Highlife Music in West Africa

Highlife Music in West Africa PDF Author: Sonny Oti
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 978842208X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Highlife Music in West Africa is an excursion into the origins and development of an extraordinary music form. Highlife music is essentially an urban music, but unlike dance music performed using Western musical instruments, its dynamism is based less in the aesthetics of form and style than in song-texts. Critics treat highlife as a popular music genre, but this fails to acknowledge the role that the lyrics of highlife music played in the search for political, economic, and national growth and stability in Africa. Highlife musicians' messages, like drama and theater scripts, not only reflect Africa's culture but also highlight her social, economic, and political problems. The involvement of radicals and Pan-Africanists has helped elevate highlife musicians from the status of entertainers to a more serious and responsible one, as modern African town criers, whose song-texts are communal messages, warnings, and counseling.

Highlife Music in West Africa

Highlife Music in West Africa PDF Author: Sonny Oti
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 978842208X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Highlife Music in West Africa is an excursion into the origins and development of an extraordinary music form. Highlife music is essentially an urban music, but unlike dance music performed using Western musical instruments, its dynamism is based less in the aesthetics of form and style than in song-texts. Critics treat highlife as a popular music genre, but this fails to acknowledge the role that the lyrics of highlife music played in the search for political, economic, and national growth and stability in Africa. Highlife musicians' messages, like drama and theater scripts, not only reflect Africa's culture but also highlight her social, economic, and political problems. The involvement of radicals and Pan-Africanists has helped elevate highlife musicians from the status of entertainers to a more serious and responsible one, as modern African town criers, whose song-texts are communal messages, warnings, and counseling.

Musicmakers of West Africa

Musicmakers of West Africa PDF Author: John Collins
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9780894100758
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introducing the development of West African popular music, this text begins with a discussion of the early Highlife bands. It then traces the growth and diversification of various popular musical styles, including comic opera, Dagomba Simpa folk, and the current Afro-beat and Juju.

Highlife Giants

Highlife Giants PDF Author: John Collins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789785023817
Category : Dance music
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description


Highlife Saturday Night

Highlife Saturday Night PDF Author: Nate Plageman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253007259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana—when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor—in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "highlife" music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20th century and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

The Hiplife in Ghana

The Hiplife in Ghana PDF Author: H. Osumare
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137405067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Highlife Years

The Highlife Years PDF Author: Paul 'Wale Ademowo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Highlife (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description


Living the Hiplife

Living the Hiplife PDF Author: Jesse Weaver Shipley
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395908
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 558

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 value—aesthetic, moral, linguistic, economic—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.

Dust & Grooves

Dust & Grooves PDF Author: Eilon Paz
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1607748703
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.

Juju

Juju PDF Author: Christopher Alan Waterman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226874654
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now known internationally through the recordings of King Sunny Ade and others, juju music originated more than fifty years ago among the Yoruba of Nigeria. This history and ethnography of juju is the first detailed account of the evolution and social significance of a West African popular music. Enhanced with maps, color photographs of musicians and dance parties, musical transcriptions, interviews with musicians, and a glossary of Yoruba terms, Juju is an invaluable contribution to scholarship and a boon to fans who want to discover the roots of this vibrant music.

West African Pop Roots

West African Pop Roots PDF Author: John Collins
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439904979
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
The nearest thing we have in the twentieth century to a global folk music.