Living the hiplife Celebrity and entrepreneurship in Ghanaian popular music

An ethnographer, sociolinguist, filmmaker of Living the Hiplife, and Haverford College anthropologist, Shipley offers up a heady mix of political, business, and music history, of entrepreneurship and converging genres, intermixed with reportage and personal contacts as he explores the junction of celebrity, commerce, and politics in contemporary Ghana. As he assesses the impact of hiplife music-a transglobal genre developing as the musicians move between Accra, London, and New York-upon Ghanaian social and cultural life, he poses a central question: "How does an artist as entrepreneur convert musical labor into fame and economic value?" Musicians receiving particular attention include Reggie Rockstone, Rab Bakari, Gyedu Blay Ambolley, Obrafour, Mensa Ansah, and Mzbel, a rare female performer in this overwhelmingly male genre. Shipley cautions the reader early on that the book "is not a history of hiplife nor does it attempt to comprehensively catalog artists, songs, and stylistic differences." While his considerations of seminal figures and specific texts assist the general reader, absent tonal familiarity it is impossible to hear it, and that's a bar to listening to Shipley. However, scholars of contemporary African culture and aficionados of hiplife will find enlightenment. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Filmmaker Shipley (anthropology, Haverford Coll.) released an eponymous documentary in 2007 in which he described the growing power and influence of the mixture of Ghanaian highlife music and American hip-hop that is hiplife. His book both updates and adds greater depth to the understanding the film provided of a social and cultural movement that combines speech, storytelling, and vision and offers a path to social mobility and societal change. Following the career of hiplife originator Reggie Rockstone, Shipley weaves a tale of struggle, success, and the effects of social, political, and commercial pressures on arts. VERDICT Shipley's book doesn't shake its academic tone, but he has written with passionate involvement and balances his study with firsthand interviews. The globalization of hip-hop should be no surprise, and this exploration of its reach and how it can be remade provides a fascinating example of the localization and renewal of the form.-Bill Baars, Lake Oswego P.L., OR (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.