the intersection of high-tech media, global market forces, and the sensibilities of marginalized, Third World musicmakers having become ever more volatile in the wake of digitalization, deregulation, and the emergence of new media, the South African case offers fascinating and urgently needed insights into power dynamics both within the specifics of a peripheral, African economy and within an increasingly integrated, albeit fickle and differentially empowering, global music market.

The focus on industrial production of music as a form of mediation has important consequences for the textual strategy pursued in Meintjes’s book—a strategy that marks Sound of Africa! as a strikingly novel and compelling narrative in its own right. The most obvious level at which this will be registered by the reader is the brazenly self-referential terminology adopted throughout the book. Thus, chapters become “cuts,” summaries become “playbacks,” and what is normally titled preface here is called “demo tape.” But the author does not confine herself to this rather harmless metaphoric level. In line with her overall goal of uncovering the empowering potential of studio production and of exposing the “analytic limitations of dichotomizing production and consumption” (p. 16) (yet, at the same time being acutely aware of the fragmented nature of the production process itself), Meintjes self-consciously chooses to adopt a nonlinear style of writing that privileges unexpected connections, sudden insertions, and verbatim repetitions, mimicking the recording process itself. Consequently, her account is assembled rather than unfolding, synchronized rather than sequential.

Much of this attempt to mimetically represent mediation in a form of poetics that pushes ethnographic representation to its limits harkens back to Walter Benjamin (whom Meintjes rarely mentions) and Michael Taussig, to a thinking that seeks to recover capitalism’s magic, utopian dream moments in metaphor, flashes, and techniques of montage. Like Benjamin and Taussig, Meintjes is convinced that all a distanced, analytic rhetoric will achieve in looking at what Marx called “the theological whims of commodity production” is to shroud in even more mystery the processes ethnography is supposed to illuminate in the first place. Very few books on media and popular culture are as shrewdly aware as Sound of Africa! of how this dialectic must inform the very way ethnography mediates between the author, the people she writes about, and the reader. Even fewer achieve this awareness while being informative, empirically sound, and engaging at the same time.