Oi meu povo! Recently I’ve been in a series of debates w/ people about what is going down in the Music Biz, the good the bad and the ugly of it. Here’s some insight on one side of the issue - it’s an article I wrote on Ghanaian Hip Hop that was published earlier this Summer 2006 in Leverage Magazine. Whether you’ve had any experience with AFrican Hip Hop or not, it should make for an interesting read…
More Than Words
By: Derrick N. Ashong
It’s thumping. I feel it more than I hear it. It’s so thick you can almost taste it. It’s funky – smells stronger than teen spirit – like the wisdom of ages wrapped up into an incessant, irrepressible, unforgiving beat. It commands you to move, inspires you to dance, but now is neither the time nor the place…
I’m feeling the groove. Then I hear my name emanate from the speakers. “Is DNA in the house?” I stand up and make my way around the crowd towards the patch of dance floor in front of the small DJ-laden stage. The MC greets me with a pound, a hug and a pass of the microphone. I grab the mic and the cipher’s mine.
Growing up on three different continents I never thought it would be the music that would ultimately give me roots. So standing in the midst of a packed club, mic-in-hand facing a sea of unfamiliar faces that look like mine, I can’t help but marvel at the thought that maybe Hip Hop has in fact brought me home. In retrospect it makes utmost sense. In the music is our story, the souls of those not yet and not quite forgotten. What better medium to bring one back to Mother Afrika than the songs sung by her scattered offspring?
Last year I couldn’t imagine a cipher like this at a club in Ghana. But in January 2006 I got a chance to witness MCs dueling it out for the respect of a crowd packed with Hip Hop heads down at the Last Stop club in Accra. It was the third month of a weekly open mic and it was clear that the scene was in full effect. Young MCs, hungry for recognition, stood chomping at the beat waiting for their chance at the microphone.
The old heads were also in the mix. Reggie Rockstone, founder of the “Hip Life” movement, chillin’ in the cut in trademark all-white attire, with dreadlocks flowing and Guinness in hand – admirers giving props, but leaving space enough for the man to do his thing. Then the sound of a trumpet’s clarion call, and in walked Panji Anoff, producer and leader of the near legendary Pidgen Riddim Kollektive. Bearded and braided Panji gives a laid back dap to friends and foreigners alike. Like Reggie he’s a legend in his own time. The Godfathers of Hip Life are in the house.
But this is not a Hip Life party. This is Hip Hop.
See, as Reggie Rockstone puts it, when it first began “Hip Life” was “a con.” The son of a renowned Ashanti designer, Reggie was raised in the UK and US and speaks Hip Hop like a Brooklynite. He coined the phrase “Hip Life” to make cats in Ghana feel more comfortable with the idea of a fusion of Hip Hop and Ghanaian Highlife. But Reggie considers himself “straight Hip Hop,” whereas now artists are really putting Highlife into their music.
I know what he means. Unlike mainstream American Hip Hop, you won’t hear many Hip Life tunes that don’t incorporate actual singing – and I’m not talking about the standard hooks accented by a pretty R&B singer. I mean the MCs themselves can sing. From the tight vocal harmonies of Buk Bak, to the rugged Ragga-influenced chanting of Batman, a melodic vocal has become a near pre-requisite for a hit Hip Life song. Add to that indigenous lyrics flowing deftly over the distinctive rumble of traditional percussion, interwoven with heavy synthesized beats, and the palm-wine drenched licks of a Highlife guitar and you have an authentically hybrid sound. Hip Life is no longer a con, it’s the real deal and it dominates the Ghanaian music scene.
So why are the founders of “Hip Life” hanging out at a “Hip Hop” party? The distinction was articulated to me by Souljah, the organizer of the party, a young DJ at Accra’s Vibe FM. He expressed to me in no uncertain terms that he and his peers were building a scene for Hip Hop in Ghana. According to them Hip Life never fully embraced the fullness of Hip Hop culture. The impact of the DJ; of Graffiti artists, B-Boys and B-Girls has been virtually invisible in Hip Life. And if those influences are indeed there, they have been so subsumed beneath the “bling” and bravado of the MC, as to have taken on a tertiary role at best.
Hip Life has not been so much a reflection of Hip Hop culture, as a spin-off of a certain segment of Hip Hop culture. It takes the cross-section of the genre most readily visible to the outside eye – the representative MC, gold teeth, diamond earrings, misogynistic lyric and all – and translates it into Ghanaian idiom. In Hip Life the posture of Hip Hop is visible, but the original spirit of it is often lost.
A student at the University of Ghana once told me that he loved the music of Jay-Z and 50 Cent, but that Ghanaian artists needed to be more careful with their lyrics. It was ok for the American artists to trade in the profane because in America the Blacks are “fabulously rich,” but in Ghana where “Blacks are poor” they need the Hip Life guys to give “more inspiration.” The sentiment regarding inspiration was a beautiful one, but it was nearly lost on me as I stood reeling in the face of a young, college-educated Ghanaian DJ who proceeded to explain to me why it was clear that Blacks were in fact better off than Whites in the United States. How could the truth get so lost in transmission?
To start, Hip Life may have been born of the migration of Hip Hop culture back to the motherland, but it wasn’t raised that way. Like the Ghanaian youth of today who were “raised by MTV,” as Reggie Rockstone puts it, so is Hip Life maturing in the crucible of American popular culture. Yet it is divorced from the social, political and economic milieu that gave birth to the artistry and the attitude itself. Hip Life in many ways resembles a kind of musical little brother, lionizing Hip Hop, its older sibling, emulating its every move but unaware of the depths of talent and turmoil that have lived and breathed beneath the “cool pose.”
