Jesse Weaver Shipley,Living the hiplife: Celebrity and entrepreneurship in Ghanaian popular music

Reviewed by: Dominique Santos, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

When my daughter started school a couple of years ago, proper play dates at home became the order of the day. Little girls crammed into her tiny bedroom dressing up as princesses and singing Azonto, ¹ the song with accompanying dance routine that all the kids at her south east London primary school were crazy about at the time. In 2013, Azonto’s creator, Fuse ODG, ² won Best African Artist at the MOBO ³ Awards. A Londoner of Ghanaian descent, his performance later that night was a confident display of Afro-centric symbolism, which sought to display a marriage of the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ – from the kente cloth barely-there outfits of his backing dancers, to the traditional court chair Fuse ODG began the show seated on and his baseball cap featuring the acronym TINA – This Is New Africa. It was a highlight of the night, and Fuse ODG made a point of marking the arrival of African identity and music as a source of pride, and route into celebrity and success in his acceptance speech. For the children at my daughter’s school, mostly the sons and daughters of African migrants to London, Fuse ODG was an everyday part of their pop cultural reference point; a local boy done good. Suffice to say, by the end of their Reception year, my daughter and her friends had mastered the Azonto routine, which was proudly performed at their class party.

Jesse Shipley’s book arrived at this timely point for the hiplife and afro beat industry, when artists like Fuse ODG are enjoying unprecedented cross-over success, fuelling the intersection of celebrity, entrepreneurship and hustling that Shipley writes so eloquently about. Hiplife is a genre of Ghanaian electronic dance music that deploys a synthesis of highlife beats, indigenous melodies and hip hop to create energetic, beat driven songs that invite listeners to dance. Enjoying wide spread popularity throughout Africa and the African diaspora, hiplife has also had some notable cross-over hits in Europe and the US, ‘Azonto’ arguably being the most well known. The book aims to explore hiplife in its social and political context, seeing it as a vehicle for the transformation of value. Drawing on Turner and Marx, Shipley sees participation in electronic music production and social action associated with it as a trajectory that provides the potential for turning these acts of social capital into the means to participate fully in a capitalist economy of accumulation and consumption. The rewards, epitomised by the likes of Fuse ODG, can be enormous, but few achieve the kind of transformation that the genre promises.

The work is divided into two sections. The first half of the book traces the historical roots of the genre, examining its historical emergence, cultural contexts and creative processes. The second half considers technological practices, economic strategies and moral debates, particularly those around the participation of female artists. A highlight for me was the excavation of hiplife’s musical roots in the Akan countryside and popular music trends of previous decades. Shipley’s description of the legendary Soul to Soul concert held in Ghana in 1971 to celebrate Independence day, in which American soul greats like Wilson Picket shared the stage with local musicians, evokes a soundscape that says a great deal about the experience and feeling of the Pan-African optimism that characterised post-independence nations. The vivid musical descriptions, and the intersection of style, sound and politics gain a chilling significance in the form of the stylistic posturing of the coup led by General Hawkings, the military man who looked and dressed like an American soul super star, a turning point in Ghana’s post-independence history in which the socialist promise of Nkrumah gave way to forces which prioritised personal power and enrichment. Another highlight is Shipley’s obviously close and prolonged involvement with some of hiplife’s most successful proponents. This gives the book an authentic flavour and permits the reader insight into the contradictory dynamics at work for those who achieve high profiles in the shadows of the global order. This is communicated in rich though subtle ethnographic vignettes, such as when one of hiplife’s biggest producers and performers Mr Rock is prevented from travelling to the USA for a concert due to immigration restrictions. At these moments, the limit of celebrity is fore grounded. The current economic and social inequality of the global world order, together with the restrictions placed on transnational movement, is disproportionately borne by African bodies, despite the neo-liberal rhetoric of New African discourse. It is a powerful example of how ethnographic writing can vividly communicate the nuances and personal experience of current configurations of economics and power that other kinds of academic representation cannot.

It is in the area of the gendered audience that there are some gaps asking to be filled. Though Shipley’s chapter on gender vividly, and painfully, brings to life the experiences of female performers such as Mzbel and Abrewa Nana who occupy opposite ends of the moral spectrum of the performance of female identity, it left me wishing for more insight into the world of female fans. How do they navigate the moral minefield of a genre in which female sexuality is such a powerful signifier? In a sense this is an aspect of a wider hiplife ethnography that may be beyond Shipley’s remit as a middle-aged western male, whose own body may not easily occupy the more private spaces of young women’s consumption. However, his engagement with gender is such that it can only serve to inspire aspiring ethnographers to seek out these under-represented spaces so that a fuller picture of the gendered experience of hiplife can be painted. The book demands response from its readership, which is part of its vitality and open-endedness. It asks for more ethnography in the hard to reach places of the hidden domains of popular cultural consumption. This is not due to any shortcoming in Shipley’s scholarship, which is thorough and compelling. In using music to discuss the circulation and accumulation of value, Shipley has written a book with excellent inter-disciplinary appeal. A must-read for any student of African popular culture and urban music more generally, it will also enhance courses on economics and gender studies. It is most of all an enjoyable read and insight into a fascinating and dynamic musical tradition.