On Hybridity in African Popular Music: the Case of Senegalese Hip Hop Author(S): Catherine M

On Hybridity in African Popular Music: The Case of Senegalese Hip Hop Author(s): Catherine M. Appert Source: Ethnomusicology , Vol. 60, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2016), pp. 279-299 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.60.2.0279

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On Hybridity in African Popular Music: The Case of Senegalese Hip Hop

Catherine M. Appert / Cornell University

Abstract. This article critically considers the legacy of hybridity in African popular music studies and questions whether contemporary African engagements with diasporic popular musics like hip hop call for new interpretations of musical genre. Through ethnographic research with hip hoppers in Senegal, I explore how practices of musical intertextuality reinscribe global connections as diasporic ones and challenge the conditions for musical hybridity. I argue that the formal parameters of musical genre themselves constitute conscious and strategic social practice that situates human actors in local and global place.

merging as a distinct genre in the early 1980s, a period of intensifying global- Eizing flows, hip hop was almost destined for a global future. As with African American musics before it—including jazz, gospel, and soul—urban Africa has widely embraced hip hop and adapted it to local realities. While frameworks of syncretism and hybridity have played a part in many productive analyses of the African popular musics that developed during the colonial and immediately postcolonial periods, in this article I draw on extended ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal to question whether contemporary engagements with globalized African diasporic musics call for new ways of understanding genre in popular music.1 Historically, the term “hybrid” has signaled a unique product of the contact between two distinct cultures, musics, or even races, if we go back far enough to the concept’s roots in the evolutionary racial theory of the Victorian era (Young 1995:27). But for an early generation of Senegalese hip hoppers producing music primarily directed at global audiences, hip hop represented a North American transformation of African traditional practices: a musical returnee, an encounter with sameness. For the later generations who make up a

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widespread network of “underground” hip hoppers concerned with local audiences, to localize their music is to engage in hip hop practices of sampling and referentiality that are definitively rooted, not in Africa, but in the struggles of African American urban youth.2 What, then, becomes of hybridity and cultural globalization when we privilege these contemporary and varied local narratives about African popular musical practices that identify the “western” or “global” music involved as diasporic music? In this article I suggest that hybridity—as traced in sound and musical form—reinscribes the limitations of western-centric models of cultural globalization that don’t necessarily account for how music makers understand themselves in relation to a globally interconnected world. Instead, I define genre through the meanings ascribed to sound and form, examining Senegalese hip hop as a constellation of strategic intertextualities that, through an active engagement with musical genre and in dialogue with local and global markets, alternately blur or reinscribe the boundaries of indigenous and diasporic cultural production. I call for an understanding of musical genre as conscious social practice that situates human actors in local and global place.

Music, Hybridity, and Place Ethnomusicologists have established that music produces place through musical signifiers that are perceived as belonging to a certain locale, culture, or group of people (Stokes 1994; Negus 1996; Cohen 1994). Hip hop is particularly suited to processes of musical situation, with its emphasis on regional styles of verbal delivery, lyrical signifiers of place, and locally distinctive musical styles (Forman 2002).3 Senegalese engagements with hip hop, however, fall in a much longer history of musical localization in Africa. Since the early days of the colonial encounter, indigenous instruments, languages, aesthetics, and formal elements have been combined with imported ones to create new popular genres that served alternately to ground musicians and their audiences in local place (Erlmann 1999), to create an image of a cohesive, bounded nation (Turino 2000; White 2008), and to represent them to global audiences in terms of global imaginings of Africa (Meintjes 2003). The Senegalese mbalax music that developed in the immediately post-Independence period is one example of such a new musical genre. Drawing on the jazz and Cuban son of colonial nightclubs, musicians combined imported harmonies and song forms with Islamicized griot praisesing- ing and indigenous rhythms, sounded simultaneously on traditional drums and electrified instruments (for in-depth treatments of mbalax see Mangin 2013; Tang 2007). The result was neither localized Afro-Cuban music nor western- ized traditional music; instead, musicians drew on disparate musical sources to create a new popular genre.

