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1 The Birth of Ghanaian Hiplife UrbanStyle,BlackThought, ProverbialSpeech 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 Anof 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 30 rap storiEs 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...

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