Hip Hop Africa

New African Music in a Globalizing World

Eric Charry, Eric Charry

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253005823
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip hop and other music in Africa and their place in global music culture.

PART 1.

RAP STORIES

(GHANA AND SOUTH AFRICA)

1

The Birth of Ghanaian Hiplife

Urban Style, Black Thought, Proverbial Speech

JESSE WEAVER SHIPLEY

Could it be that you were never told, Keep your eyes on the road.

—REGGIE ROCKSTONE

Amid the political frustrations and economic transitions of 1980s Ghana, American rap music became the latest African diasporic music to become popular with urban African youth. In Accra clubs, DJs began playing American rappers such as LL Cool J, Heavy D, Public Enemy, and later Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. By the early 1990s, at talent shows and small venues, elite youth experimented with rapping over beats and samples, emulating English rap flows. For some, hip hop provided a vision of black agency and economic success, while others derided it as an un-African foreign imitation. Young artists began experimenting with hip hop. Groups like Talking Drums with innovative producer Panji Anoff and Native Funk Lords (NFL) aimed to re-create hip hop in local terms, infusing rap with pidgin lyrics, local beats, and African-oriented imagery. This music moved from a small subculture in schools and clubs onto a main public stage, through the music of Reggie Ossei Rockstone. A Ghanaian rapper based in London, Rockstone returned to Ghana in 1994 and began rapping in Twi over heavy hip hop beats and samples of Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian afrobeat. By the mid-1990s, a new musical genre called hiplife emerged combining rap lyricism and hip hop mixing and beatmaking with older forms of highlife music, traditional storytelling, and formal proverbial oratory. Hiplife gained popularity through dance clubs, radio and television plays, clothing styles, and the circulation of cassettes, videos, CDs, and magazines. Around the open air drinking spots and nightclubs, markets, taxi stands, and compound houses of Accra, hip hop and hiplife clothing styles and bodily forms of expression began to reshape narratives of nationhood and generational change.

It is now widely recognized that hip hop provides a highly adaptable formal structure that has been reinvented by youth around the world in multiple ways. One of the fascinating things about hiplife in Ghana is how, over the course of a few short years, it developed a locally specific musical aesthetic, while continuing to draw on the uneasy balance between rebellious spirit and commercial legitimacy that has come to characterize American hip hop. As with many musical subcultures, hiplife provides a forum for the self-conscious contestation of moral value and legitimate forms of public expression. A central feature of the genre is the ongoing debate about the origins and the significance of foreign and Ghanaian influences in the music and dress of hiplife-oriented youth. To some, hip hop seems foreign, whereas to others it seems familiar; no matter what, it has reshaped Ghanaian public culture. Hiplife has creatively intermingled three main influences: African diasporic popular expression; the legacy of proverb-based Akan-language performance genres; and the rapid development of commercial electronic media in Accra. Hiplife, then, is not characterized by a particular rhythm or lyrical flow but rather by a creative style for mixing diverse African and diasporic performance practices and signs.

This chapter describes the confluence of styles that led to the birth of hiplife in the late 1990s. It shows how the naturalization of this genre relied upon elite youth transformation of American hip hop, privatization of media, and state appropriation of youth taste, in creating this eclectic remix of multiple performance traditions into a locally relevant form.

Embodying Diaspora in Ghanaian Popular Culture

In the decades after independence, black diasporic music provided young Ghanaians with a symbolic language to see themselves as modern and removed from the colonial legacies of older expressive forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, African American soul and rhythm and blues music as well as Afro-Caribbean reggae and dancehall were popular in Ghana and other parts of Africa. American records and magazines circulated widely among the youth. Popular local highlife guitar bands and concert party theater troupes, such as the Jaguar Jokers, covered songs like “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and incorporated soul styles of dance, vocals, and dress into their shows. Nigerian Fela Kuti came to Accra in 1967 and in the early 1970s, developing his afrobeat sound.

The influence of soul, funk, and R&B in Accra culminated in the Soul to Soul Concert in 1971.¹ For youth this concert represented a critique of the authority and cultural icons of the older ruling generation who had been raised under colonial rule and, in the eyes of some, continued to value colonial ways of doing things.² The adoption of African American styles and popular music became, for them, a political and social critique of British colonial forms of cultural capital. Held as a part of the Independence Day festivities, Soul to Soul was a state-sponsored event that provided a celebration of African American popular music, styles of dress, and ideologies of racial identification (e.g., Black Power) and linked them to the political struggles of the Ghanaian nation. The concert marked the rising interest in gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music in Africa. As one woman who had been in secondary school at the time told me, students saw this concert as a major event facilitating their adoption of African American styles of dress and expression. In school they listened to records of black American music, imitating hairstyles and clothing and setting up groups to imitate the sounds. Many snuck out of their boarding school dormitories, coming from all over the country to attend the massive all-night Soul to Soul Concert at Black Star Square in downtown Accra.