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The novel mixtures like mbalax that developed out of the musical dialogues between Africa and the West in the twentieth century have been fruitfully exam- ined as practices of syncretism and hybridity. Although hybridity is sometimes touted over syncretism for its ostensible emphasis on cultural actors’ agency, I have not encountered substantial differences in how the two terms are generally used to describe musical genres in ethnomusicological literature. Scholarly trends seem to have gradually replaced “syncretic” with “hybrid” in reference to musical expressions understood, explicitly or implicitly, to have formed through the combination of distinct musical practices (for a few examples of such references to hybridity in ethnomusicological scholarship, see Asher 1999; Bilby 1999 Erlmann 1998:14; Guilbault 1994:166; Horowitz 1999:450; Kaemmer 1989:36; Malm 1993:339; Monson 199:60; Steingress 2002; Taylor 2007:145; Wallach 2005:139; Weiss 2014:513). While hybrid and syncretic practices have been explored as resistant spaces of anti-colonial enunciation (Apter 1991; Bhabha 1994),4 in working from the assumption of preexisting, fundamentally distinct cultural units, frameworks of hybridity and syncretism risk reinscribing bounded cultural units and reaffirming the racial vocabulary of colonialism (Matory 2006:164; Ranmarine 2007:95; Young 1995:27). To talk about African popular musics in the twentieth century as hybrid is often to work from and between dichotomies of rural/urban, local/global, and traditional/modern, opening music scholarship to these same critiques;5 indeed, Veit Erlmann underscored this dependence on discrete cultural units when he wrote that syncretism “no longer adequately reflects the reality of global cultural evolution where culture contact and homogenization are all-pervasive rather than exceptions”(1991:16). More recently, Mark Slobin drew a similar conclusion, declaring hybridity out of vogue in its dependence on musical difference that does not reflect the increased interconnection of the modern world (2007:110). On the other hand, the increasingly popular position that “all music is hybrid” (see Stokes 2004), while bypassing this issue, not only drains the term of any analytical utility but, perhaps more importantly, fails to acknowledge how particular groups have negotiated real encounters with difference through conscious processes of musical hybridity. As Christopher Waterman writes in his work on Nigerian jùjú, “syncretism is fundamentally grounded in human actors’ interpretations of similarity and difference, and in their attempts to make sense of a changing world in terms of past experience” (1990:9). Through practices of syncretism and hybridity, emergent African popular cultures mediated between the colonially imposed binaries of space, place, and time that, whether “invented” or “real”, were clearly central to local understandings of the displace- ments of colonialism and in particular, new forms of urban existence in Africa (Mudimbe 1988; Ranger 1983).6 This article therefore does not suggest that we do away with hybridity altogether but rather, questions its continued and

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somewhat loose usage as a descriptor of current African popular musics and, in particular, hip hop. For if musical hybridity historically functioned, implicitly or explicitly, as a resistant strategy that negotiated experiences of colonial domination, what, if anything, is it resisting now? The obvious answer, perhaps, is global neoliberal capitalism and its cultural baggage; as hip hop scholar Halifu Osumare writes, “African political colonialism ushered in by European military dominance in the late nineteenth century has now been replaced by a willing twenty-first- century cultural colonization” in which youth enthusiastically embrace western cultural products like hip hop (2012: 30; emphasis in the original). Scholarship traces a common trajectory in which hip hop reaches Africa in the 1980s through recordings brought from family members traveling abroad, is initially imitated by elite youth before spreading through African cities as a localized music of social commentary, and eventually comes up against com- mercial US hip hop spread through global capitalism, igniting current struggles over authenticity and local identity (Casco 2006; Charry 2012; Ntarangwi 2010; Osumare 2012). Too much of the work on hip hop in Africa, however, fails to consider how practitioners understand hip hop as music, instead taking musical localization for granted as a manifestation of cultural hybridity that negotiates between the local and global (Niang 2010, Ntarangwi 2007), as a backdrop to lyric-centered debates over authenticity (Casco 2006:233; Clark 2013a, 2013b:3; Ntarangwi 2007; Shonekan 2012),7 or as an unexamined counterpart to linguistic hybridization (Adedeji 2014). What these various scholarly conversations have in common is that they take the hybridity of the music in question as a given; even as ethnomusicological discussions overwhelmingly center on what hybridity as a process resists, negotiates, or accommodates, they still assume the hybridity of the music that instigates these critiques of the term in the first place. In this article, I question this continued and uncritical assumption of musical hybridity, particularly as the result of the imagined newness of globalization. Here, I explore a music— Senegalese hip hop—that looks and sounds hybrid to the musicological ear identifying its component parts, but that is understood by its practitioners in ways that contradict the basic tenets of hybridity as an aesthetic mediation of difference (whether social, cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, national, etc.) even as it seems to function in the resistant ways that trigger the “hybrid” modifier. In this instance, to privilege scholarly interpretations of sound and form (as hybrid) elides the potential of genre to function as positional and strategic social practice.

Towards an Ethnographic Analysis of Genre In his work on Zimbabwean music, Thomas Turino suggests that there are “levels” of syncretism, writing that “levels of meaning, value, and practice

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are more important than formal features for identifying different cultural for- mations” (2000:46). Here, I build on this idea to argue that, at least in some instances, people attach meaning and value to the formal features of musical genre themselves; I show how Senegalese hip hoppers incorporate tradition through self-conscious practices of intertextuality that situationally reinscribe genre. Expanding on an anthropology of texts, I consider music as a coherent configuration of aural signs that can be lifted from its original context (Bakhtin 1986:103;Barber 2008:22)8, allowing a transformational process in which the music retains meaning from traditional performance contexts while acquiring new meaning, form, and function as it is recontextualized in hip hop (Baumann and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992). Such analysis takes “tradition” not as codified musical practice or timeless artifact but as a locally invoked discur- sive strategy in which the present invokes the past (Apter 2007; Scott 1999); as something that is constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated through human agency and intentionality (Yelvington 2006); as a practice of memory that invokes the past in the construction of present selves (Young 2007); and as constituted in social practice and susceptible to reinterpretation as forms and values are strategically linked in different ways (Erlmann 1991). Musical texts, like any other, are guided by the conventions of genre that give them form; that form itself is often as significant as the text’s “message” (Barber 2007). As a musical and speech genre, hip hop is defined by intertextual practices of sampling, quotation, and signifying. Early DJs’ “merry-go-round” of break beats established an aesthetic norm of cutting and looping decontextualized musical material that has remained constant through developments in musical production technologies (Katz 2012; Keyes 2001; Krims 2000; Rose 1994; Schloss 2004). That hip hop generic parameters already emphasize the decentering and recentering of other musical texts has significant implications for questions of hip hop hybridity. As artists decenter elements of Senegalese traditional music from their original social and musical contexts to transform them in hip hop, musical form takes on meaning not only as a complex of aural features but as a conscious social practice. What follows is an ethnographically-grounded musical analysis that reveals how Senegalese hip hoppers negate the possibility of hybridity even as they combine local and global/western musics. In doing so, they strategically mobilize genre by reinscribing the formal characteristics of music and speech genres that they view either as fundamentally equivalent or as definitively separate, depend- ing on the positionality of the artist. First, I show how internationally successful artists in Senegal redefined hip hop as a historically local music, grounded in African tradition and evolving through multi-directional diasporic movements. Here, musical localization entails not so much a combination of traditional and global musics as a conflation of them. I then present the contrasting views of the Senegalese hip hop underground, who find hip hop’s origins in the musical

