From Afro-Funk to Hiplife: Ghana Reinvented Through Music
PRI’s award winning Afropop Worldwide goes to Ghana to tell 2 stories: the roots of afrobeat and the “hip life” of contemporary Accra.
For 25 years, Afropop Worldwide has taken radio listeners and web fans to some of the world’s most exciting cultural destinations: Egypt, both Congos, Senegal, Mali, Angola, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia… and now, Afropop is going to Ghana! But we need your help to make it possible.
This campaign is aimed at raising funds to support field expenses in Accra, Ghana, for Senior Producers Banning Eyre and Sean Barlow to create two hourlong radio documentaries on the past and present of Ghanaian music. In addition to the programs themselves, Afropop’s time in Ghana will allow our team to create a wealth of supplementary materials, including recordings of live music, videos, interviews, photos, and much more!
The idea of exploring the Ghanaian Afro-funk roots of Fela Kuti’s world-famous Afrobeat sound arose out of conversations with Afropop Worldwide “Hip Deep” scholar Mark LeVine at UC Irvine. A cutting-edge historian and musician, LeVine has a deep personal passion for West African music. On a trip to Ghana in 2010, he met Ebo Taylor and was amazed by the bandleader’s reminiscences and analysis of popular music in 1960s Accra. Ghana, it seems, led the way in incorporating funk and jazz elements into existing highlife formulas. No surprise then that when Fela Kuti unveiled his new Afrobeat sound in the early 70s, Ghana was the first place it caught on with the public. Initially, we had planned to interview Taylor remotely for this program, but LeVine insisted that we must find a way to get there and meet the man in person. We began to pool resources, including a pair of air tickets from a generous benefactor, and a plan took shape.
In the meantime, another Hip Deep scholar, Jesse Weaver Shipley, published a landmark book on the contemporary scene in Accra. Entitled Living the Hiplife, Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music, it led to the idea of creating a second Ghana program as a bookend to the first. Just as the Ghanaian funksters of the 60s created potent hybrids of African and American sounds—often mediated through London, where both Taylor and Fela Kuti studied jazz—today’s savvy hiplife artists are doing the same thing in the age of hip hop.
The two programs that will be created by Afropop’s producers in Ghana will paint a vivid portrait of a vital African city and tell a richly interwoven tale of four monumental music styles: highlife, funk, afrobeat, and hip hop. We have a fantastic team of scholars, artists, and music producers advising us on this project. With your help, we will follow their leads, and dramatize their insights with the voice, music and spirit of Ebo Taylor and his contemporaries, as well as a lesser-known but deeply talented cast of younger Ghanaian artists. The goal is to bring all this to the living rooms, automobiles, and ear-buds of music fans across the US and around the world. The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting this project with funding for post production. And we have received donated air tickets. But life in Ghana has become very expensive, and we still need funds to cover modest hotel accommodations, fees for guides, helpers, and artists we record, as well as transportation, including a trip to Saltpond (well outside Accra) to interview Ebo Taylor himself.