The Hiplife in Ghana West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop [Paperback]

The Hiplife in Ghana explores one international site - Ghana, West Africa - where hip-hop music and culture have morphed over two decades into the hiplife genre of world music. It investigates hiplife music not merely as an imitation and adaptation of hip-hop, but as a reinvention of Ghana's century-old highlife popular music tradition. Author Halifu Osumare traces the process by which local hiplife artists have evolved a five-phased indigenization process that has facilitated a youth-driven transformation of Ghanaian society. She also reveals how Ghana's social shifts, facilitated by hiplife, have occurred within the country's 'corporate recolonization,' serving as another example of the neoliberal free market agenda as a new form of colonialism. Hiplife artists, we discover, are complicit with these global socio-economic forces even as they create counter-narratives that push aesthetic limits and challenge the neoliberal order.Every Hood Has It's Own Style' 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife 'Empowering the Young': Hiplife's Youth Agency 'Society of the Spectacle': Hiplife and Corporate Recolonialization 'The Game': Hiplife's Counter-Hegemonic Discourse

An eye-opening and paradigm-shifting look into cross cultural music creation within a diaspora. - Black Grooves

This book is an excellent and painstaking review of the circumstances that led to the adoption of this musical genre and its subsequent transformations . . . I have no doubt that readers will find 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 and founding director of School of 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 lÓ(