Hiplife is a popular music genre in Ghana that mixes hip-hop
beatmaking and rap with highlife music, proverbial speech, and Akan
storytelling. In the 1990s, young Ghanaian musicians were drawn to
hip-hop's dual ethos of black masculine empowerment and capitalist
success. They made their underground sound mainstream by infusing
carefree bravado with traditional respectful oratory and familiar
Ghanaian rhythms. "Living the Hiplife" is an ethnographic account
of hiplife in Ghana and its diaspora, based on extensive research
among artists and audiences in Accra, Ghana's capital city; New
York; and London. Jesse Weaver Shipley examines the production,
consumption, and circulation of hiplife music, culture, and fashion
in relation to broader cultural and political shifts in
neoliberalizing Ghana.
Shipley shows how young hiplife musicians produce and transform
different kinds of value--aesthetic, moral, linguistic,
economic--using music to gain social status and wealth, and to
become respectable public figures. In this entrepreneurial age,
youth use celebrity as a form of currency, aligning music-making
with self-making and aesthetic pleasure with business success.
Registering both the globalization of electronic, digital media and
the changing nature of African diasporic relations to Africa,
hiplife links collective Pan-Africanist visions with individualist
aspiration, highlighting the potential and limits of social
mobility for African youth.
The author has also directed a film entitled "Living the
Hiplife" and with two DJs produced mixtapes that feature the music
in the book available for free download.
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