Winnie Mandela's fierce fight and Kwaito music made Johannesburg my base for inquiry over the past two decades. I studied Winnie Mandela's political complexity and how it manifested during her testimony at the TRC. I was moved by Kwaito and other forms of underground township music and the cross-township musical collaborations between Sophiatown and Soweto in Joburg and Gugulethu and Khayelitsha in Cape Town, producing enduring sub-genres of South African music. These rich intersections lie at the core of a methodological practice called "DJ Scholarship." My work explores connections between South African jazz and Black American jazz, the friendship of Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba, the bubblegum musical era, and Brenda Fassie's influence on what I call electro refusal. This auditory investigation sparked a special interest in community-based archives, grassroots libraries, and public vinyl record collections in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Johannesburg, for me, provides new insight into localized sonic life worlds while drawing on Black geographical ways of knowing as an analytical frame to highlight the politics of place.