Listening to the Aesthetics of Popular Culture

In the last fifty years, Congolese popular dance music (also known as “Congolese rumba”) has become something of a musica franca for much of sub-Saharan Africa. As Congolese like to say, the captivating sound of their music, firmly grounded in Africa’s encounter with afro-Cuban culture, has “colonized the rest of the continent”, but the music has gone through a series of important aesthetic changes since it first emerged in the urban colonial centers of the Belgian Congo. Despite this rich history, limited research has been done on the subject and very little has been published on Congolese popular music from the point of view of aesthetics. By tuning in on local conversations about certain aspects of the music’s structure and form, this text attempts to understand how Congolese popular dance music attempts to transcend the ugliness of an ongoing political and economic crisis that has become increasingly acute since independence (la conjoncture) and how this particular expression of beauty enables us to better understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics more generally. The perception of “noise” in the analysis of popular music reveals more about our inability to understand non-Western aesthetic criteria than about popular music per se. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the metaphor of listening is used to argue that the difficulty of hearing music from someone else’s point of view should not be used to justify a retreat into the self.