Review of Ytasha Womack's Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
Charting the landscape of Afrofuturism: a review
Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013) arrives as the first book-length survey of a movement that has long deserved comprehensive treatment. Following her earlier work Post-Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity (2010), Womack delivers a readable and personable guide to Afrofuturist culture. She defines the term as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation”, where practitioners “redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future” by weaving together “elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs”.
The book adopts a first-person narrative style, rich with interviews from artists, musicians, writers, and scholars. It also sketches Afrofuturism’s intellectual history and its various artistic and musical traditions. Full-page black-and-white comic artwork by John Jennings and James Marshall introduces each chapter, helping readers visualize the hybrid fusion of black identity and technology.
Womack succeeds in a difficult task: making accessible the nuanced concepts of cyclical temporality and post-human identity that underpin the Afrofuturist worldview. Where academic texts often turn dry, she adopts a conversational tone. Her personal journey — from discovering fellow “AfroGeeks” in college to speaking at exhibitions and authoring the science fiction series Rayla 2212 — ties the book together with a human warmth that illuminates Afrofuturism as a positive means of confronting systemic racism and inequality.
The chapters are short, digestible, and grouped by medium. They cover science fiction literature, music, comics, film, music videos, and black inventors and technologies. Unexpected topics also appear: the cosmogony of the Dogon, Malidoma Somé’s work in Africanist ritual, D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurrealism manifesto, “The Afrofuturist Affair” curatorial group, and a chapter dedicated to “The Divine Feminine in Space” (women in Afrofuturism). Womack surveys familiar figures — Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry, George Clinton, Grace Jones, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe — but also uncovers lesser-known works from earlier eras. She discuss[E]S nineteenth-century African American literature by George S. Schuyler and Sutton E. Griggs, noting that “the black visionaries of the past . . . used [speculative and proto-science fiction] as devices to articulate their issues and visions”. These historical references hint at deeper Afrofuturist roots still awaiting full excavation.
A key strength is Womack’s inventory of recent works not covered in earlier publications. She highlights exhibits, conferences, and galleries across the United States where artists have adopted “Afrofuturism” as a framework. She also outlines “Afrofuturist critical theory” as an emerging scholarly movement, citing Kodwo Eshun, Alexander Weheliye, D. Denenge Akpem, Reynaldo Anderson, and others. This dimension positions Afrofuturism not simply as a cultural aesthetic but as a critical platform for rethinking time, technology, and liberation.
In the chapter “Project Imagination”, Womack discusses Afrodiasporic inventors and futurist technologies. She draws on a conversation with Alondra Nelson to explore how people of color have historically contributed to — but been erased from — technological progress. This move acknowledges Afrofuturism’s role in reclaiming and rewriting whitewashed histories of innovation.
Yet some aspects of the book invite critique. While Womack lists several technologies developed by people of color (including a claim about the “modern computer” that may oversimplify complex networks of collective production), she provides few details about the inventors, dates, or conditions of production. For readers wanting deeper stories and struggles, this lack of context feels like a lost opportunity — an odd gap for a book aiming to illuminate black history.
One might also question Womack’s approach to technology itself. At times she equates Afrofuturism with Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian optimism — often called the “California Ideology” — in which new tools are assumed to bring social and economic liberation. She writes: “Today technology enables a greater ability to create and share images across the world. Social media, websites, music downloads, digital cameras, low-cost sound engineering, at-home studios, editing equipment, and on and on.” Similar enthusiasm appears in her description of a family portrait taken by a cousin “with her iPad”. These familiar celebrations overlook that the same technologies enable surveillance and have been used against communities striving for change. Is not
a more critical Afrofuturism possible — one that questions the very hardware and platforms that sustain it (for example, Linux and BitTorrent rather than iPad and Instagram)?
Womack also aligns Afrofuturism with “hope” populism, echoing gestures from President Obama’s campaigns. But how does simple hope fit with Afrofuturism’s own cyclical temporality, in which “the right words and actions can speak the future into existence, [just as] the same can recast the past”? The thinking of Kodwo Eshun, who speaks of “chronopolitics” and an “extreme indifference to the human”, or the destructive finale of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, suggests a darker, more militant vision. Meanwhile, a deeper question runs beneath the surface of Womack’s text — a tension one finds throughout all Afrofuturist thought: is “Afro”-futurism essentially bound to black bodies and representation, or does its imaginary force free[E] identity from racial constraints entirely?