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expression of black inner city youth and understand musical localization as a generic tenet of hip hop. In both cases, they redefine hip hop’s globality as diasporic connection, doing away with hybridity’s requisite difference to emphasize sameness and historicity. Their musical practice resists interpretation through hegemonic narratives of globalization and foregrounds instead the agency of African actors in reframing their place in a global world.

Global Artists, Local Music And the speaking over the djembe really reminds you of hip hop because it’s an egotrip. It’s a strong rhythm that makes you trip, and we had that since way before, and that’s traditional. And that’s why when you see that the youth love rap, it’s because it’s something that we knew before, but it’s a new form. (Nix, Interview, 22 August 2011, Dakar) In the early 1980s, young people—primarily men—in Dakar’s financially privileged neighborhoods began to make hip hop, first copying what they saw and heard on videos and cassettes provided by family members traveling abroad to Europe and North America, and then creating original music. The first widely- known hip hop group in Senegal was the duo Positive Black Soul, who landed an international record deal after opening for Senegalese-French rapper MC Solaar at Dakar’s French Cultural Center in 1992. The groups Pee Froiss and Daara J (now Daara J Family) followed suit. Their music—featuring traditional instruments and rhythms and peppered with Wolof lyrics—has been successful in international world music markets.9 Ethnomusicologists Timothy Taylor and Sarah Weiss have both noted the problematic essentialisms that arise with world music’s frequent recourse to authenticity (Taylor 2007; Weiss 2008). These early Senegalese hip hop artists—whom I refer to in this article as international artists due to their sustained engagement with western audiences—drew on globally circulating Afrocentric narratives to locate hip hop’s roots in the performance traditions of West African griots (Appert 2016).10 According to Daara J’s Fada Freddy, “Rap was born in Africa and grew up in the United States—we have our own styles of rap like kebetu and taasu that we consider the ancestors of rap” (Interview, 26 September 2011, Liberté VI). These rappers commonly emphasize this aesthetic resonance between hip hop and the speech genre taasu, a style of Wolof griot performance that they describe as the rhythmic chanting of topical rhymes over a drum beat. In this globally cycling narrative of departure and return—expressed in Positive Black Soul’s song “Return of da Djelly (Return of the Griot)” (see Tang 2012) and in Daara J’s oft-cited metaphor of hip hop as a musical boomerang thrown from and returning to Africa—Senegalese musical history is reimagined and

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re-remembered. This is not simplistic essentialism, however; nor do these artists actually believe they are griots, who belong to specific lineages and are not very well viewed in Senegalese society. In fact, while rappers depict “ancient” griots as storytellers, genealogists, and topical commentators, they generally are critical of modern griots (see Tang 2012; Appert 2016). In idealizing ancient griots as bearers of African tradition, these rappers consciously elide contemporary griot practices—which include traditional performance as well as popular music—to redefine hip hop as a local music. These depictions of hip hop as originating in African cultural practice do not, however, preclude an awareness of its roots in Black America. In 2011, DJ Awadi described the relation between taasu and rap to me as “the grandpa and the son . . . . There is a real lineage. I can’t speak for others but for me I can’t cut this link between my roots and what I am—I can’t do it.” But he quickly continued: “What’s in rap is the reprise of George Clinton and James Brown because those are also the roots” (Interview, 19 September, Amitié II). Like- wise, Baïdy, of Bidew bu Bes, a group of brothers whose career was launched by internationally-renowned Senegalese popular musician Youssou Ndour and who enjoy increasing international success, explained to me, The Americans who are in the United States are African Americans, because slavery brought them there, and the music that brought them to soul, to gospel—this came from Africa. In Africa there are a lot of rhythms that are like rap, so I can say that Africa is the source and that slavery brought young people to the United States and they brought music with them. That’s my idea. There are a lot of people who don’t agree with that, who say that rap is American. But I’m not talking about the music, I’m talking about the birth, before. Clearly there’s a moment where there was a break. But the people stayed. And that’s why Africans love American music because they recognize themselves in it. The music became something else but the base is African (Interview, 28 September 2011, Hamo). In the absence of pre-modern audio recordings, artists’ understandings of griot speech genres are of course based entirely on contemporary griot performance. But while taasu might sound like hip hop, it does not typically serve as a vehicle for the kinds of socially conscious messages international rappers represent as aligning with the roles of ancient griots. Rather, taasu is an often lewd style of chanting that was historically performed primarily by female griots over clapped accompaniment; in the last several decades, male griots have adopted the style, particularly in the context of mbalax (Heath 1990; Tang 2012). African music’s maturation in the United States is therefore central to hip hoppers’ reimagining of griot orality in/as hip hop. Interpolating hip hop into Senegalese musical history allows rappers to reimagine taasu through a lens of hip hop consciousness that differentiates the

