Kwaito's Promise
Subtitle: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780226362403
Subjects: Music, philosophy and aesthetics; Music, south african; South africa, social conditions; Musicians
Description: In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country's urban black youth developed kwaito - a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today - who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime - Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.