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Highlife Music in West Africa (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,075
Discovery Miles 10 750
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Highlife Music in West Africa (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,095
Discovery Miles: 10 950
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A posthumous publication, the book is an excursion into the origins
and development of Highlife music in West Africa. Although highlife
music belongs to the entertainment genre, it is essentially an
urban music. Its dynamism does not lie in the aesthetics of its
form and style, as a dance music relying almost totally on western
musical instruments; it lies more in its song-texts. Critics
evaluate it as a popular music genre, but fail to emphasize that
its critical song-texts are the major forces guaranteeing its
development and interplay with factors which contribute to the
search for even political as well as economic, and national growth
and stability in Africa. Highlife musicians may be referred to as
modern African town-criers whose messages or song-texts, like drama
and theatre texts, present not only Africa's culture but her
social, economic and political problems. The presence of radicals
and Pan-Africanists from the fifties in music has therefore lifted
highlife musicians from the status of mere entertainers and nerve
therapists to a more serious and responsible one, as African modern
town-criers whose song-texts are communal messages, warning and
counselling. Even, militant criticisms of the establishment are
innovative. The musicians also alert the society on topical issues
of significance as the press and the theatre do. There is currently
an appreciable transformation and "transfiguration" in highlife
music. Its conventional dancers are giving way to audiences;
because the highlife musicians preach political and social messages
instead of the passion of dance in their audience. Thus, ears and
the mind are now becoming more important, intellectually, than the
sensual eyes and body ballroom motion.
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