Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music

Jesse Weaver Shipley

Published by Duke University Press 2013

Living the Hiplife

Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music

Jesse Weaver Shipley

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395904

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Jesse Weaver Shipley is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College.

Reviews

“[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.”

-- Bill Baars Library Journal

“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.”

-- Publishers Weekly

“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.”

-- Martin Sinnock Songlines

“[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 consideration…. Living the Hiplife offers readers an admirable mix of ethnographic detail and analytical discussion.”

-- Nate Plageman Journal of Anthropological Research

“[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 forums…. [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.”

-- Jenny F. Mbaye Africa

"Living the Hiplife is an important testimony to the innovative and entrepreneurial nature of hip-hop music in Ghana as well as an excellent example of a theoretically engaged ethnography that productively uses anthropological ideas of value and circulation."

-- Girish Daswani American Ethnologist

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction. Aesthetics and Aspiration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Soul to Soul: Value Transformations and Disjunctures of Diaspora in Urban Ghana Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
2. Hip- Hop Comes to Ghana: State Privatization and an Aesthetic of Control Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
3. Rebirth of Hip: Afro- Cosmopolitanism and Masculinity in Accra’s New Speech Community Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
4. The Executioner’s Words: Genre, Respect, and Linguistic Value Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
5. Scent of Bodies: Parody as Circulation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
6. Gendering Value for a Female Hiplife Star: Moral Violence as PerformanceTechnology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
7. No. 1 Mango Street: Celebrity Labor and Digital Production as Musical Value Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
8. Ghana@50 in the Bronx: Sonic Nationalism and New Diasporic Disjunctures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	230
Conclusion. Rockstone’s Office: Entrepreneurship and the Debt of Celebrity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 344
Illustrations
- Other: 54 illustrations, including 9 in color

eBook

Published: January 28, 2013
ISBN: 9780822395904