On one hand, Womack stresses the importance of black representation in science fiction, noting the “obvious absence of people of color in the fictitious future/past”. She identifies with countless black children who “yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceships”. She writes that scholars focus on “works that analyze dynamics of race and culture specific to the experiences of black people through sci-fi and fantasy works”. On the other hand, she argues — as she did in Post-Black — that Afrofuturists “redefine” “notions of blackness” and that race itself is “a creation too”. She quotes filmmaker Cauleen Smith calling blackness “a technology. It’s not real.” This second viewpoint suggests scholars should not only look for images of blackness tied to lived experience but study how blackness has been constructed as a specific “technology” that Afrofuturism excavates through alien, android, and post-human identities. Kodwo Eshun pushes furthest here, attempting to reject “all notions of a compulsory black condition”.
This paradoxical dual demand — to both represent blackness and deconstruct it — gives Afrofuturism its ongoing relevance. Womack observes the tension: artists “develop art exploring people of color and the future . . . all valuing black characters or aesthetics to deconstruct images of the past to revisualize the future”. Yet one must ask: does the rewriting of time truly dissolve racial limits, as she hopes — “bending time erases the prism of race-based limitations that all too often lac the present” — or does it remain a gesture of “self empowerment”? Future scholarship could probe this ambiguity more directly. This book, though rich, does not settle the matter.
Fact-checking also reveals a few minor errors: Wallace D. Fard Muhammad (not Elijah Muhammad) founded the Nation of Islam in 1930; Mark Sinker wrote for the British magazine The Wire, not the American Wired. Researchers should verify such details if citing this work.
Through her concise and self-reflective reportage, Ytasha Womack has explicated Afrofuturism’s concepts, and works with success and grace. She makes this world — with its cyclical sense of time, redefined race, and post-human futures — feel personal, approachable, and deeply relevant.
Format Theory revealed: Sterne takes a grain of sound
Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) turns a single digital format inside out, revealing centuries of technological, economic, and cultural sediment. Where most studies focus on MP3 players and mobile listening, Sterne redirects attention to the underlying histories of sound compression, charting the prehistory, genesis, adoption, and ontological meaning of the codec itself.
Sterne argues that the MP3 did not spring from Silicon Valley alone but grew out of longer imperatives in telephony — an area often sidelined in audio scholarship. He asserts that telephonic research drove the practical and theoretical push to “compress” sound and information, innovations that share DNA with scientific experiments and aesthetic philosophy from the early twentieth century. The eventual standard released in the early nineties, he contends, was built upon a notion of a “universal” listening subject: an artificial but construct that once he hearing could be an ind, ion without become an embodied creature.
The fruit of Sterne’s archiology (sic, arontology/epistemology of the sound file), his proposal for “Format Theory”. Treat format not as a container but as a holistic lens of media change. A focus on a device types - LP of CD not a film of sound media - can bridge analysis of economics and a practice. From the key idea “intering affect of methodic” to “complex,” mutual referencing in communication tech). First quality oriented shift infach and codes, ignoring flat of remediation no no false teleologio and also more critically = industry organization strategies. And the results indeed part specific analysis: one beyond the human to relate infrastructures scales. For reader building not seduced, this minor - not once medium “the true descendant track > histories
Surplus Perception and the MP3 Standard
Chapter 1 examines “Perceptual Technics,” which Sterne describes as “the application of perceptual research for the purposes of economizing signals” (19). He situates work at AT&T, Bell Labs, and Western Electric within early twentieth-century corporate efforts to quantify human life and apply instrumental reason to bodies for profit. The pursuit of monopoly fueled psychoacoustic research on hearing. Drawing on Foucault’s power/knowledge and Bourdieu’s field theory, Sterne links the legitimization of this scientific domain to its institutional environment. Through media technologies like the audiometer, designed for standardized measurements, hearing was abstracted from lived bodies and experiences. Different values were assigned to specific frequencies, with some frequencies deemed surplus. Sterne coins “surplus definition” to describe the gap between the producible definition of sound and the definition needed for a signal to function. That gap generated “perceptual capital,” which could yield economic value. In probing both the inner ear and the mind’s ear, corporate research and theories of sound, shaped by technologies, sought efficiencies in signal transmission and reception.
