List of Illustrations  ix

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction. Aesthetics and Aspiration  1

1. Soul to Soul: Value Transformations and Disjunctures of Diaspora in Urban Ghana  28

2. Hip-Hop Comes to Ghana: State Privatization and an Aesthetic of Control  51

3. Rebirth of Hip: Afro-Cosmopolitanism and Masculinity in Accra's New Speech Community  80

4. The Executioner's Words: Genre, Respect, and Linguistic Value  108

5. Scent of Bodies: Parody as Circulation  134

6. Gendering Value for a Female Hiplife Star: Moral Violence as Performance Technology  163

7. No. 1 Mango Street: Celebrity Labor and Digital Production as Musical Value  198

8. Ghana@50 in the Bronx: Sonic Nationalism and New Diasporic Disjunctures  230

Conclusion. Rockstone's Office: Entrepreneurship and the Debt of Celebrity  267

Notes  285

Bibliography  303

Index  317

“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. . . . [S]cholars of contemporary African culture and aficionados of hiplife will find enlightenment.”—Publishers Weekly

“Jesse Weaver Shipley's Living the Hiplife is a recently released academic work focused on the music and business of Hiplife, a musical genre from Ghana that combines hip hop and highlife. It follows the earlier release of the documentary Living The HipLife and paints a rich portrait of an industry and an aesthetic landscape in which both cassettes and low-end cellphones are primary technologies.”—Clyde Smith, Hypebot

“[Shipley] 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, Library Journal

“The scholarly passages are hung around lengthy, eminently readable sections that will appeal to anyone who might enjoy modern African music styles, and not necessarily those with a hip-hop bias. Even if you have no particular interest or liking for hiplife, this is an absorbing and very informative book.”—Martin Sinnock, Songlines

“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. . . . [S]cholars of contemporary African culture and aficionados of hiplife will find enlightenment.”—Publishers Weekly

“Jesse Weaver Shipley's Living the Hiplife is a recently released academic work focused on the music and business of Hiplife, a musical genre from Ghana that combines hip hop and highlife. It follows the earlier release of the documentary Living The HipLife and paints a rich portrait of an industry and an aesthetic landscape in which both cassettes and low-end cellphones are primary technologies.”—Clyde Smith, Hypebot

“[Shipley] 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, Library Journal

“The scholarly passages are hung around lengthy, eminently readable sections that will appeal to anyone who might enjoy modern African music styles, and not necessarily those with a hip-hop bias. Even if you have no particular interest or liking for hiplife, this is an absorbing and very informative book.”—Martin Sinnock, Songlines

"African music, in its newest and most innovative forms, is changing our cultural and political worldview, and Jesse Weaver Shipley is in the know! The all-too-important voices that comprise the tidal wave of creativity throughout Africa, and especially in Ghana, will be the most significant voices of the future. Therefore this book is more than a look at the recent past and the present; it is a blueprint. Living the Hiplife is a necessary analysis of African word, sound, and power."—M-1, of Dead Prez

"Jesse Weaver Shipley has written a highly compelling account of hiplife in Ghana. Historically and ethnographically rich, it demonstrates how this musical form has affected ideas of Ghanaian identity. Not only does hiplife celebrate entrepreneurship among African youth situated in the 'shadows' of the global order. It also provides them with a language of mobile signs 'geared toward capitalist accumulation and consumption.' Based on a broad range of theoretical sources, Shipley's writing is lively, his insights memorable. This is a book that anyone interested in Africa, anyone interested in contemporary cultural production, will want to read."—John Comaroff, Harvard University and the American Bar Foundation

"Living the Hiplife is about young hiplife musicians in Ghana trying to make good while making do. The musicians are at once artists, entrepreneurs, and hustlers. Jesse Weaver Shipley's ethnography of these artists and their listeners presents their ways of laboring as forms of struggle under neoliberal conditions. I am particularly struck by his identification of the skills of electronic mediation as crucial to good musicianship, good cultural brokerage, good hustling, and good entrepreneurship."—Louise Meintjes, author of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio

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