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speech genre from contemporary griot practice. Xuman, formerly of Pee Froiss, described taasu’s transformative transatlantic sojourn: I want to say, it wasn’t the original taasu that was imported to the United States to directly become rap. The fact that they are both spoken is the similarity. It’s like cof- fee. It is grown here in Africa and exported to the United States and Europe where it is processed and it comes back here called Nescafé and it is more expensive. Rap is the same thing. It’s certain that our ancestors, upon leaving, knew our traditions. The slaves had celebrations and they had it in their skin and their blood. But it was there a long time, and when it came back here it wasn’t taasu anymore. It had become something else. And the first difference is in the construction, how we construct phrases, the content we put in these phrases. (Interview, 20 September 2011, Liberté VI) The aural likeness between these two performance genres becomes an important aesthetic link enabling rappers to strategically position taasu as the musical root of hip hop, an evolutionary construction that depends on invented musical tradition as an unchanging body of precolonial practices. In doing so, they convert hip hop from a globalized US music into a historically local one that has circulated through diaspora and returned to them.11 This depends on a conscious decentering of the griot speech genre taasu from its contemporary contexts of traditional musical practices and the pop genre mbalax so that it may be recentered in hip hop, not in its original form, and importantly, not with its original meaning. In discursively conflating hip hop and taasu, rappers bypass the latter’s generally superficial texts while invoking its original context to signal a locality and indigeneity that lend weight to their own music’s social messages.

Hearing Hybridity DJ Awadi, formely of Positive Black Soul (PBS), was the first rapper I ever met in Senegal. When I interviewed him in 2007 at his studio in Dakar’s quiet Amitié II neighborhood, he was in the midst of recording Présidents d’Afrique, an album featuring collaborations with rappers from around forty different African countries. Each track on the album samples the voice of an African leader. “We’ve included Martin Luther King”—he informed me, “because we understand the diaspora as a region of Africa” (Interview, 8 August 2007, Amitié II, Dakar). Since the 1990s, the now disbanded PBS has situated themselves in a global ecumene of Afrocentric discourse. In an interview with James Spady, Awadi’s former partner, Duggy T, described the time he would spend in libraries pour- ing over Senegalese philosopher Cheikh Anta Diop’s texts, and explained the group’s early recording “Africa”, We did ‘Africa’ because we wanted to let people know all around the world what Africa really is . . . . We are civilized! Modern. We are not that bad. We are not the

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image that they saw on the TV screen. All they show is that in Africa there are diseases, wars. That is the image we want to change. That is why we are named Positive Black Soul. Yeah! Everything that is black is associated with whatever is negative. Know what I’m saying? So we want to give them another image of Black people. (Spady 2006:640) Since the beginning of their careers, international rappers have directed their music primarily at the western audiences that consume their recordings as world music (Herson 2011). This is reflected in their musical and linguistic choices; although they do use Wolof, their albums are largely recorded in French and English, languages that are infinitely more marketable outside of Senegal. Their themes are often pan-African, and their music—which is mostly self- produced—relies heavily on African instruments and musicians.12 Take, for example, DJ Awadi’s 2008 Sunugaal album.13 The album title features a common play on words in which Senegal is revisioned as “Sunugaal” by Wolof speakers, who turn the country’s name into an indigenous language phrase meaning “our (sunu) boat (gaal).” The phrase is sometimes said to be the actual origin of the country’s name, deriving from linguistic misunderstandings between early French visitors and Wolof fishermen.14 Sunugaal opens with the title track, where Awadi raps in Wolof peppered with French over a languid kora-esque guitar accompaniment and gentle drums. The lyrics describe the hardships of contemporary Senegalese existence and condemn the Senegalese government for its complicity in creating those hardships, thus driving people towards the dangerous ocean migrations that so often end in tragedy. The second track on the album is a remake of a popular Cameroonian song “Tsamina” from the 1960s, the same song that inspired the 2010 World Cup theme (sung by Colombian international pop star Shakira). In Awadi’s version, the Wolof talking drum revisions the refrain as distinctly Senegalese, while a rhythmic interlude in the middle invokes Ivorian coupé decalé dance music. The album continues in its retro imaginings of Senegal with “Le Cri du Peuple,” a French-language track decrying the financial hardship that defines life in urban Senegal over a salsa-inspired hip hop beat. The next track “Rosa,” creates a diasporic musical imagery, overlaying Brazilian samba rhythms with sabar drums played by legendary Wolof griot, DouDou Ndiaye. The album returns to Senegal with “J’accuse,” where Awadi riffs off Emile Zola’s famed open letter to the French government, rapping his own French-language letter accusing the presidents of the world’s superpowers of crimes against humanity over a sparse, kora-based accompaniment performed by griot Noumoucounda Cissoko, who also sings the refrain. The album’s eighteen tracks continue along these lines, seamlessly combining the most modern of production practices with musical signifiers of local place, magnified through the names of globally recognized masters of the drum and kora.