Chapter 2, “Nature Builds No Telephones,” traces the MP3’s genealogy into the 1920s–1940s, as psychoacoustic research and its tools continued modeling and abstracting hearing—through innovations like cochlear microphonics—and defined the sense as information processing. Sterne argues this research broadly influenced information theory and cybernetics during that era. The chapter centers on a bizarre, cruel 1929 experiment where Ernest Glen Wever and Charles W. Bray at Princeton removed the midbrain and cerebral cortex of live cats, wiring the animals into an AT&T phone system. These feline cyborgs contributed to theories of signal transmission and “perceptual coding” of audio at the “minimum threshold of intelligibility to people and machines” (84).
In Chapter 3, Sterne examines perceptual coding in the 1980s against a broader 1960s–1970s backdrop of “domestication of noise” across fields including dentistry, workplaces, and both experimental and popular music. Practices in these areas informed one another, with practitioners often moving between them. By the 1970s, scientists realized they didn’t need to eliminate noise but could mask annoying or unnecessary sounds with others. Theories of psychoacoustic masking and compression models shaped digital communication theories and models, as computers increasingly mediated how scientists imagined hearing. Inventions like the speech-synthesizing vocoder and cochlea-based computer models of hearing point to a sound culture Sterne—echoing Jacques Attali’s age of “composition”—calls “decompositionism,” which he defines as a “new malleability of sound and noise across cultural domains that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s” alongside “processes that analyze it, decompose it, and reassemble it” (127).
Chapter 4 arrives at the MP3 proper, describing how the format became an industrial standard through negotiations, struggles, and compromises among different economic interests in telecommunications, broadcasting, consumer electronics, and computer industries. The MP3 emerged from companies with distinct markets and technological needs. Two competing codecs represented two consortia: MUSICAM, mainly Philips and Panasonic/Matsushita, versus ASPEC, backed by Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T, Thompson, and France Télécom. MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group), formed in 1988 as an extension of JPEG, arbitrated these competing interests; its layer scheme accommodated different constituencies. Layer 2 represented MUSICAM, while ASPEC’s layer 3 offered better compression at the cost of sound quality. Sterne argues that media regulation studies should focus more on the politics and governance of audiovisual standards, as such standards are increasingly defined across multiple media sectors.
From this industry focus, Chapter 5 shifts to aesthetic judgments in the design and interpretation of the 1990–1991 listening tests that shaped the MP3 format. Far from objective, these tests constructed a particular type of listening subject and propagated specific values about “good sound.” They aimed to remove subjective experience and context but selected particular music genres or styles for listeners. Though appearing disinterested, they mobilized the tastes of the engineering culture that designed them. Sterne recounts Suzanne Vega visiting the labs where her “Tom’s Diner” was a key test piece for the MP3 standard, illustrating the clash between audio engineers’ and many other listeners’ listening subjectivities.
Chapter 6 explains the MP3’s success as a “nonrivalrous” and “nonexcludable” resource in the 1990s and 2000s, attributed to a confluence of industrial, technological, and cultural forces. The record industry was slow to embrace Internet music distribution, while computer manufacturers and consumer electronics led the way. The Internet Underground Music Archive, Napster, and unauthorized reproduction and distribution were elements, though not determinants, in the mix. Sterne uses piracy debates to ask whether music is a thing or a process. He takes a middle path, conceiving it as a “bundle of affordances,” and outlines major perspectives on music as technology, commodity, property, and the idealized (romantic and modernist) work of art beyond performance. The MP3 is enmeshed in processes but treated as a container-thing. Critiquing romantic, utopian, and singular positions in debates about Internet music and piracy, the chapter also challenges libertarian information views and the use of gift economy notions to understand often non-reciprocal MP3 traffic. He also dissects the music industry’s piracy rhetoric. Sterne persuasively argues that the history of music piracy—from radio to home taping and the Internet worldwide—reveals that unsanctioned copying, distribution, and related activities have often coexisted symbiotically with sanctioned market practices. Skeptical that anti-copyright movements constitute a coherent public countering capitalist music organization, he stresses that capitalist and non-capitalist music-making and exchange have long existed together. It remains to be seen whether the progress of organizations like the Pirate Party and others advocating a culture of the commons will contradict Sterne’s downplaying of their political possibilities.
The conclusion speculates on both the resilience and possible end of the MP3. As Sterne notes—and as I can confirm, typing this on the first Cassette Store day—older or residual media formats survive, though he also points to digital file and hard drive fragility, meaning some major MP3 music currents, like mashups, may not be adequately archived. Sterne also discusses aesthetics that have emerged as electronic musicians and DJs played with the MP3’s sonic qualities on other software platforms. He predicts the persistence of audio compression given mobile technology desires for music on smartphones and wireless communication between devices. More importantly, he argues that what we consider media today might be more “diluted” and distributed, making infrastructure, format, and platform issues more significant for communication politics.
