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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Variations on the beautiful in the Congolese world of sounds |
| Author: | Mbembe, Achille |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Periodical: | Politique africaine |
| Issue: | 100 |
| Pages: | 71-91 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) |
| Subjects: | popular music aesthetics |
| Abstract: | Refusing the contrast between 'high' and 'low' art forms, this text considers Congolese urban music as an aesthetic form exhibiting particular modalities, sounds, harmonics, and relations to sensorial experience that produce particular effects on the listener, including that of 'beauty'. The meaning of musical beauty is not a matter of categorization, but is rather its capacity to produce particular effects on the human senses. With reference to the historical trajectories of various strains of Congolese music from Congo-Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Congo-Brazzaville, the author assesses the aesthetic signification of Congolese music of the last fifteen years as 'an experience of listening', but also as a social and political act that contributes to the performance of both resistance and resignation - or historical and personal experiences of order and disorder. He discusses the context in which the music was born and developed, (mis)rules of beauty, and dimensions of form. He shows how the world of some performances of Congolese music, by exaggerating the relationship with the body and by their rendering of time, illusion, deception and ostentation, reflect a type of existence balancing between the abject and the ugly and back to a jubilant state. Notes, ref., sum. in English (p. 325) and French (p. 327). [Journal abstract] |
