Becoming a “Society of the Spectacle”: Ghanaian Hiplife Music and Corporate Recolonization

Abstract

Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a revision of Ghana's own century-old popular music known globally as highlife; yet it is subject to the same postcolonial, global, and neoliberal corporate “recolonization” to which other sectors of Africa societies are subject. I dissect neoliberalism as the global free market agenda acting as a new form of colonialism in Africa through examining Ghana's ubiquitous telecommunications companies. Their lucrative corporate relationships with hiplife artists allow me to explore the meaning of modernity in Africa, as well as the place of the Structural Adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank. I conclude that hiplife music has given Ghanaian youths a counter-hegemonic voice while enabling their gainful employment, but, while doing so, hiplife music necessarily had to involve itself in capitalism's global dominance with increasing corporate privatization in Ghana and Africa in general.

Notes

^[1] Hip-hop culture's global hip-hop nation (GHHN) is a construct that theorizes that youth across the globe find common cultural ground through the subculture of hip hop, which started in the South Bronx, New York, but which is now international.

^[2] Jesse Weaver Shipley states that the popular image of the Kufuor's NPP party was important in privatizing the corporate transition of Ghana: “While not accurate in terms of policy, in the popular imagination, the 2000 transition was seen as a crucial shift from an old state-centered approach to free-market-oriented governance” (640).

^[3] Debord goes on to say: “With the Industrial Revolution's manufactural division of labour and mass production for a global market, the commodity finally became fully visible as a power that was colonizing all social life. It was at that point that political economy established itself as the dominate science, and as the science of domination” (21).

^[4] However, not all theorists emphasize global economic control embedded within neoliberalism. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong focuses on “governing activities” that “are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions.” Ong analyzes the technical emphasis within neoliberalism as “a new relationship between government and knowledge…focusing on the active, interventionist aspect of neoliberalism in non-Western contexts, where neoliberalism as exception articulates sovereign rule and regimes of citizenship.”

^[5] Pádraig Carmody, quoting Castells's characterization of the African continent by the mid-'90s as a “black hole of informational capitalism,” notes that the mid to late 1990s was a time when “there were more telephone landlines in Manhattan or Tokyo than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.” Carmody and Castells emphasize the “technological dependency and technological underdevelopment, in a period of accelerated technological change in the rest of the world.”

^[6] For example, Carmody writes, “Black Star TV has spurred an investment to assemble mobile phones that can receive the service by a Korean Manufacturer in Ghana” (113).

^[7] Throughout this article, I use the term “postmodern.” My meaning of this debatable term is similar to Frederic Jameson's explanation of postmodernism in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where capitalism since the 1960s utilizes popular culture in a wholly different way than in the first half of the 20th century. This new economic order is able to hold sway over the replication of cultural tenets because it is viewed as the natural order of social life. Other meanings, such as that of post-rationality and a new expression of thought itself, that have been put forward by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and Moralitiés Postmodernes can also be subsumed in my meaning. For an exhaustive analysis of postmodernism in relation to hip hop, see Russell Potter.

^[8] Ghana's early 20th-century concert parties, as a popular entertainment that traveled throughout the urban and rural areas with its dance, music, and minstrel-like morality tales, is a prime example of the centrality of expressive culture in relation to African societies.

^[9] The $9 billion sale made Bharti the fifth largest cell-phone company in terms of numbers of subscribers. Bharti, in turn, is 32% owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., which had previously unsuccessfully tried to enter the African market by attempting to buy into MTN. Through its high-level corporate buy-out of Zain Africa, Bharti Airtel had finally become a major telecom player in Africa.

^[10] I define the Africanist aesthetic as a process-oriented improvisational, poly-rhythmic approach to music, dance, and oratory that is founded in the principle of using art as social and personal commentary. A thorough exploration of this aesthetic can be found in Osumare.