Sterne’s book offers scholars of dance musics many entry points and applications. Considerable scholarship already exists on specific formats like the 12-inch single and cassette. Most obviously and importantly, this MP3 history reminds us that new or digital media are part of longer histories, and the analogue-digital schism is overstated. There are lessons for those studying intersections of economic, political, social, and cultural forces through which various music hardware and software emerge, become widely used, and are discarded. Sterne’s noise discussion is useful for considering how seemingly disparate fields (science and art) actually ask the same questions and use similar concepts. His argument doesn’t assume noise in music or sound art is necessarily radical or transgressive—it can be quite ordinary and accommodated within existing systems. When thinking about “good” or “bad” audio format sound, we might reflect on the taste formations and values shaping these judgments and how they do or don’t acknowledge and encourage diverse listening practices. We can trace how subcultural networks and music piracy may not fund terrorism, but can gel with regular business in many respects. There is much in this big book about a little thing that will inform scholarship across sound studies, communication, and popular music studies.
Discography
Vega, Suzanne. 1987. Tom’s Diner. A&M (7-inch): VEGA2. <http://www.discogs.com/Suzanne-Vega-Toms-Diner/release/570788>.
---
Electronica, Dance and Club Music Mark J. Butler (ed.) Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-7546-2965-8 (hardcover) RRP: £170.00 (hardcover)
Hillegonda C. Rietveld London South Bank University (UK)
As part of Ashgate’s The Library of Essays on Popular Music series, this anthology compiles English-language academic work on electronic dance (and) club music developed since the early 1990s—plus Richard Dyer’s 1979 pioneering paper “In Defense of Disco,” which points to the radical potential of the experience of dancing to DJ-driven music.
Compiled by musicologist Mark J. Butler, the twenty-eight ready-edited contributions cover topics beyond rave, techno, house, and trance, including kwaito, nor-tec, and glitch. It opens with Pedro Peixoto Fereira’s useful exploration of digital DJ-ing, arguing that the DJ and dancers form an interactive network where dancers actively embody recorded music. The remaining articles, chapters, and extracts are divided into three sections: Part I, Production, Performance and Aesthetics; Part II, The Body, The Spirit and (the Regulation of) Pleasure; and Part III, Identities, Belongings and Distinctions. Contributors include Mark J. Butler, Tara Rodgers, Fiona Buckland, Anthony D’Andrea, Graham St John, Arun Saldanha, and others, engaging with electronic dance music cultures from musicological and/or anthropological perspectives.
In the introduction, Butler justifies the selection by defining these music cultures through four criteria. First, the music is performed by DJs and digital producers. Second, it is produced for dancing, making it part of a dance culture. Third, engagement with this music is site-specific, depending on what might be called a “club-concept” (xi). Fourth, the electronic dance music culture addressed shares a common history in disco and can be considered post-disco. In short, the common attributes are “electronic sound production and performative consumption through dance” (xiii)—though electronica as a genre isn’t necessarily made for dancing at all.
At 536 pages plus preface and introduction, this is a substantial book. No anthology can be complete, but this one offers a handy reference point for those teaching electronic dance music and culture, and works well as a primer for early research dissertation literature reviews. It includes many classics by authors such as Kai Fikentscher, Tim Lawrence, Barbara Bradby, Philip Tagg, Sarah Thornton, Maria Pini, Sean Albiez, and Ben Malbon, drawn mainly from academic journals like Popular Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, or Culture and Religion, as well as various academic books.
However, it’s surprising that no work appears from Ashgate’s own pioneering publications in this field, which began in 1993 with Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Steve Redhead for its former subsidiary Avebury. The anthology also omits any reflective non-academic work by journalists and creative producers—comparable to the approachable mix found in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited in 2004 by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
Even more surprising is the prohibitive price, available only in hardcover—especially given that no original work was commissioned (beyond the introduction) and no copyediting was required, with contributions retaining their original layouts. Why must such a popular topic remain so inaccessible? Ashgate seems to have missed the opportunity to reach a potentially much wider readership.
References
Cox, Christoph and Daniel Warner, eds. 2004. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum.
Redhead, Steve, ed. 1993. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Avebury.
