Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World ed. by Eric Charry (review)

Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World, edited by Eric Charry, is a set of twelve essays on rap and hip-hop on the African continent. Charry, a distinguished professor of music, contends, “American rap was the source for African rap” (p. 3). Consequently, he has assembled remarkable essays by experts who offer deep historical and cultural connections showing how Africans shape rap to fit their local circumstances.

Invariably, the volume offsets the attention that is unequally paid to the experiences of African hip-hop music from the continent. Toward that end, most of the essays focus on compelling stories of how “the genre has become one of the most relevant forms of expression for African youth” (p. 1). According to Charry, “African youth continually search for new ways to make rap relevant and unique, which often means digging through local culture, almost like American DJs will crate-dig; search through crates of obscure vinyl record albums for new sounds” which eventually helped the connection with African culture through rap (p. 18).

In varied ways, the essays collected here consider rap as “appropriating, integrating, and transforming a foreign art form into a locally meaningful genre . . . [providing] a rich laboratory in which to view [the] process of change” (p. 300). These essays—contributed from Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Côte d’lvoire, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania—examine the conditions, motivations, and experiences that attended the birth of hip-hop in Africa.

The contents of the book, grouped into six parts, show that rap is not limited to American popular culture, but has exponents in Africa. The authors become conversant with young hip-hoppers in Africa, looking to the United States for legitimization of their own culture—perhaps an issue for urban elites more than rural Africans. This phenomenon underscores everyday popular culture. As a result, several of the essays demonstrate how a focus on African hip-hop expands the range of plausible responses embraced in contemporary music. The essays essentially argue that rap is a “recent tradition, originally associated with a specific place and culture but rooted in aesthetics that developed in the Americas” (p. 308).

Part one of the volume has two chapters. The first, “The Birth of Ghanaian Hip Life: Urban Style, Black Thought, Proverbial Speech,” contributed by Jesse Weaver Shipley, an anthropologist, discusses the “confluence of styles” (p. 30) that led to the birth of hip life in the late 1990s. It demonstrates how the naturalization of this genre builds upon such important genres as “elite youth transformation of American hip hop,” “privatization of media,” and “state appropriation of youth taste” (p. 30). In combining such an eclectic mix of performance traditions into a locally significant form, it emphasizes that hip life intermingles African diasporic influence with the legacy of proverb-based Akan language performance genres and the rapid development of commercial electronic media in Accra. Subsequently, hip life is not characterized by a particular rhythm or lyrical flow, but by a creative style for mixing diverse African and diasporic performance practices and signs.

The second chapter in this part, “A Genre Coming of Age: Transformation, Difference, and Authenticity in the Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture of South Africa,” is contributed by Lee Watkins, an ethnomusicologist, who here unveils the authenticity of rap music, expressively mobilized and contested in various spheres and spaces. For example, Watkins examines South African hip-hop in the late 1990s in the light of such issues as “racism, marginalization, and musical creativity embedded in local and global frames” (p. 58). For a deeper and easier understanding, he discusses this chapter in sections, including “a description of the numerous hip hop scenes in South Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, [and] Durban[,] and the seriously neglected music studies of the Eastern Cape such as Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth” (p. 58). The second and third sections explore the issues emerging in these locations, contextualizing hip...