Synopses & Reviews
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 valueandmdash;aesthetic, moral, linguistic, economicandmdash;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.
Review
andquot;Living the Hiplife is about young hiplife musicians in Ghana trying to make good while making do. The musicians are at once artists, entrepreneurs, and hustlers. Jesse Weaver Shipleyand#39;s ethnography of these artists and their listeners presents their ways of laboring as forms of struggle under neoliberal conditions. I am particularly struck by his identification of the skills of electronic mediation as crucial to good musicianship, good cultural brokerage, good hustling, and good entrepreneurship.andquot;
Review
andquot;African music, in its newest and most innovative forms, is changing our cultural and political worldview, and Jesse Weaver Shipley is in the know! The all-too-important voices that comprise the tidal wave of creativity throughout Africa, and especially in Ghana, will be the most significant voices of the future. Therefore this book is more than a look at the recent past and the present; it is a blueprint. Living the Hiplife is a necessary analysis of African word, sound, and power.andquot;
Review
andquot;Jesse Weaver Shipley has written a highly compelling account of hiplife in Ghana. Historically and ethnographically rich, it demonstrates how this musical form has affected ideas of Ghanaian identity. Not only does hiplife celebrate entrepreneurship among African youth situated in the and#39;shadowsand#39; of the global order. It also provides them with a language of mobile signs and#39;geared toward capitalist accumulation and consumption.and#39; Based on a broad range of theoretical sources, Shipleyand#39;s writing is lively, his insights memorable. This is a book that anyone interested in Africa, anyone interested in contemporary cultural production, will want to read.andquot;
Review
andldquo;Shipley offers up a heady mix of political, business, and music history, of entrepreneurship and converging genres, intermixed with reportage and personal contacts as he explores the junction of celebrity, commerce, and politics in contemporary Ghana. . . . [S]cholars of contemporary African culture and aficionados of hiplife will find enlightenment.andrdquo;
Review
“Jesse Weaver Shipley's Living the Hiplife is a recently released academic work focused on the music and business of Hiplife, a musical genre from Ghana that combines hip hop and highlife. It follows the earlier release of the documentary Living The HipLife and paints a rich portrait of an industry and an aesthetic landscape in which both cassettes and low-end cellphones are primary technologies.” Clyde Smith, Hypebot
Review
andldquo;[Shipley] has written with passionate involvement and balances his study with firsthand interviews. The globalization of hip-hop should be no surprise, and this exploration of its reach and how it can be remade provides a fascinating example of the localization and renewal of the form.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The scholarly passages are hung around lengthy, eminently readable sections that will appeal to anyone who might enjoy modern African music styles, and not necessarily those with a hip-hop bias. Even if you have no particular interest or liking for hiplife, this is an absorbing and very informative book.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[A] fascinating foray into a complex world of musical production, the deployment of shifting technologies, and articulation of conceptions of entrepreneurial success that deserves wide attention and careful considerationandhellip;. Living the Hiplife offers readers an admirable mix of ethnographic detail and analytical discussion.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[T]his study not only originally and brilliantly recognizes the role of the diaspora in this cultural field, but it brightly manages to let the audience speak back to cultural producers. Indeed, Shipley repeatedly succeeds in giving voice to these participants, from a local public transport conversation to online forumsandhellip;. [H]is book significantly contributes to a much neglected field that is the economy of popular music in urban Africa; and I can only welcome and salute such a study, full of original insights, as a firsthand account from an obviously enthusiastic and dedicated participant.andrdquo;
Synopsis
This ethnography of hiplife, a popular Ghanaian music genre combining hip-hop with highlife music, shows how young hiplife artists in Ghana and its diaspora use the music to gain social status, wealth, and respectability.
About the Author
Jesse Weaver Shipley is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College.