Experiments in sound: generating sonic landscapes in online spaces

ABSTRACT

The democratic possibilities of a new public sphere created by communication technologies have been widely celebrated. Online technologies have created new spaces for individuals to facilitate encounters with and understanding of popular music. Across East Africa, online space as a medium to present popular music has been eagerly embraced by musicians, fans and cultural intermediaries. However, the social, cultural and financial resources required to convene a public for online space are unevenly distributed, and online spaces are frequently discarded, abandoned and deserted. These emergent and abandoned spaces offer us an alternative archive of imaginings, possibilities and potentiality in cultural life. Using the example of the Tanzanian hip hop blog Bongo Boom Bap, this article explores how, using online technologies, the blog's creator is able to generate a distinctly Tanzanian, pan-African, transnational hip hop space. I trace the origins of the blog to contestations over the direction of Tanzanian hip hop which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s and explore how these are revisited and reimagined through online space. The blog ultimately seeks to generate ‘authentic’ hip hop production offline and constructs this new genre through the configuration of relationships between multiple musical temporalities, localities and traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet
• hip hop
• Tanzania
• digital technology
• digital publics
• diaspora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

David Kerr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4745-6676

Notes

1. In 2010, I received a small grant for the Arts from the UK Arts Council, which enabled me to invite a significant, influential rapper, Dogo Hashim (young Hashim), for an artistic residency in the UK. Following Hashim’s return to Dar es Salaam, KBC continued to visit Birmingham and to develop his relationships with the studios, rappers and producers in the city. KBC visited me during these trips to Birmingham and this article in principally based upon discussions and interviews held during these visits.

2. DJ Cro owns and runs the label Crate Escape Records and Hashim performed at an event organised by the reggae collective Friendly Fire Music and the music collective Jibbering.

3. In 1997, Thomas Gesthuizen was a student of African Studies at the University of Leiden and later a researcher on the documentary ‘Hali Halisi, rap as an alternative medium in Tanzania’, which includes an interview with KBC.

4. TZhiphop is now largely hosted on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TZhiphop/.

5. The Kinondoni ward of Kinondoni district in Dar es Salaam is a planned settlement which has been occupied by a growing middle class since the 1970s (Brennan and Burton 2007, 54).

6. American slang derived from ‘homeboy’, denoting a friend.

7. The Zulu nation was a community group that sought to bring harmony to fighting gangs in New York through their involvement in the culture of hip hop. The Zulu Nation eventually became imagined as a transnational international community (Morgan and Bennett 2011, 183–184).

8. The development of FM stations in from 1993 onwards was pivotal in the development of hip hop in Tanzania. KBC can be seen working at Clouds FM on a documentary filmed in 1999 ‘Hali Halisi – Rap as alternative medium in Tanzania’ during which he gives aspiring new rappers an opportunity to perform (this can be viewed online at https://youtu.be/CYCycR2vfpA).

9. To spit is a colloquialism used to describe the act of rapping.

10. WAPI was an acronym for ‘words and pictures’ in English and also means ‘where’ in Swahili.

11. FA is a reference to Tanzanian rapper Mwanafalsafa (philosopher) and AY is the rapper (Ambwene Yessayah).

12. Overstanding is ‘deeper and more critical than understanding’ (Alim and Pennycook 2007, 90).

13. The term Bongo as a prefix denotes the Tanzanian origin of music genre Bongo Flava, and has been incorporated into the name for the Tanzanian film industry, ‘Bongo Movies’ (Sanga 2011, 190; Krings 2015, 151).

14. The Tema Yai Nation in Tanzanian seeks to be a collective for rappers performing in English.

15. Owner of 41 Recordz Lufunyo Mvungi is also a rapper active in the group Masharikans.

16. P Funk, Lindu and Duke are producers based in Dar es Salaam. P Funk owns the Bongo Records studio which has been active since the mid-1990s and has recorded many of the most successful Tanzanian artists in the hip-hop, Bongo Flava and RnB genres. Duke is a producer at MLab studio set up in 2009 and recording popular Tanzanian musicians including FidQ and Grace Matata.