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As many underground hip hop practitioners in Senegal have pointed out to me, this music “doesn’t really sound like hip hop.” In their heavy reliance on traditional musical elements and rhythms, artists like Awadi and Daara J Family produce music that is easily heard as hybrid—as something new, not quite hip hop, not quite local. But in their claims that hip hop in and of itself was already rooted in indigenous music, these artists have discursively denied the difference required for hybridity. Thus, what sounds like musical hybridity is reimagined as sameness through the decentering of an indigenous speech genre, transformed in hip hop, but carrying with it an association with a past that ostensibly pre- dates diaspora and globalization. Their localized hip hop claims a place in the world defined not through colonization or globalization but through diasporic connections grounded in Africa.

Local Artists, Global Music We use [traditional music] just to show your identity. To show that this is where I’m from. For example, when you go back to the States, if you hear a beat with kora or sabar you might know it’s from Senegal. (Djily Bagdad, Interview, 8 August 2011, Medina, Dakar) In 1998, the group Rap‘adio released the first Wolof-language rap album, a self-proclaimed “hardcore” expression of the daily struggles of urban Senegalese youth. For the first time, hip hop became a music of and for the young people living in Dakar’s overpopulated, underprivileged neighborhoods. A local hip hop movement quickly grew and spread far beyond the elite neighborhoods of the early international generation; the thousands of hip hoppers in Dakar today identify themselves, following Rap‘adio, as “underground,” a reference to their marginalization vis-à-vis international and national music markets,15 but also an invocation of social consciousness drawn from globalized discourses of US hip hop (Appert 2016). In hip hop’s depictions of the American “ghetto,” underground rappers found parallels to their own struggles in the postcolonial city. In my informal conversations and recorded interviews with well over fifty of these underground hip hoppers from various generations, they almost uniformly denied any historic or aesthetic connection between hip hop and traditional performance, instead emphasizing hip hop’s roots in the United States and using the music to inscribe contemporary, experience-based connections with black American youth. As Books of Sen Kumpë told me, There are a lot of people who say rap comes from taasu, but don’t worry. Senegal is like that. We know that soccer doesn’t come from Senegal. But if Senegal wins the World Cup one day, there are Senegalese who will say, doesn’t soccer come from Senegal? That’s why a lot of people say rap comes from Senegal or from Africa. But me personally, I’m not against the people who say it but I don’t believe it. Even if I don’t know the whole history of rap, I know where it comes from. . . . It doesn’t come

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from Africa. . . . Every history comes from somewhere. But if someone comes to say taasu comes from the United States or from Europe, what are you going to say? Wait! If someone says mbalax comes from the United States or France, what would you say? Until the end of the world you would never believe this because you know the history. . . . It comes from the United States. There are books that we already studied and we know very well where it comes from . . . it doesn’t come from here. We are influenced by Americans and this comes from American ghettos. (Interview, 19 August 2011, Mermoz) Indirectly acknowledging international rappers’ investment in hip hop’s African origins, Books offered a corrective: what he understands as the historical fact of hip hop’s origins in the US inner city. This emphasis on hip hop’s US identity carries over into the musical aesthetics of the Senegalese underground, whose music is localized primarily through the use of Wolof lyrics and locally- specific themes, although not to the complete exclusion of French and English. Although underground artists do sometime incorporate traditional instruments through digital sampling, live recording, or drawing on synthetic soundbanks, this is typically limited to no more than a few songs per album.16 More often, these hip hop beats are indistinguishable from their US counterparts, and trends in hip hop production styles follow closely behind US innovations. Musical localization, when it happens, takes different forms. Sometimes, traditional instruments become prominent musical elements. For example, the instrumental track for hip hop duo 23.3’s song, “Guem sa Bop,” (“Believe in Yourself”), is constructed on a repetitive kora phrase, layered over a simple synthesized hand drum rhythm with faint strings and flutes to fill out the texture. Rapper and Jolof4Life founder Simon’s song, “Borom Xél,” foregoes a typical refrain in favor of a circumcision song from from the Casamance region of Southern Senegal, sung over djembe accompaniment and overlaid with a pierc- ing male voice singing in traditional style. 17 At other times, indigenous instruments are more subtly embedded within dense hip hop textures comprising synthesized western instruments, machine- generated drum loops, and samples of US pop music. Def Dara studio owner Gaston’s “Khikeuma” opens with a hand drum rhythm quickly subsumed under a string-heavy hip hop beat. Later a kora enters, only to fade back into the beat after several bars, reappearing in the final verse. At the very end of the song, local Muslim praise singing (of the Senegal-specific Baay Fall sect)18 juts up against electric guitar melodies, finally giving way to the same kora from the beginning, which continues alongside the strident guitar lines. Embedded this way in the multi-layered production of hip hop beats, sometimes indigenous musical elements are not readily recognizable to a non-local ear. Although Gaston produces many of his own instrumental tracks, most underground rappers (unlike the international artists discussed above) do not. However, they still actively contribute to the creative process. As rapper Baye

