Dancing to a new afrobeat

Everyone is going Afrobeat crazy. There’s Vampire Weekend, the Good, the Bad and the Queen, and Mi Ami, not to mention many Nigerian compilations on Strut and Mississippi Records and, of course, there are rumours of Franz Ferdinand heading to Africa for inspiration. African music seems to hold sway again in popular culture, and one blog has captured this cultural change more than any other. Awesome Tapes from Africa is compiled and run by Brian Shimkowitz, an ethnomusicologist who was granted a scholarship to investigate the music of Africa.

Shimkowitz originally set out to discover the roots of “high life”, a genre of African tribal forms and European music popularised by ET Mensah and SE Rogie, which combines big band, gospel, calypso and reggae. But Africa gave him another story instead, that of hiplife music. Highlife is seen as “supper club” music for older people, whereas hiplife is the opposite - Africa’s version of hip-hop.

Hiplife shares similarities with highlife. Both are variations of Western popular music and African tribal sounds. Hiplife artists originally stole the beats from Western hip-hop artists and rapped about their own experiences over the top. These stolen samples eventually morphed into the creation of homemade beats and thus hiplife was born. Making the music is still a struggle as the high levy on musical instruments in Ghanaian culture (with the government doing its best to eradicate live music for political purposes) forces many Ghanaian musicians to rely on cheap keyboards, pirated sequencing programs and computers. The limitations of these instruments often gives hiplife an unintentionally otherworldly sound.

Hiplife thrives in Africa - Shimkowitz writes of it being played everywhere from cabs, markets and street corners, and all on cassette. Although pirated CDs are making their way through the streets of Ghana, the cassette still reigns within their own burgeoning music industry. When a hiplife star is made, a producer (strictly in the monetary, not creative, sense) puts up the cash to record the album. Musicians work on the beats and sometimes the hiplife album can do upwards of 100,000 copies in Ghana.

Interestingly, Awesome Tapes from Africa doesn’t focus mainly on hiplife, it takes from all sorts of music throughout the continent, from highlife, ethnic and gospel, which is still hugely popular in Africa. It demonstrates that, even in the poorest of conditions, music lifts the spirit infinitely.

What I love about the blog is Shimkowitz’s descriptions of finding new music in Africa. You can feel the pure joy of discovery, almost like an internet version of Harry Smith, as he collects and highlights a unique musical journey. The blog is a portal into another world and demonstrates the healthiness of the MP3 blog (beyond the RIAA/Music Industry viewpoint that all of it is an unholy evil destined to destroy music). Awesome Tapes from Africa is just that - awesome.