The present generation of Ghanaian leaders, who grew up in the 1960s, defined their political and social differences from their elders partly in terms of soul and R&B music and styles. For many Ghanaians, the music and its associated forms of communication represented Pan-African consciousness. As part of the increasingly global American music industry, soul music also represented Western styles of consumer capitalism and its related forms of commodification.³

On 31 December 1981 Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings staged his second coup d’etat in 19 months, taking over the reins of the government from the democratically elected Dr. Hilla Limann. Rawlings established a socialist government that aimed to discipline and stabilize the country after nearly a decade of military rule and rampant corruption. One of the early dictates of the government was to establish a curfew banning movements from 6 PM to 6 AM. As many musicians recall, this effectively destroyed the vibrant nightlife of Accra, the live music scene, and theatrical and musical groups that toured the country. Many musicians left for the United States, Germany, Holland, England, and Nigeria. This also had the effect of reducing drastically the number of viable recording studios and recorded albums coming out of Ghana, which had been vibrant in the 1970s.

The rise of portable record and tape music systems, as well as the increasing availability of video recording and screening facilities, shifted public entertainment in the 1980s away from live musical and theatrical performances toward the circulation of recorded music. Spinners—mobile DJs who provided music for funerals, outdoorings, parties, and dances—were cheap and easy to hire, further decreasing the shows for live bands and vitality of the live music scene. Highlife music transformed as musicians traveled to Europe and brought back electronic computer and synthesizer music, creating the subgenre known as burger highlife because of the influence of Ghanaian musicians working in Hamburg, Germany. At the same time gospel highlife began to develop out of the influence of African American church music. The governmental tax on the importation of musical instruments and the decrease in the teaching of music in school also crippled the music industry. Since churches were one of the few institutions that were not subject to this tax, the musicians who did not leave often performed in churches and became closely tied to gospel (see Collins 1994 and this volume). In the midst of these changes, African American music remained at the center of what Ghanaians listened to and reinterpreted with local variations.

By the mid-1980s nightlife began to return, though the lack of instruments, the dispersal of bands, and the interest in new electronic sounds reshaped style and music. Babylon Disco, among other clubs and schools, hosted dance competitions focusing on post-disco Michael Jackson–like dancing and fashion. Jackson’s singing and dance were the epitome of style for many youth. Others with perhaps a more rebellious sensibility were drawn to break dancing as part of the new hip hop urban cultural movement. As one teenage club-goer at the time recalls, “We thought Michael Jackson, who was all the rage, was really corny. We wanted to be more like the streets, and even more than hip hop and soul music, it was break dancing competitions at first that started to spread.” Youth watched copies of films like Wild Style (1982) and Breakin’ (1984) and television shows like Soul Train, which featured the latest dance moves and clothing styles. “It was black music. We felt it, but it was also so urban and American, and it made us feel a part of what was happening outside.”

Ghanaian Rap

Many hiplife musicians credit Gyedu-Blay Ambolley as the first Ghanaian to use rap in his afrobeat-funk-jazz-infused highlife. Beginning with a 1973 hit single, “Simigwa Do,” he used spoken-word lyricism in the Akan language over layered funky beats and horn riffs.⁴ Nii Addokwei Moffat, writer for the weekly national entertainment newspaper Graphic Showbiz, recalls that in the 1980s there were various isolated experiments with rap by Ghanaian musicians. For example, at a cultural performance held at the State House in 1984, dancer and musical performer Cecilia Adjei “asked why we can’t rap in our local dialects. She tried something [in the Dagbane language] and so did I [in the Ga language] and several other artists and people found it to be very interesting and exciting.” Eclectic musician Atongo from the north of Ghana also rapped in Hausa at various points in the 1980s, although it never received popular attention.

In the late 1980s, the increasing ease of international travel and expanding access to foreign television, radio, and video facilitated the rapid movement of images, objects, and practices between Ghana and the rest of the world. Through the 1990s the development of cultural tourism brought an increasing number of students and tourists to Ghana to experience African culture. After the return of democratic rule in 1992, many young Ghanaians living abroad returned to seek opportunities in the newly privatizing economy.

One young hiplife artist told me that if a new fashion or product comes out in New York, the next day it is in Accra. CDs, cassettes, and videos are sent by relatives in the United States or Europe, sold by traders who regularly travel abroad, or acquired by elite youth who travel during holidays. Cassettes and music videos began to circulate, and images of African American artists began to appear on T-shirts, paintings, and posters throughout Accra and other urban centers. Young men adopted hip hop styles of dress, African American vernacular phrases, and forms of bodily expression. At first it was mostly elite young men in Accra and Kumasi and in coastal boarding schools listening to these radical foreign-sounding beats with forceful new social messages. Children of Lebanese, Syrian, and Indian merchants as well as those of mixed parentage were drawn to the music as a marker of black American coolness, resonating for the second generation born after independence coming of age in the context of the revolutionary coups of 1979 and 1981. While their older siblings and parents continued to listen to gospel, highlife, soul, and R&B, rap music provided a new defiant sensibility in relation to the radical political changes and economic hopes that they faced.

