Scholars and writers have long framed African popular music as a medium that openly critiques and combats patterns of marginalization, especially in contexts marked by political oppression. It is assumed to be no accident that some of Africa's most well-known popular musicians are those who vocalize the complaints of silenced, disadvantaged people. Their popularity stems from their willingness to confront state authorities and demand change, or so conventional thinking holds. In The Revolution's Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea, Nomi Dave grapples with a much different phenomenon: cases in which musicians support the powers that be and contribute to the aesthetics of authoritarianism. Eager to understand how audiences can find a song with a ‘bad’ message ‘good’, Dave interrogates how Conakry-based musicians generate public pleasure by celebrating Guinea's authoritarian state (8). The result is a striking study of how musical and aesthetic practices have shaped Guinean political life.

Dave's analysis revolves around two chief assertions. The first is that pleasure — in particular ‘shared sets of feeling that create community among people’ — is a ‘constitutive force’ in Guinean sociopolitical relations (2–3). Working against Euro-American portrayals of pleasure as a hazardous distraction from reality, she recasts it as something so immersed in politics that it becomes power's ‘coconspirator and counterpoint’ (4). Attending to pleasure in such a matter, Dave asserts, enables us to look past the state and consider how public structures of feeling — affective solidarity, love of country, and understandings of history — can accommodate acts of violence and give shape to authoritarianism itself. Dave's second central claim is that Guinean musicians do not categorically support or oppose government leaders, but instead negotiate a range of ‘conflicting practices and stances involving music, power, and state authority’ (9). Adamant that we appreciate such artists as ‘three-dimensional, fully human, and self-aware’, Dave unearths how they balance the prospects of official patronage with prevailing popular sentiment, the demands of established musical praxis, and their own understanding of Guinea's past, present, and prospective future (16).

The Revolution's Echoes consists of six chapters that tackle different aspects of Guinea's power, music, and pleasure nexus. Chapter One, which serves as the book's foundation, centers on Sékou Touré and the musicians who promoted his revolutionary ideology and longstanding hold on power from 1958 to 1984. Drawing upon a range of interviews, archival documents, and established literature, it explores how Touré's government enshrined forms of music and dance as tightly regulated ‘patriotic acts’ that at once celebrated the party-state, president, and emerging understandings of Guinean identity and exceptionalism (25). Like other works on Guinea's revolutionary era, it emphasizes the contradictions — between old and new, the global and local, and joy and pain — that defined the early nation as well as musicians’ place in it.Footnote ¹

Subsequent chapters shift to the afterlives of Guinean revolutionary music during the period of Dave's ethnographic research in Conakry from 2009–16. Chapter Two assesses the Conseil National pour la Démocratie et la Développement (CNDD) military junta's efforts to resurrect past patterns of musical politics following its 2008 seizure of power. Focusing largely on the expectations and experiences of the now-aged members of the band Bembeya Jazz National, it examines musicians’ desires to reclaim ‘the pleasures they once enjoyed as symbols of the nation’ (78). Chapter Three turns to the praise singing of Mande jelilu (hereditary musicians often referred to as griots) to explore how and why Guinean audiences accept, even revel in, songs honoring the country's dictatorial leaders. They do so, Dave argues, on account of musicians’ vocal techniques and aesthetic invocation of a ‘feelingful’ space that celebrates not state authorities but Guineans’ shared past and collective future (105). Whereas Chapter Three centers on the power of naming and vocality, Chapter Four foregrounds the role of quietness, guardedness, and silence in Guinean musical and political culture. Turning to a youth-oriented genre known as Soso music, Dave asserts that silence allows ‘manifold musical and public pleasures to be enjoyed’ while ‘too much voice’, even at a time of widespread political violence, carries the threat of uncertainty (124). Following this tract, Chapter Five examines how a 2013 song by Takana Zion, Guinea's most popular reggae star, that attacked president Alpha Conde produced public anxiety and displeasure because it destabilized established aesthetic practice. Chapter Six, which serves as an epilogue, considers the continued entanglements of music and authority in government-sponsored concerts that marked the end of the Ebola crisis.

The Revolution's Echoes offers a detailed foray into the relationship between public structures of feeling and relations of power in Guinea, provisioning readers with a deep appreciation for how and why musicians elect to sing the state, stay silent, or sing against it. The book clearly details how music has been central to Guineans’ efforts to ‘work out questions of self-recognition, of who they are, where they have been, and where they are heading’ (158). How pleasure fits into such dynamics is sometimes less clear. Although Dave does not seek to articulate a ‘total theory of pleasure’ (3), a more overt framing of this slippery concept would bring further clarity to her claims about how it matters in Guinean politics and public life. Her skillful analysis of the Mande musical practice of naming forwards a specific understanding of pleasure (Maninka sewa) as ‘pride in self-recognition and the fact of knowing’ oneself, but this is not the exclusive conceptualization used within the book (13). The importance — and limits — of the musical pleasures cultivated by Touré's government in the 1960s would also benefit from additional discussion of the challenging circumstances in which they took root. The corporeal and epistemic violence of French colonialism receive no attention, nor do the everyday economic difficulties that Guineans faced throughout first few decades of self-rule. Finally, the assertion that Touré's revolution was an ‘ever-present counterpart’ to subsequent regimes, would gain further traction were the book to give more attention to that of Lasana Conté, which lasted from 1984 to 2008 (49).

All told, The Revolution's Echoes is a skillfully written and richly documented analysis of how Conakry musicians and musical audiences position themselves in relation to structures of authoritarianism. In addition to advancing our appreciation for the relationship between popular music and state power in Guinea and beyond, it excels at carefully conveying the many complexities that inform artists’ decision-making and modes of action. ‘How’, Bob White asks, ‘can we write about the relationship between politics and popular culture without reproducing a narrative that ends up blaming the victim?’Footnote ² Dave's book offers a superb answer that deserves wide reading and close consideration.