The Hiplife in Ghana is an ethnography of one international site where hip-hop music and culture has morphed over two decades into a whole new form of world music called hiplife. I investigate hiplife music not merely as an adaptation of hip-hop, but as a revision of Ghana’s own century-old popular music known globally as highlife. The Hiplife in Ghana is situated in the new scholarship on the globalization of American hip-hop as the Global Hip-Hip Nation (GHHN) that deconstructs the imitation-adaptation paradigm, promoting instead various indigenization processes by local artists and consumers. Ghanaian hiplife becomes a perfect example of the emphasis on localization of hip-hop with its highlife rhythms, melodies, and the use of local languages.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Hiplife in Ghana explores how hip-hop music and culture in Ghana, West Africa has morphed over two decades into a whole new form of world music called hiplife. The groundbreaking scholarship investigates hiplife music as more than just an adaptation of hip-hop, but as a revision of Ghana's own century-old popular music known globally as highlife. While examining the idea of an imitation-adaption model, the author also reveals various indigenization processes by local artists and consumers. Ghanaian hiplife becomes an example of the emphasis on localization of hip-hop with its highlife rhythms, melodies, and the use of local languages. The book also illuminates many of hiplife's well-known artists, such as Reggie Rockstone, Batman Samini, Tic Tac, and Okyeame Kwame, who are perched for international notoriety, along with close readings of selected hiplife lyrics.

Global hip-hop scholar Halifu Osumare, Ph.D. reveals a five-phased indigenization process (1994-2010) that spans over three generations of artists in Accra, the capital city. She also demonstrates a dynamic youth agency that puts a newfound power in the hands of Ghanaian youths that has emerged from these artists and their consumers, transforming Ghanaian society in the process. The perception of youth as a marginal status in most societies is examined in relation to Africa's traditional cultural focus on age deference. Hiplife music empowers Ghana's youths, giving them an influential voice in various social, economic, and political spheres. Through Cultural Studies' youth subculture theory, Osumare investigates hip-hop's establishment in Ghana from the late 1980s imitative phase through the adaptive mid-1990s, to the current indigenizing phase since the early 2000s, giving voice to a younger generation who previously had none.

Hiplife's youth empowerment is given a socio-economic context through what Osumare calls Ghana's "corporate recolonization." Osumare dissects neoliberalism as the global free market agenda often acting as a new form of colonialism through investigating Ghana's ubiquitous telecommunications cell phone companies that are integrally involved with marketing hiplife music artists. These multinational corporations are at the center of hip-hop's globalization into Africa, situating the music implicitly into "gangsta" situations saturated with the scramble for state power and global commerce. The neocolonial intrusion, spawned by local corruption and the neocolonialist agenda of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, transcends far beyond the stereotypic, notorious ghetto neighborhood gang violence surrounding hip-hop in the U.S.

Osumare explores how hiplife music has given youths both a global voice along with gainful employment, as well as an involvement in capitalism's global dominance in Africa.

Hiplife music artists have also created various anti-colonial projects that have aided in bringing hiplife music and culture to a new level of maturity and recognition. Hiplife music's socio-political activism forms a counter-hegemonic story that illustrates how imported American popular youth music in Ghana was transformed for its own local needs through the indigenization process. Hiplife is currently engaged in self-critique as it continues to shift within certain boundaries established by tradition and innovation— between the past (highlife) and the present (hip-hop). The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop captures the complexities of these social, economic, and political dynamics through hiplife music in Ghana.

Contents

Introduction—Every Hood Has Its Own Style

• I. Making an African Out of the Computer: Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife
• II. Empowering the Young: Hiplife's Youth Agency
• III. Society of the Spectacle: Hiplife and Corporate Recolonialization
• IV. The Game: Hiplife's Counter-Hegemonic Discourse

Published by Palgrave Macmillan. Coming in 2012

TESTIMONIAL

It is a great joy and a pleasure to endorse this study of Hiplife in Ghana: West African indigenization of Hip-Hop by Halifu Osumare. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, for it is an excellent and painstaking review of the circumstances that led to the adoption of this musical genre and its subsequent transformations . . . As Dr. Osumare's study shows, what made the Hip-hop/Hiplife juncture exciting but challenging was the emblematic transatlantic sound and visual modes of transmission that had to be reconciled . . . I have no doubt that readers will find Dr. Osumare's theoretical observations, thoughts and critical comments on her field materials and those related to the operation of multinationals, etc. equally interesting and thought-provoking.

-J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Emeritus Professor & Founding Director, School of the Performing Arts, University of Ghana

Halifu Osumare has written a rich account of hiplife music in Ghana through a prism of what she has termed the "musical arc of inspiration," and beautifully provides the reader with a picture of the intricate connections between highlife, US hip hop, late capitalism, youth agency, and local cultural practices. In this regard hiplife is not only a window into a local music style mobilized by youth in Ghana but a medium through which dominant ideologies and global structural forces are simultaneously complied with and resisted by those mostly affected by the challenges and opportunities of economic and political processes of the 21st century.

-Mwenda Ntarangwi, author of East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization

This book is very indepth filla! (Ghanaian Pidgen for "scoop") I really missed my Pops talking 'bout him and my life! History in print....again. But, this book is probably the best summary explaining this Ghana phenom called Hiplife and the only biographical account of my relationship with family, country, and hip hop.

-Reggie Rockstone, Founder and "Godfather" of Hiplife Music

CONTACT

Sacha Adorno | 267-243-1593 | sacha@SachaAdorno.com or Laura Henrich | 484-467-4315 | lahenrich@gmail.com