The global spread of hip-hop has resulted in a copious output of publications by scholars in many disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, communication, cultural studies, comparative literature, English, musicology, and ethnomusicology. Into this crowded field enters anthropologist Jesse Shipley’s Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music. A popular music genre interweaving rap, hip-hop beatmaking, Ghanaian highlife, proverbial speech, and Akan storytelling practices, hiplife is at once locally grounded and intensely transnationally interconnected. Similarly, the artists who create, perform, and record hiplife are Ghanaian cosmopolitans; these artists come alive in Shipley’s artfully and vividly written book. A study of production and consumption, circulation and the impact of neoliberalism on the lives of Ghanaians at home and abroad, Living the Hiplife crafts an argument that is relevant far beyond the large audience of hip-hop scholars. This fine ethnography will appeal to readers of many disciplines interested in globalization/global capitalism, circulation, neoliberalism, transnationalism, identity, migration/diaspora, as well as African music and popular culture. Within African music literature, Shipley’s book complements other recent scholarly accounts of African musical engagement with global economic processes and transnational interconnections (see, for example, Feld 2012; Perullo 2011; Kapchan 2007; and Klein 2006).
In this book, Shipley makes a compelling case for an understanding of hiplife as a process of identity negotiation through which agents transform aesthetic, moral, linguistic, and economic value. Hiplife emerges as a genre not just of the neoliberal era, but for and about neoliberalism. Analyzing production and economic processes, Shipley argues that hiplife can be read as an expression of a distinctively transnational Ghanaian form of entrepreneurship. Likewise, the author finds this unique form of entrepreneurship expressed verbally in hiplife lyrics and visually in the videos and images of its biggest stars. Emerging at the moment in history when mass communications and mass media made possible a world in which the latest fashion in New York could be known in London or Accra mere seconds after its birth, hiplife is at once a celebration and a critique of the neoliberal world order. Through hiplife, artists embrace their transnationally interconnected world, even as they call into question its economic disparities.
A major reason for this book’s success is Shipley’s ability to illuminate hiplife artists’ lives by focusing on the communicative dimensions of hiplife social processes. Toward this end, Shipley effectively employs sociolinguistic theory to explore the ways “musical meaning is actively made and contested in lived social contexts of production, circulation, and reception"(5). The production process finds hiplife musicians and producers engaged in mediated, transnational, creative dialogues that result in marketable product. Artists go back and forth between London and Accra carrying audio tracks in various states of completion on external hard drives, literally connecting Africa and its diaspora in a commodified, tangible sonic form.
A close attention to technologies and their implications for meaning-making in hiplife practice is another strength of the book. In earlier eras, popular musicians relied on commercial studios as mediators between them and their public. In contrast, for hiplife artists, "private media technologies emphasize personal freedoms: specifically the right to free expression and to shape one’s self and market tastes through consumer choice—though this idea of freedom also constrains subjects as they are increasingly beholden to market logic" (11). Free to record themselves and post their own recordings on the web, these artists also are subject to the capriciousness of a free market world.
As production bleeds into marketing and distribution, increasingly more agents engage in the process. Digital files circulate “between home recording setups, private studios, web designers, and Internet upload sites scattered across cities and continents” (226). Participation in this complex process offers artists access to credibility, which they strategically employ. Travel experience and transnational personal connections become valued resources that distinguish musical products from others in the market. Along the way, artists develop skill sets specific to the needs of twenty-first century commercial music-making. While in earlier generations success in Ghanaian popular music depended upon the musical and social skills of a bandleader, “turn of the millennium hip-hop artists require the skills of an entrepreneur, a branding executive, and an Internet—social media expert" (210).
In the process of pursuing his central argument, Shipley occasionally seems to reduce hiplife to entrepreneurship (e.g., "[hiplife] musicmaking is about [my emphasis] entrepreneurship, driven by changing media and business forms" (229). But this is a small complaint, because on the whole Shipley’s book represents hiplife as a polysemic social field rich in multiple meanings. Hiplife is also shown, for example, to be part of an increasingly transnational process of “national”-identity generation, a set of practices through which “Ghanaian affiliation is made into an increasingly transnational musical culture" (232). Furthermore, Shipley provides ample ethnographic evidence in support of his claims for entrepreneurship as an emphasis of hiplife social processes.
Living the Hiplife moves the reader through the historical and cultural contexts of the spread of hip-hop into Ghana and the birth of hiplife, the creative processes employed by hip-hop artists, the economic and technological dimensions of its transnational circulation, and the moral controversies that emerge in its reception—all without ever losing sight of human agency, which is no small feat. Shipley succeeds wonderfully at representing in rich ethnographic detail contemporary Ghanaians’ use of a popular music genre to engage the world around them.
Works Cited:
Feld, Steven. 2012. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kapchan, Deborah. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Klein, Debra L. 2006. Yoruba Bata Goes Global: Artists, Culture Brokers, and Fans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Perullo, Alex. 2011. Live from Dar es Salaam: Popular Music and Tanzania’s Music Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
--------
[Review length: 955 words • Review posted on May 28, 2014]