Hip Hop was born of the ingenuity of Black and Latino youth in New York City, who in the face of urban blight, joblessness and reduced funding for the arts in schools responded with a culture that turned their concrete jungle into an artist’s canvas. Subway trains became a spray can’s illicit lover, caressed nightly under cover of darkness. Asphalt playgrounds were turned into a proving ground where young men and women tested their bodies against the beat and the unyielding hardness of the streets. Street lamps provided power for block parties that bubbled where the electric company could not go. There amid the cultural and political ashes of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, New York City reinvented itself in the image of its most marginal youth.
Is this the same image that made it back to Ghana? Ask the average Hip Life fan about racial profiling or poverty in America, and you would likely be met with a confused stare. Question whether the legacy of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King is reflected in today’s Hip Hop and you run the risk of meeting a genuine question: “Who?” Ghanaian youth know almost as little about the environment of racial and economic division that gave birth to Hip Hop, as American youth know about the complex historical legacies from which the popular images in western media of African violence and underdevelopment emerge.
On both sides of the Atlantic, there’s a misunderstanding. The resultant misperception may be defining Africa’s cultural future. Is misperception about the good life in America why we all want to leave the motherland? Is this why the lines grow chronically long outside the US Information Services office in Accra? Is this why the SAT is the exam of choice for budding intellects at the University of Ghana at Legon, and an American accent the requisite affect of so many a young TV presenter?
If MTV is indeed raising the youth of Ghana then what of those who question pop culture’s motives and excesses? What of those who sit at the feet of the local pioneers and hear stories of what Hip Hop “used” to be, what in their estimation it “really” is – the uncompromising, unparalleled, unassailable voice of the streets? What of those youth who perceive there is something more in Hip Hop than a material dream, and find they want a piece of that too?
For them there is an open mic on Tuesdays at Last Stop in Accra. Where the burgeoning Hip Hop community is sharpening its teeth and plotting a cultural revolution.
Will this revolution sweep away the webs of confusion that surround our misunderstandings of cultural “authenticity” and the global redefinition of Black manhood? Not necessarily. As I watch my fellow artists posture and pace as the cipher transforms into an MC battle, I perceive a similar hyper-masculine stride to that of our peers in the West; a similar edge in the language and the lyric. I hear the “n” word sprayed like pepper over dull meat and I continue to question whether our redemption songs will ever be sung over breakbeats…
When did Hip Hop turn Africans into “niggers?”
“It’s just a song.” That’s the apologist note so often sung when one raises the issue of Black identity being co-opted by a mainstream music industry that has little regard and no substantive investment in the development of our communities. “Just a song” sounds a bit trite to me. Particularly when one considers how historically Africans have interwoven their music and the transmission of their culture and values so intimately. For the African music has always been about much more than entertainment, it has been about communal memory, about cultural and political history.
I recently sat in a cipher in my hometown in Ghana, watching the neo-revolutionary wrangling of my peers with our evolving identity and it struck me that we need to connect on a level much deeper than MTV, lest we do in fact forget who we are. Between bangin’ beats and inspired lyrics both burdened and buoyed by Western profanities, I felt solidifying within me a call for an interstitial intervention. This intervention must go “beyond, beneath and between” the poisoned images of the Diaspora that flood our airwaves worldwide, teaching even the illiterate to do the proto-neo-colonial dance of “Black authenticity.”
Such an intervention needs more than well-meaning articles written by over-educated young Africans living overseas and catching occasional confused glimpses of “life back home.” We need more than academic double-speak and more than street-bred, corporate-bestowed “legitimacy.” We need more than a Black culture sold by European and American executives to a 70% White audience, that uses as the cornerstone of its value a manufactured concept of urban credibility – one rooted not in the harsh realities of life in the urban underclass, but rather in the need for a marketable image of youth rebellion authenticated by Blacks for the consumption of White suburbanites.
What of we who grew up to the soundtrack of Hip Hop culture, and remember when it represented not only the world as it was, but the world as we wanted it to be? What of we the progeny of those who fled a continent in turmoil bearing never-to-be-fulfilled promises to return home? What of we, the emerging afropolitan clique who have experienced the education, opportunities and oppressions of life in the West, and peering across the waters perceive that if we are to survive, Africa must mean more to us than warfare, poverty and “structural adjustment”.
We need a new definition of what’s real, and I suspect “we” are not alone. As Reggie Rockstone once pointed out to me, in questioning the so-called gangsta pose of so many American MC’s: “in Africa we don’t do drive-by’s…we have coup-d’etats.” Somalian MC K’Naan asks the question “what’s hardcore?” I’d like to add to this the related and more fundamental question “what’s real?” In the struggle to bridge the gap between Africa and the Diaspora I am increasingly questioning whether Hip Hop is working for or against us. I’m not sure anymore. But I do know that 50 Cent does not represent me. Hip Hop is looking more and more like a cultural bridge over the Atlantic, across which much is being lost in translation.
An essay that began with a beat ends with a question and a call for intervention. What will it take to articulate a trans-national Black identity that empowers, rather than eviscerates our cultures? I can’t say that I know. I will say it’s high time we changed the sound and syntax of Black truth…and it’s going to take more than a well-turned phrase, a polished dissertation or a catchy hook to make it happen. This is a change in need of more than words…and ultimately more than music.
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Derrick N. Ashong is a musician, actor, activist and scholar who starred in Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad” and is a graduate student in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Sweet Mother Tour (SMT) and lectures widely on the influence of popular culture on youth identity. Visit www.sweetmother.org to learn more about the SMT.
Then don’t you know the next day I got an inquiry from CNN.com asking if I had any thoughts on Obama’s historic speech on race. So I wrote this 
Still got some work to do on that front, but it’s all good! Would love to see response videos from y’all and show the world that we are far from sleep in 2008. Peep the info below and catch you all soon! Peace, D.N.A