Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century

by Dhanveer Singh Brar

How Black electronic dance music makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city.

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city.

Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiments with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Brar foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life.

Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of Blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Brar rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary Black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in Blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism.

Genres: Music, Theory, Nonfiction

219 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 27, 2021

Reviews

[n · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated Brar's thoughtful syntheses of the works of Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Katherine McKittrick among others; however, I found his gesturings towards "racial capitalism" - a concept that was left pretty much undefined throughout the book - to be rather frustrating. Brar masterfully traces divergent yet overlapping sonic geographies, but fell short of being able to really explicate how these geographies are enwoven, enmeshed, and entangled with the landscapes of neoliberal financialization, organized and strategic abandonment, and carcerality over which they are superimposed because of his superficial engagements with political economy/critical geography.

[Ryan Dyck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t finish, so boring 😴

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

im too dumb for part 1 but part 2 good

[Anusha Datar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work covers various dimensions of Black electronic dance music in the early 2000s. Brar discusses how the work in the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress all reflect transcendent artistic output that allows for reframing around traditional racialized notions of space and class in contemporary urban life.

Brar does not shy away from very rigorous theoretical analysis in several sections of this book, especially towards the beginning, and I admire this thoroughness. That being said, it often felt like his analysis was not moving towards any meaningful synthesis, and it often felt like he got 80 percent of the way to a truly groundbreaking point before moving on to the following topic. This felt especially salient with regard to how he connects (or, frankly, could have done a better job connecting) the three projects he describes in the most detail.

I'm glad I read this book, and I learned a lot. But between how overly academic it felt to read (though I curated the right soundtrack of I read it to understand more about this work) and the relatively small payoff in terms of broader applications (I learned a lot about music, but not as much about the implications of his commentary), I don't know if I'd rush to recommend it.

[Andreea Iliescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very academic and intellectual; extremely well-researched and argumented. Favourite part was by far the one on Actress/ Ghettoville, where I could see a clear link between the socio-economic changes of the city of London and Actress’ soundscape. I wish I had read more about how the three albums are contrasted and compared to one another, not solely as individual pieces of black electronic music. still, a great way to wrap up the year with this book. Listened to a talk about the book at Cafe OTO in London prior to starting the book, so it was helpful to get an overview beforehand from the author himself.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Such was the level of volatility that we can hear the potential for all the subsequent styles which were to come, all those which preceded it, and the potentiality for sonic innovations which await us…. colony-bass culture, as a territorial rendering of blackness, was fully demarcated the very first time a bass line came shuddering out of a speaker at a blues dance in a Notting Hill basement.” Haunting, elegiac, speeding toward new horizons, fabulous.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feels like a natural extension to the work of Kodwo Eshun, Kode9 and amazing The Last Angel of History documentary.