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Njagne, formerly of 5kiem Underground, told me, “If I write a text, I’ll see a kind of beat, drums, bass—this is the first thing. Afterwards I go to the studio and I tell the technician to program what I tell him. It’s not up to him to make my beat, I do it in my head. If I do ‘tum tum tak,’ that’s what he does” (Interview, 10 August 2011, Medina, Dakar). Rapper Almamy of 23.3 explained a similar process: Sometimes you write a song and then you want to write a beat for it. You go to the studio, you find the beatmaker, you say I want a beat like [sings a bit], and after he tries to play this, adds the bass, then it comes along. The second song on the album we did like this—I played it with my mouth and then the guy did it. (Interview, 20 July 2011, Medina, Dakar) Rappers’ influence on their own beats is particularly evident when local instruments are involved. In general, the more obvious the incorporation of traditional instruments, the more likely that the song will have topical lyrics dealing directly with social issues and contexts specific to Senegal (the opposite is not necessarily true: topical lyrics don’t always inspire traditionally-inflected musical tracks). Baye Njagne described the musical track for 5kiem Under- ground’s song, “Jooyu Askan,” a lyrical critique of the governmental corruption that exacerbates the daily hardships of many Senegalese people: You hear the notes of the kora; we had a professional come in and play over the beat . . . with the theme, it has to do with the suffering of the people. It’s a revolt. It’s the population crying. And if they are crying you should feel it, the music should have a sensual form that lets you feel what’s in the song. We said to ourselves that we should have a traditional instrumental because that would give something. (Interview, 10 August 2011, Medina, Dakar) The correlation between localized topical lyrics and traditional music under- scores a self-conscious effort to mark their tracks as specifically Senegalese; as Baye Njagne continued, “rap comes from the United States, but to make a rap beat, we can make a sample that will describe the identity of that rapper.” In referring to sampling as a way of inserting local identity into a US hip hop framework, Baye Njagne’s comment reflects broad understandings of musical localization as an essentially hip hop practice; artists incorporate traditional music in a conscious engagement with US hip hop’s longstanding history of aesthetically unique sub-styles grounded in particular urban locales. Rapper Don Zap explicitly made this comparison, telling me, “this happens in the US too. Every region has shown their own kind of hip hop with their own identity. Like the West side with Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, they do certain things in their music to show where it comes from” (Interview, 16 August 2011, Grand Yoff Medina). In drawing on traditional music, underground hip hoppers self-consciously participate in what they see as a fundamentally hip hop practice of place-based identifications.

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In Hip Hop Time There’s a way of using the drum in the hip hop instrumental that will become an mbalax rhythm, and you shouldn’t do that. I’m not strong in this, but sometimes I hear a song and I hear that it doesn’t have a hip hop rhythm (Toussa, Interview, 21 August 2011, Guediaway). Underground artists often express concern that using traditional music in their tracks could, if done incorrectly, result in a musical product that should not be considered hip hop at all. Concepts of beat and rhythm, or “tempo”—the French word most often used to distinguish between hip hop and traditional rhythms—are central to how artists gauge whether musical localization rein- forces or violates the formal parameters of hip hop. After comparing localized Senegalese hip hop to West Coast gangsta rap, Don Zap continued, “But first you should hear the beat to know it’s rap, but hear little touches that let you know what sector it comes from. You should have a cultural connotation to show where the music comes from, but we all have the same limits” (Interview, 16 August 2011, Grand Yoff Medina). Sen Kumpë’s manager Lamine Ndao expanded on the centrality of time and rhythm in distinguishing hip hop from local music: At the base it’s hip hop, and there are norms within hip hop that you should follow. When you want to sample an instrument there are norms to follow. . . . Even if there is traditional music that used other time [signatures], because between hip hop and traditional music the time is different, you have to modify traditional music to make it hip hop and that takes a certain work and reflection. Because if it doesn’t sound like hip hop, people will hate it. So it’s the way you use the instruments, within a hip hop norm. If you don’t use them well, you offend the norms, and you’ve committed an error. (Interview, 21 July 2011, Mermoz) Musical localization therefore not only leaves fundamental characteristics of hip hop such as layering, sampling, and referentiality unaltered but in fact depends on these intertextual practices. While these could be—and have been— read as grounded in West African musical aesthetics, the musical repetition that results when deejays or beatmakers use fragments of preexisting music in new ways differs from repetition in say, Wolof sabar drumming. Scholars have positioned hip hop repetition in the genealogy of African diasporic aesthetics while noting its novelty in breaking down and looping existing music to create new collages of sounds (Rose 1991:70; Schloss 2004:136). The same line of thinking that links taasu to rapping thus links African musical repetition to hip hop’s looping aesthetic; yet here, again, underground rappers insist on the fundamental rhythmic difference between local indigenous music (usually in complex time) and US hip hop beats. As Kalif of Undershifaay said, [Using traditional music] takes a lot of work and a lot of precision. You can’t just have a drummer come and say, ‘go ahead, play.’ Because he’s learned a music that

