Review
“I know of few more compelling investigations of popular culture: it has scope, color, a sense of pace, loads of information, and an intellectual organization that does well to center around that elusive notion, urbanization.”—Robert Christgau, Voice Literary Supplement, on the first edition
(Robert Christgau
Voice Literary Supplement 20070920)
“In Township Tonight! was a landmark, appearing in a desert of writing about South African music but rapidly becoming the most quoted source in the literature. This new edition, twenty two years on, is a rich and insightful reimagining of the original, as beautifully written and engaging as the first, but the story it tells is not only of black South African music and its history, but of a writer who speaks unforgettably to the way an entire country and its collective cultures have ‘come of age’ in the early twenty-first century.”—Christine Lucia, Professor of Music, University of the Witwatersrand
(Christine Lucia )
"[The book] flies through the decades at a swift pace, densely-packed, expansive, introducing new pieces of information and building on old ones. . . . If you''re looking for a comprehensive overview then you''ll have to search hard to find a better one than this."—Deanne Sole, Pop Matters
(Deanne Sole
Pop Matters )
"The significantly expanded second edition of In Township Tonight! is an essential read for those interested in understanding South Africa''s political transformation as it manifests itself through live and recorded musical and theatrical performance. . . . Throughout this book one senses a capacious longing to know, to understand, and to convey to readers around the world a taste of the past, present, and future of black South African performance in all its fullness from someone who has seen and heard an extraordinary amount of South African music and theater in the last forty odd years."—Carol Muller, International Journal of African Historical Studies
(Carol Muller
International Journal of African Historical Studies )
About the Author
David B. Coplan is professor in and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of Lyrics of the Basotho Migrants and In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