---
Directed by Andrew Johner USA: Federation of Earth, 2011. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2038260/
Garth Sheridan RMIT University (AU)
Amid growing mainstream acceptance and corporatization of EDM cultures in North America, [title] offers a welcome look at independent gatherings ongoing since the early 1990s. Though touching on earlier events, the film focuses on the contemporary outdoor electronic dance music scene, shot between 2006 and 2011 at parties including Burning Man, Earthdance, Shambala, and LoveFest. Alongside festival footage, the film interviews a wide range of DJs, promoters, religious figures, journalists, and academics including Terrence McKenna, Robin Sylvan, Anthony D’Andrea, Graham St John, and members of Moontribe, Wicked, and Tribal Harmonix. The documentary’s primary emphasis is on the deeply spiritual basis of cultures and practices that have grown around these parties—especially trance music—and the possibilities this spirituality might offer ravers and the world at large.
Interviewees suggest that for those organizing and attending these events, raves function as 21st-century “tribal gatherings,” where one can experience connectivity to other ravers and the land while entering ecstatic states and participating in cleansing through collective dance. Executive producer Julian Reyes sees the experience as rooted in contemporary culture while building upon older knowledge and belief systems, suggesting “electronic music is modern shamanism; it is the evolution of ritualized drum circles” (Cronshey 2011). Arguably, the experience of attending raves and participating in spiritual activities potentially offers an alternative to organized religion and a more intuitive connection to divinity.
The development of America’s outdoor rave scene is framed as a reaction to increasingly restrictive anti-rave legislation that pushed promoters outside traditional club spaces—either into larger commercial dance parties or underground to city limits and into the desert. San Francisco house pioneer DJ Garth explains the early outdoor parties thrown by Wicked Crew were motivated by a move away from downtown club restrictions and a chance to connect with nature, dancing freely on the beach at full moon. The full moon parties are considered a cornerstone of America’s outdoor scene, leading to the Wicked Tour over the summers of 1994 and 1995, where the group crossed America in an old bus with a sound system.
This tour was instrumental in spreading outdoor rave culture across America and culminated in Burning Man Festival. Director Andrew Johner returns to Burning Man throughout the film, positioning it as an experiment in an alternate, utopian societal organization based on community, spirituality, support, and self-expression, devoid of judgment and capitalist exploitation. In this sense, Burning Man represents the values of the scene as a whole.
By interweaving festival footage with interviews, outdoor parties are presented as religious gatherings. Festival-goers are shown establishing spontaneous altars to a diverse range of deities, taking part in hand-holding circles, and entering altered, ecstatic states. The footage captures the ritualistic, spiritual nature of collective dance that participants experience. Many interviewees suggest that dancing to repetitive rhythms induces bliss and transcendence, opening the mind to positivity and reprogramming. Neo-pagan author Starhawk draws parallels between the outdoor party movement and Earth-based religions, in that they prioritize experience over specific belief systems or dogma. While the personal and non-prescriptive journey of festival spirituality is emphasized, moments where participants discuss specific rituals—such as Goa Gil spreading Ganga water and building altars to prepare festival sites—ground the discussion and may prove more accessible to those outside the movement.
The film presents outdoor raves as a global movement, with people worldwide organizing festivals and engaging in spiritual communion. Footage of Portugal’s Boom Festival visually reflects this global dimension, though interviews with attendees and organizers could have made these links explicit. For instance, DJ Garth’s interview could have explored historical and global contexts due to his background in London’s acid house scene and role in developing UK-style, Jamaican-influenced sound system culture in America. Similarly, Goa Gil, a Sadhu primarily based in the Indian state of Goa through the 1980s and 1990s, was a key figure in developing Goa trance. Goa trance developed strong countercultural and religious components, binding music and spirituality together in significant ways.
Directed by Rollo Jackson for Heatwave Productions (UK, 2011), RAAAAA offers a documentary record of a London dancehall club night held in June 2011. The event was organised by the Heatwave crew, regular reggae dancehall promoters and presenters on London’s Rinse FM. As the DVD sleeve notes explain, the night was intended to be “an explosion of UK dancehall history, bringing together legends from every era of UK rave music to share the mic and spit lyrics over classic dancehall riddims” (Jackson 2011). Alongside the 2008 Soul Jazz Records compilation An England Story (also compiled by Heatwave), this event reveals the evolution of the UK MC from 1980s reggae through to today’s grime artists. Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash examines a wide range of Jamaican musical practices absorbed into UK dance music post-hardcore, but here the focus narrows exclusively to the MC. A detail that may confuse newcomers is that in reggae sound system terminology, MCs are called DJs; accordingly, textual references to artists who rap or “chat” often label them as DJs. Throughout this review I shall use the term MC.