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is different than ours. So what we do is compose the beat and then call the musician to play accompaniments; this isn’t using African rhythms but it’s like a mix. (Interview, 28 August 2011, Yoff) Underground rappers rather nonchalantly acknowledge the historic connections between Africa and the United States even as they dismiss them as not musically meaningful. Thiat, from the group Keur Gui, expressed this widely held view when he said, “Yes they were African but over how many centuries did they lose their African traces? You have to recognize that rap comes from the United States, but that it was made by the little brothers of Africans there. That’s all” (Interview, 6 October 2011, Parcelles Assainies Unité 15). For underground hip hoppers, African musics and oralities were so thoroughly transformed over hundreds of years in the Americas that they are no longer for any intent or purpose African. The sampling of local elements could be read as the hybridization of a globalized musical form. But in framing these practices as essential characteristics of a US hip hop idiom, rappers define the very process of producing locality as a global one reliant on hip hop’s historic development in the United States and operating within hip hop norms of repetition. For underground artists, then, the introduction of traditional music into hip hop therefore does not fundamentally change hip hop or indigenous music; instead, hip hop’s very generic parameters allow for music that is grounded in Senegalese particularity and still definitively hip hop. This lack of generic alteration undermines the possibility of musical hybridity, as production techniques result not in a new, different music, but rather in a self-consciously hip hop musical product that contains within it decentered fragments of indigenous music. It is important to note, however, that concerns for market success inevi- tably influence musical decisions, and an emphasis on making “real” hip hop collides with the recognition that for an international audience, charmed by the musical markers of difference that designate popular music as “world music,” well-constructed, lyrically sophisticated hip hop isn’t enough in and of itself. Senegalese hip hop is thus marked by a particularity, wherein what is musically localized is what is internationally viable, while what is generi- cally international is limited to local audiences. As Djily Bagdad remarked, “I have ideas, for future projects with more traditional stuff. Because sometimes internationally they say you are doing the same stuff as America and France. You have to do your own thing! I think we’re going to explore that in our next album, one or two tracks to see how people will appreciate it” (Interview, 8 August 2011, Medina, Dakar). Rappers’ recognition of international market preferences for musical difference thus tempers their emphasis on hip hop generic norms.

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Conclusions: Genre as Social Practice What is at stake in non-hybridity? The answer relies on a broader picture of African popular music history. In the beginning of this article I described mbalax, Senegal’s postcolonial hybrid genre, which layers elements of Afro-Cuban son, jazz, and griot oral performance over a musical base grounded in the sabar rhythms of Wolof griots. But both international and underground hip hoppers distinguish between an idealized ancient griot and the supposedly devolved modern one who praisesings political and religious leaders in contemporary popular and traditional performance contexts (Appert 2015). This distinction motivates their strategic linking and delinking of the social functions and aesthetics of traditional music. Eliding both mbalax and contemporary traditional griot practice, international rappers invoke an invented ancient speech genre that they conflate with hip hop. Interestingly, at times the most recognizably hip hop characteristic of their eclectic, highly localized music is the fact that they are rapping; with their depic- tion of taasu and hip hop as speech genres accompanied by music, they are much more likely than underground rappers to obscure what the latter understand as a global hip hop beat. Here, intertextuality functions implicitly, as underground rappers take the form of griot practice—or really, the idea of a form, rooted in Africa, evolving in the United States, and returning to them in hip hop—while detaching that orality from its contemporary social function so as to recenter it in, as, and through hip hop. What seems perhaps to be the most global formal element of their music—rapping—is redefined as an indigenous one. Underground rappers refuse to separate traditional orality from its contemporary social function in this way (Appert 2016). Instead, they maintain that hip hop and traditional music are different and they insist on producing hip hop that maintains that difference rather than effacing it. Lifting instrumental music from ethnically diverse traditional contexts and inserting it into a hip hop framework, they lay claim to musical markers of local place through practices of sampling that explicitly avoid the hybrid creation of new musical forms to emphasize a global hip hop aesthetic. Through these performative intertextualities that strategically separate and rejoin music, speech, and histories, Senegalese hip hoppers situate themselves in locally grounded, globally articulating place. Both international and local rappers connect local performance practice (perceived and described as “tradition”) and hip hop (as a globalized music of the African diaspora), although they do so in markedly different ways. In the case of international rappers, this sense of con- nectedness is rooted in histories of forced migrations from West Africa to the Americas and their study of African philosophy, but it also depends largely on the seemingly more concrete stylistic connection that emerges from the actual

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sound of griot verbal performance. For local rappers, their marginalized experiences of urban postcoloniality create a sense of contemporary connection with African American youth. The recourse to tradition that has marked so much of popular music production in colonial and postcolonial African societies also becomes, in this case, a claim to global interconnectivity, so that music perceived as local/traditional and music seen as global/modern are positioned as two sides of the same coin: international rappers understand hip hop as always already indigenous, while local rappers view their hip hop as global not despite but because of its very localness. Both of these narratives function through negat- ing the basic tenet of hybridity—the convergence of preexisting difference into something new. That these narratives so fundamentally differ from each other further complicates ideas of global and local place in music and highlights the importance of musicians’ positionality vis-à-vis local and global flows of capital and culture. Thus, while to the ethnomusicological ear, Senegalese hip hop might sound like a hybrid product of cultural globalization, ethnographic engagement with the ways in which situated human actors understand and make use of genre challenges an analysis that begins from sound. In Senegal, strategic practices of hip hop genre produce a sense of global situation that subverts concepts of western cultural hegemony in favor of diasporic cultural flows. Perhaps, then, musical hybridity as a resistant strategy is limited to a particular moment in African history that we have since passed, and the present era of accelerated globalization necessitates new, increasingly situational models for understanding popular musical production.

