Hip Hop Africa

Description

Urban music and youth culture in Africa

Visit the author's website for Hip Hop Africa

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.

Preface
African Rap: A Capsule History Eric Charry
Part I. Rap Stories (Ghana and South Africa)
1. The Birth of Ghanaian Hiplife: Urban Style, Black Thought, Proverbial Speech Jesse Weaver Shipley
2. A Genre Coming of Age: Transformation in the Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture of South Africa Lee Watkins
Part II. Griots and Messengers (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Malawi)
3. The Rapper as Modern Griot: Reclaiming Ancient Traditions Patricia Tang
4. Promises of the Chameleon: Reggae Artist Tiken Jah Fakoly's Intertextual Contestation of Power in Côte d'Ivoire Daniel Reed
5. Style, Message, and Meaning in Malawian Youth Rap and Ragga Performance John Fenn
Part III. Identity and Hybridity (Mali and Nigeria)
6. Mapping Cosmopolitan Identities: Rap Music and Male Youth Culture in Mali Dorothea E. Schulz
7. Nigerian Hip Hop: Exploring a Black World Hybrid Stephanie Shonekan
Part IV. East Coast (Kenya and Tanzania)
8. The Local and Global in Kenyan Rap and Hip Hop Culture Jean Ngoya Kidula
9. Infinite Flavors: Imitation and Innovation in the Music, Dress, and Camps of Tanzanian Youth Alex Perullo
Part V. Popular Music Panoramas (Ghana and Malawi)
10. Contemporary Ghanaian Popular Music Since the 1980s John Collins
11. Popular Music and Young Male Audiences in Contemporary Malawi Jochen Seebode
Part VI. Drumming (Mali)
12. Urban Drumming: Traditional Celebration Music in a West African City (Bamako) Rainer Polak
Music for an African 21st-Century Eric Charry
Bibliography
Discography
Videography
Webography
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Musiques du monde
• Music
• International
• Africa
• World music
• Ethnomusicology
• Multiple signal classification
• Hip hop music
• Popular music
• Genres
• Styles
• African Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 33
• EAN13: 9780253005823
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

HIP HOP AFRICA
AFRICAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURES
Patrick McNaughton, editor
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Catherine M. Cole
Barbara G. Hoffman
Eileen Julien
Kassim Kon
D. A. Masolo
Elisha Renne
Zo Strother

