Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio and Grime YouTube Music Videos. By Malcolm James. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 152 pp. ISBN 978-1-501-32072-9: Book review

Sonic Intimacy is a welcome contribution to the interdisciplinary field increasingly referred to as Bass Culture Studies, where reggae sound system music and its many cultural manifestations are analysed. The second monograph by media and cultural scholar Malcolm James, Sonic Intimacy develops the author's investment in using music and sound as a means of critiquing neoliberal Britain, especially its impacts on Black British life in London. The project can be summarised as a hybrid media archaeology and critical sound studies work, exploring a set of relations that James calls ‘sonic intimacies’ in Black British popular music after 1970. This unfolds through three chronological case studies, examining ‘vibe’, ‘hype’ and ‘grime’ as the central sonic intimacy in relation to three pairings of musical genre and technology: reggae sound systems in the 1970s–80s, jungle pirate radio in the 1990s and grime YouTube music videos in the 2000s. A range of other intimacies such as ‘kinship’, ‘craft’ and ‘presence’ are explored throughout, in addition to a Conclusion that meditates on critical Left scholarly discourse: perhaps a tall order for 119 pages.