Early UK hip-hop often suffered from MCs’ awkward attempts at American accents—Derek B’s 1988 single “Good Groove” typifies this. UK MCs eventually found their own voice by drawing on Jamaican culture. Jamaican street style has shaped British youth culture for decades, and patois has steadily entered UK street slang. Academics such as Les Back have documented how black music, youth culture, and syncretism intertwine in British life.
The DVD is dedicated to UK reggae artist Smiley Culture, who died under controversial circumstances in 2011. The roots of the UK MC style can be traced to the “fast chat” vocal delivery popularised by Smiley Culture and his circle—a style that emerged from vocalists associated with the UK’s Saxon sound system during the 1980s. UK “urban” music gained serious credibility when British MCs began tapping into their own or their peers’ Jamaican heritage, melding it with a hybrid British-Jamaican syncretic template informed by dancehall reggae. MCs became integral to the UK rave scene in the late 1980s and sustained this role into the 1990s, where they became a defining element of jungle and drum and bass club nights. Interestingly, drum and bass releases tended to be instrumentals or reliant on sampled vocals, with the producer the focal point on record. In live settings, however, the sound system ethos reigned: interaction among DJ, MC, and crowd was paramount. The centrality of the live MC continued as UK garage and its sub-genres evolved. Though grime is often considered a form of hip-hop, its cultural debt to reggae is far greater, and this film provides a lively visual and aural lesson on Jamaican culture’s imprint on today’s UK bass music scene. Simon Reynolds coined the term “hardcore continuum” to describe the chronological influence of Jamaican musical practices on UK dance music: “I’ve argued that the hardcore continuum is a UK adaptation of the Jamaican system” (Reynolds 2010: 70). This documentary strongly supports his argument.
RAAAAA consists primarily of live footage interspersed with brief interview segments featuring many of the MCs who performed. The line-up spans from 1980s UK reggae artist Asher Senator to grime stars such as Wiley and Flow Dan, alongside jungle, UK garage, and dancehall MCs. The backing tracks are mostly dancehall-influenced, but grime instrumentals like Wiley’s “Ice Rink” are also woven into the set. The event exhibits classic sound system practices, including numerous “rewinds”, and, unlike DJing in other genres, uninterrupted multi-deck mixing is not the aim. The short interviews clarify how central sound system culture and pirate radio were to the rise of UK bass music styles. Early on, Lady Chann states that without Smiley Culture there would be no grime MCs, while Wiley acknowledges dancehall’s influence on his own performance style. DJs Chris Goldfinger and David Rodigan are singled out as having played especially influential roles in popularising Jamaican music in recent years. Various interviewees also cite important UK sound systems like Saxon and Coxsone, and recognise pirate radio’s impact. Refreshingly, female dancehall MCs both perform and are interviewed at length.
Overall, the film offers an oral history that validates key aspects of Simon Reynolds’ hardcore continuum: “It’s a particular set of relations based around pirate radio, dubplates, raves and rave-style clubs, along with certain kinds of music-making technology” (Reynolds 2010: 70). It also demonstrates the syncretic quality of the UK bass music landscape. The DVD could serve as a teaching resource for exploring syncretic culture or for anyone curious about the Jamaican-inflected strands of UK dance music. The film clearly connects reggae-influenced contemporary styles with their predecessors—helpful when explaining to students the formative influences behind dubstep. One notable omission from the event’s line-up is the absence of any MCs representing the UK hip-hop scene, even though artists such as Blak Twang and Roots Manuva also show clear Jamaican influence. Understandably, organising the sixteen MCs who did appear would have been demanding enough without covering every base.
An interesting observation from the audience shots in the DVD and photographs on Heatwave’s website is the demographic that attends their events. Contrary to dancehall’s “traditional” core Jamaican audience, Heatwave’s crowds reflect a crossover into a young, multicultural demographic. Coincidentally, in June 2013, UK dancehall artist Stylo G scored a top-twenty chart hit, demonstrating that Jamaican music’s impact on the UK pop scene is ongoing. If one considers that this process began with Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop”, this cultural dialogue has now lasted nearly half a century.