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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2012 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hip hop Africa : new African music in a globalizing world / edited by Eric Charry.
pages cm. - (African expressive cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes discography, videography, and webography.
ISBN 978-0-253-00307-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00575-5 (paperback : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00582-3 (ebook) 1. Rap (Music)-Africa-History and criticism. 2. Popular music-Africa-History and criticism. 3. Hip hop-Africa. 4. Music and youth-Africa. 5. Music and globalization-Africa. 6. Popular music-Social aspects-Africa. I. Charry, Eric S., editor. II. Series: African expressive cultures.
ML3531.H565 2012
782.421649096-dc23
2011052793
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For our parents and our children
CONTENTS
PREFACE
A Capsule History of African Rap
ERIC CHARRY
Part 1. Rap Stories (Ghana and South Africa)
1. The Birth of Ghanaian Hiplife: Urban Style, Black Thought, Proverbial Speech
JESSE WEAVER SHIPLEY
2. A Genre Coming of Age: Transformation, Difference, and Authenticity in the Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture of South Africa
LEE WATKINS
Part 2. Griots and Messengers (Senegal, C te d Ivoire, and Malawi)
3. The Rapper as Modern Griot: Reclaiming Ancient Traditions
PATRICIA TANG
4. Promises of the Chameleon: Reggae Artist Tiken Jah Fakoly s Intertextual Contestation of Power in C te d Ivoire
DANIEL B. REED
5. Style, Message, and Meaning in Malawian Youth Rap and Ragga Performances
JOHN FENN
Part 3. Identity and Hybridity (Mali and Nigeria)
6. Mapping Cosmopolitan Identities: Rap Music and Male Youth Culture in Mali
DOROTHEA E. SCHULZ
7. Nigerian Hip Hop: Exploring a Black World Hybrid
STEPHANIE SHONEKAN
Part 4. East Coast (Kenya and Tanzania)
8. The Local and Global in Kenyan Rap and Hip Hop Culture
JEAN NGOYA KIDULA
9. Imitation and Innovation in the Music, Dress, and Camps of Tanzanian Youth
ALEX PERULLO
Part 5. Popular Music Panoramas (Ghana and Malawi)
10. Contemporary Ghanaian Popular Music since the 1980s
JOHN COLLINS
11. Popular Music and Young Male Audiences in Contemporary Malawi
JOCHEN SEEBODE
Part 6. Drumming (Mali)
12. Urban Drumming: Traditional Jembe Celebration Music in a West African City (Bamako)
RAINER POLAK
Music for an African Twenty-First Century
ERIC CHARRY
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ONLINE SOURCES
DISCOGRAPHY
VIDEOGRAPHY
WEBOGRAPHY
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
PREFACE
ERIC CHARRY
This book has its origins in a roundtable entitled New Music, New Research: Youth, Western Africa, and the Outside World, which was part of the 2003 African Studies Association annual meeting in Boston, whose theme was Youthful Africa in the 21st Century. The enthusiastic reception suggested that we expand our scope into the resulting book. Here thirteen authors carefully look at and listen to what young Africans are doing in the realm of music. They are an international group of scholars from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Germany, and the United States. Nine countries are examined: Senegal and Mali in the Muslim western sahel and savanna; C te d Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria along the southern coast of West Africa; Kenya and Tanzania on the Swahili coast in the east; Malawi in the heart of central Africa; and South Africa, with the most significant multiracial and white minority communities and racially polarized past. The Mediterranean Arabtinged Muslim north is unfortunately missing here.
The approaches herein are diverse, including focusing on single artists or pieces (Tang, Reed), broad overviews (Charry, Watkins, Collins, Seebode), a balance between the two approaches (Shipley, Fenn, Schulz, Shonekan, Kidula, Perullo), and intensive participatory ethnography (Polak). While the bulk of the contributions here cover hip hop and are responsible for the title of the book, the inclusion of reggae and ragga (Reed, Fenn, Seebode), gospel music (Kidula, Collins), and especially drumming (Polak) adds a unique comparative dimension. The variety of approaches and musics make for a rich story of how recent generations of Africans are making sense of the world around them.
The countries covered in this book are in many ways representative of Africa, although, to be sure, they each have their own identities. The most populous country (Nigeria) and the country with the biggest economy (South Africa) in Africa are covered here. The countries with strong international reputations for hip hop are here (Senegal, Tanzania) as is Malawi, which has a minimal presence. Kenya, where politics and rap have been closely intertwined; C te d Ivoire, where a reggae song sent an artist into exile; Ghana, with its close ties to the United States and the UK; and Mali, where drumming traditions thrive in an urban environment, are all present.
The following table shows some statistics that may be helpful in grasping the economic and demographic standing of these countries, both within Africa and also compared to the United States and France (I have added Algeria to represent North Africa). African nations have some of the youngest populations in the world, in part because of the short life expectancy. The third youngest median population in the world is represented here: Mali (the first two are Uganda and Niger). Four of the twelve countries with the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world are represented here (South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania); the other eight are neighboring countries. Access to the internet is extremely low in Africa, especially compared with the most prosperous nations of the world.
As our sources come from a variety of media, readers may need to search through the bibliography, discography (including separate sections for Tanzania and Malawi), and videography to find a particular citation. Online articles and radio interviews and documentaries are placed in the bibliography. Indiana University Press s website for the book contains links to supplemental sources.
We would like to thank Indiana University Press editor Dee Mortensen for helping to bring this book to fruition, Magee McIlvaine for his photos on the front cover, and the artists for their permission to print their lyrics in this volume. All authors royalties earned from the sales of this book will be donated to a nongovernmental organization working to improve the lives of young Africans through music or dance (see the book website at www.iupress.indiana.edu/a/hiphop for details).
Population and other statistics of countries discussed in this volume
HIP HOP AFRICA
A Capsule History of African Rap
ERIC CHARRY
The notion that rap has arrived home, in Africa, common in much rhetoric both inside and outside Africa, demands investigation. African rap artists get little international respect. Representing the inspirational homeland, Africans can find a small audience abroad, but there is hardly any competing in the international marketplace in that role. Some Africans, young and old, vigorously object to some of the surface values purveyed in commercial hip hop culture, such as the pursuit and display of high price consumer goods, glorification or romanticizing of street violence and vulgar language, and public degradation of women. If rap has come home, something that could be said of any artistic form created by peoples of African descent around the world that has been embraced within Africa, it has been primarily young people, part of an African hip hop generation, who embraced this distant relation.
After an incubation period in the 1980s, marked by imitation of its American source, African rappers came into their own in the 1990s. African hip hop has reached a maturity and urgency illustrated by a recent intense and remarkable flurry of documentary films from across the continent-Morocco, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Equatorial Guinea (see the videography)-each in their own way making compelling cases for how the genre has become one of the most relevant cultural forms of expression for African youth. The presence of African hip hop videos on YouTube is equally remarkable and overwhelming. MP3 audio recordings can be found easily enough, but still, one has to search hard to find CDs on the international market, one sure sign of a lack of record label and hence economic support.
What follows is a preliminary history of rap in Africa.
Out of New York
The story of the growth of rap and hip hop in the United States is well known, and there are hundreds of books and theses and many magazines, films, and websites seriously documenting the genre. 1 It originated in the streets of New York in the 1970s, born out of those specific historical circumstances that threw Caribbean immigrants in with local African American urban culture, marked by concerns of neighborhood security and pride, whic