UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the relations between music scenes, infrastructure, and urban space in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia under conditions of structural transformation. I focus on three contemporary music scenes—electronic music parties, Ethio-jazz, and traditional musician houses (azmaribets). Electronic music parties are an emerging form of nightlife which accompanied the boom in the city’s built environment over the past decade, moving from a small network of house parties into an emergent industry. Ethio-Jazz, a localized form of jazz, has become a heavily institutionalized genre in Addis Ababa with a history that reaches into the late Imperial era (1969-1974). Finally, azmaribets are small venues owned and operated by a caste of traditional musicians known as azmaris. These venues blossomed following the fall of the Derg regime in 1991, as residents took advantage of new possibilities for land ownership and the end of a curfew that had been in place since 1974. My project draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015-2022. This period saw rapid economic growth and urban development that stoked political tensions, mass protests, regime change, and civil war. Within these multiple, overlapping structural transformations, I turn to the public cultures of musical nightlife to explore two broad questions: How do urban processes shape the production of popular music? and conversely, how does popular music shape the production of the urban? I argue that music scenes compose distinct urban commons for participants by generating shared socialities, spaces, and senses of the city that become particularly valuable in a moment when the everyday is in significant flux. To answer these questions, this study brings together several theoretical domains - Southern urbanism, ethnographies of musical livelihoods, and the anthropology of infrastructure - to perform the crucial work of theorizing the “music scene” from the perspective of the Global South. With this foundation, I pay particular attention to how socialities are produced and maintained by affective, strategic, and collective action within material constraints. While this research remains focused on the city of Addis Ababa, it offers a model for analyzing the very possibility of popular music’s production in the world’s emerging megacities.