From a Website in Ghana

[Tom Roche]

Ghanaweb.com, Thu, 21 Jul 2005 1:59 PM PDT


A taste of the hiplife


http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=86355






  The BBC is presenting a series of radio shows 
from Ghana, where a fusion of hip-hop and West 
African highlife music is all the rage. Andrew 
Pettie reports from Accra

  Ras Kwame, one of the three Radio 1 DJs now 
filling the slots vacated by John Peel, is at a 
dawn assembly, addressing more than 1,500 
giggling Ghanaian schoolchildren. The last time 
he sat in the chapel of Achimota Secondary, he 
was a pupil at the school. Now Kwame has returned 
to Ghana to present a series of radio programmes 
that are being simultaneously broadcast from the 
capital, Accra, to Ghana and the UK.

  "It's the kind of thing I visualised doing when 
I was growing up," he says. "But to be here 
actually doing it, playing these great Ghanaian 
records back to people in the UK, seeing my old 
teachers, speaking in front of my old school 
where I can still point to the seat I used to sit 
in - it's pretty surreal. Especially as when I 
first started DJing in Ghana, nobody thought I 
was any good."

  Kwame is hosting a series of three radio shows 
alongside emerging UK rapper Sway DaSafo, who 
also has Ghanaian roots. It is often presumed 
that black British music is predominantly derived 
from and influenced by the Caribbean, but a 
surprising number of UK artists - including 
Dizzee Rascal, Ty, MC Skibadee, and Lethal B - 
are actually of West African descent.

  Moving back and forth between the two continents 
certainly had a profound effect on Kwame. "Before 
my family left the UK to go back to Africa, I 
remember sitting in my pyjamas watching Slade on 
Top of the Pops. So Ghana, musically speaking, 
was a bit of a shock."

  His nightly programmes certainly have a 
typically laid-back, West African feel. A 
makeshift studio has been hastily assembled in a 
back office at Accra's Joy FM; the satellite dish 
has to be hauled into position on the roof; the 
guests arrive late (or not at all), with Kwame 
cheerfully explaining to his British listeners 
that it's impossible to be late in Accra - you're 
just "running on Ghana time".

  The music flips between the traditional African 
sounds of artists such as Fela Kuti and 
contemporary UK grime and garage tracks. The 
Ghanaian studio guests nod their heads and holler 
approval and a listener from the UK texts in 
enthusiastically, "I'm not bothered about niche 
markets or genres. It's just great to hear this 
show segueing between two equally passionate 
kinds of music."

  In this spirit of Anglo-Ghanaian collaboration, 
the boisterous studio guests are all MCs and 
producers working at the vanguard of "hiplife" - 
an exhilarating combination of the traditional 
form of Ghanaian music known as highlife and the 
harder rhythms of US and UK hip-hop. Highlife - 
which emerged in the 1920s from a number of 
native musical styles - reached its popular 
zenith in the 1950s and '60s, when it became 
synonymous with Ghana's thrust for independence.

  Since the mid-1990s, however, highlife has been 
revamped and reinterpreted by a new generation of 
Ghanaian rappers. And, although hiplife is 
indebted to mainstream hip-hop, there are subtle 
differences. As hiplife MC Tic Tac points out, 
instead of pared-down, electronic beats, hiplife 
borrows from "the rich rhythms of African music, 
fusing them with our own lyrics to let people 
around the world know what we're about.

  "The performers are different, too. In America 
you've got a lot of laid-back rappers. The 
artists over here are more energetic. People want 
to see you sweat."

  These distinctions, both musical and 
temperamental, were made abundantly clear to Sway 
when he performed at an open-air festival held in 
the centre of Accra. "It was completely insane. 
There were 4,000 people in the crowd in front of 
me - like a black Glastonbury. And, to begin 
with, the audience wasn't really sure what I was 
doing. I came on with a Union Jack bandana around 
my face; I think they thought I was a bank 
robber. Then during my set I started throwing out 
some CDs, but this nearly provoked a riot. The 
security guards were fending off kids with cattle 
prods."

  Sway, who spends a frenetic afternoon recording 
with Tic Tac, talks enthusiastically about his 
West African connections. "It's now that we're 
really starting to take from each other," he 
says. "If you look at the UK hip-hop scene, and 
the Ghanaian hiplife scene, you can find artists 
like me somewhere in between. And that's a pretty 
cool place to be."

  So has the BBC's cultural exchange been a 
success? Kwame's British audience certainly 
thinks so; he receives a deluge of appreciative 
messages from Ghanaians dotted around the UK: 
"Big shout out to you all from a Ghanaian brother 
in Leicester - I'm ex-Achimota too!"

  And for Kwame, Radio 1's West African experience 
has been like a homecoming. "When I'm in the UK, 
I feel 100 per cent British. In Ghana I feel 100 
per cent Ghanaian. But that must be a good thing, 
I guess - it makes me 200 per cent Ras Kwame!"




  OneMusic with Ras Kwame is on Radio 1 on 
Wednesdays at 9pm. He is part of a series of 
programmes being broadcast from Africa on BBC 
1Xtra until Saturday. All Rights Reserved, 
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