Hiplife: The Location, Organization and Structure of the Local Urban Pop Industry in Tamale

Abstract

The aim of this research is to come to a better understanding of the organization, the richness, and the diversity of the urban popular music industry in Tamale, a cosmopolitan African city in Ghana’s Northern Region, which is growing, changing, and expanding very quickly at the moment. The focus of this research is on the different social and economic structures of the local urban popular music cultures. Special attention was given to the informal music market, the airplay of the radio stations, the subaltern position of some musicians, the organization of music education in the area, the music sales of the vendors and distributors, the public domain versus copyright law, music ownership, piracy, the opening of numerous music NGO’s, and the flood of music recording studios in and around Tamale. We organized two surveys, the first one on ‘Music Identities and Identities in Music,’ conducted among the people of Tamale, and a second one on ‘Correlation of Gestural Musical Audio and Perceived Expressive Qualities,’ conducted in several Senior Secondary Schools in and around Tamale. We were very impressed by the presence of the various musical talents in the area, the creative minds of the local male and female artists, and the use of advanced computer software and applied multimedia in their music compositions. The popular music industry in Tamale is quite young (with the introduction of electricity in the region roughly 25 years ago). Due to urbanization and globalization processes, the local urban popular music industry has been able to establish a new urban music style in the area which they call ‘Hiplife.’ Apparently, hybridization processes can be found in the continuity and change between traditional and popular urban music cultures and in the intercultural dynamics and cultural identities between Hiplife, contemporary highlife, a reggae revival, Bollywood influences, and in particular, the ‘Sahelian factor’ in northern Ghana. It is this rich mix of the northern and southern, the internal and external, the old and new, the secular and sacred, and the male and female that will all contribute to the future development of Tamale’s popular urban music culture.