Students in elite secondary schools such as Accra Academy, Achimota School, and Presec Boys had easier access to American images and products and were more fluent in English than their rural counterparts. School variety shows provided venues for teens to form rap groups. At first they lip-synched to recordings of American rappers. They soon began to copy American lyrical flows and themes and write their own raps in English (Asare Williams interview). As these elite youth began adopting hip hop dress and styles, it became a local marker of cosmopolitanism and status. Ghanaians identified with black diasporic images of capitalist accumulation and success that were increasingly appearing in films and television shows. These styles were understood as status markers and quickly became popular among non-elite urban youth with less direct access to them. Young men in Accra marked their identification with the alternate forms of consumption provided by African American hip hop culture using African American vernacular, wearing baggy pants, oversized chains, basketball sneakers or Timberland boots, sunglasses and goggles, baseball caps, name-brand clothing, and knock-off gear. For poor youth coming to the city to find work, hip hop became a way of differentiating themselves from their rural kinship ties and ideas of traditional culture.

BiBi Menson, program director for Radio Gold, was a part of Accra’s early hip hop scene. He remembers how class hierarchies were reflected through popular culture and how they were enacted around the open-air drinking spots around Adabraka and other Accra neighborhoods.

We were into break dancing, rapping, and all the hip hop culture. . . . Boys from [elite] schools . . . would always be at house parties or clubs; we would get together and talk big things, insulting each other. . . . Then there were the more local boys from down the ghetto, we used them as foot-soldiers. . . . They would easily throw a punch for you. We were the loud mouths, trying to be heard. (Menson interview)

English was seen as the language of cosmopolitanism, and access to hip hop became the purview of elite youth with fluency in English. As Menson recalls, “Then, you dare not [rap] in the local language. You would be a laughing stock.” Local African styles and the use of African languages in many public settings were often looked down upon and seen as outdated or “colo” (colonial) in the context of urban Accra. Reflecting on the negative connotations of traditional culture among certain urban Ghanaians, Menson continued, “I mean it’s amazing. In those days you couldn’t wear kente cloth [traditional woven cloth]. We had to wait for someone like [American rapper] Heavy D to wear kente caps before we saw it as acceptable to follow our own traditional forms of dress.” The irony of the African American legitimization of Ghanaian culture is not lost on local cultural critics, and it emphasizes the transformative power of transnational circuits of authenticity and cultural exchange.

While for older Ghanaians, British English had marked elite status, for Ghanaians born after independence, African American styles and speech became signs of authority. As Menson told me, “Our accents changed. . . . We wanted to sound like black Americans.” Hip hop hit a chord with Ghanaian youth through its explicit critiques of American racism, symbols of toughness, and its message of black youth resistance to institutional authority. For Ghanaian audiences, the appeal was not necessarily the specific lyrical content. According to Reggie Rockstone, many youth who were less fluent in English did not even understand the lyrics. Instead, American hip hop appealed to them through its formal stylistic elements. Hip hop street culture expressed defiant forms of bodily expression, new modes of dress, and symbols of male sexual conquest and wealth. This music and style represented the promises of American material success through a particular racial lens. At a time when Ghana was moving away from critiques of neocolonialism in the 1980s and toward an acceptance of Western liberalizing capitalist reforms, these images of black accumulation and consumption became a means for engaging the possibilities and dangers of global free market capitalism. The perceived toughness and worldly success of African American hip hop stars became markers of status for Ghanaian youth. The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur’s success, wealth, and sudden violent shooting deaths made them particularly popular, though complex, models for Ghanaians to emulate. Tupac represented both the possibilities and dangers of their changing relationship with the institutions of power and desires for worldly success.

Accra clubs such as Globe, Keteke Club, Baby’s Inn, and Miracle Mirage and in the nearby port city of Tema, Dzato Krom,⁵ She Club, and Felisa, played American rap and hip hop, and hosted lip-synched performances to the likes of Run-D.M.C., MC Hammer, and Heavy D. As several musicians recounted to me, these clubs were the first places many young Ghanaians heard this kind of music. They provided public communal spaces for youth to formulate their musical and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• A Capsule History of African Rap
• Part 1. Rap Stories (Ghana and South Africa)
• Part 2. Griots and Messengers (Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Malawi)
• Part 3. Identity and Hybridity (Mali and Nigeria)
• Part 4. East Coast (Kenya and Tanzania)
• Part 5. Popular Music Panoramas (Ghana and Malawi)
• Part 6. Drumming (Mali)
• Music for an African Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography and Online Sources
• Discography
• Videography
• Webography
• List of Contributors
• Index