Acknowledgements Research for this article was conducted between 2007 and 2012 with sup- port from Fulbright-Hays, the Mellon Foundation with the American Council of Learned Societies, and the UCLA International Institute. My thanks go out to Timothy D. Taylor, who endured the earliest incarnations of this piece years ago, and to the many hip hoppers whose time, friendship, and insight made this project possible.

Notes 1. The material in this article is based on ethnographic research—including structured and unstructured interviews, “hanging out,” and attendance at concert and recording sessions—with rappers and other participants in hip hop culture between 2007 and 2012 in Dakar, Senegal. Inter- views were conducted in French, English, and Wolof and translated by the author. All quoted interview passages reflect consensus across a wide sampling of research participants. Throughout, I use “rapper” to describe a hip hop artist who raps and “hip hopper” to refer more generally to

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participants in hip hop musical culture, including rappers, producers, managers, and fans. The somewhat contrived scholarly distinction between “rappers” and “emcees” or between “rap” and “hip hop” as indicators of commercialism or social consciousness, respectively, is rarely invoked among Senegalese practitioners and should not be considered a factor in how these terms are used in this article. 2. In a chapter titled “Rappin’ Griots: Producing the Local in Senegalese Hip-Hop,” written in 2009 and published in 2011, I mistakenly conflated the perspectives of Los Angeles-based Senegalese rappers who, like these international rappers, located hip hop’s origins in griot practice (see Appert 2007) with those of the underground Dakar rappers with whom I had conducted pre- liminary fieldwork in 2008. During my extended fieldwork in Dakar in 2011, I spoke openly with those artists about my earlier misunderstandings, and my 2012 doctoral dissertation centered on a critique of the very narrative of the “rapper as griot” advanced in my earlier chapter. Although Damon Sajnani subsequently presented similar findings in his 2013 article “Troubling the Trope of ‘Rapper as Modern Griot,’” his claim to singularity (he states that “the contrary position of a critical mass of Senegalese HipHoppers has hitherto gone undocumented” [2013:157]) and the extensive critiques of my 2011 chapter on which much of his article relies are predicated on the omission of my dissertation from his discussion of my work and of the broader literature on the “rapper as modern griot.” That dissertation—and not the 2011 book chapter Sajnani critiques—stands as what is currently (and was at the time of his 2013 fieldwork and writing) “the most recent and in-depth [analysis] of the modern-griot trope as appropriated by Senegalese HipHoppers”(ibid:162); it was posted online as an open-access document in summer 2012 in accordance with the policies of the University of California. The explicit self-critiques of my 2011 chapter appear on page 190 and the broader misconceptions that guided that chapter are addressed on page 2. 3. This marked localization of US hip hop is evidenced in sub-genres such as West Coast G-funk (which in the ’90s was easily identifiable by its combination of laid back beats, George Clinton samples, and synthesized melodic lines), “durty south” beats, and Oakland hyphy music, to name a few, in addition to the longstanding East Coast/West Coast opposition embodied most famously by rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B. I. G. 4. Timothy D. Taylor has noted that hegemonic interpretations of cultural hybridity may undermine the very oppositional potential Bhabha attributes to it (2007:145). 5. For distinctive, locally-specific approaches to this issue, see Barber’s 1997 volume on African popular culture; Erlmann’s 1991 work on South African music; Turino’s 2000 text on Zimbabwean music; Waterman’s 1990 work on Nigerian jùjú. 6. For distinctive, locally-specific examples, see Askew’s 2003 work on nationalism in Tanzania; Coplan’s 1985 work and Erlmann’s 1991 and 1999 works on South African music; Waterman’s 1990 study of Nigerian jùjú; White’s 2008 work on rumba in Zaire. 7. A notable exception is Jesse Weaver Shipley’s 2013 work on hiplife. 8. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed intertextuality more broadly to include language and linguistic elements (Appert 2012); here, I focus specifically on music and discourse about music. 9. The brief histories included here are drawn from my personal fieldwork. For an extended history of Senegalese hip hop, see also Appert 2012; Herson 2011; Moulard-Kouka 2008; Niang 2013 and 2010. 10. Although some underground hip hop artists do travel and perform internationally, I limit the descriptor “international rappers” to describe those whose work circulates in world music markets. 11. Senegalese rappers are not the only ones to link indigenous performance and hip hop; artists in Ghana (Osumare 2012), Kenya (Samper 2004), Somalia (Pennycook and Mitchell 2009) Tanzania (Ntarangwi 2009) and have made similar claims, despite the unlikeliness of direct historical links between East African orality and African American music. This extends outside Africa; Maori rappers in New Zealand have made similar claims linking indigenous oral traditions and hip hop (Pennycook and Mitchell 2009).

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12. This is not specific to Senegal; Ntarangwi notes that in East Africa stereotyped images of unchanging African culture facilitate access to international markets (2009:37). 13. Other albums that involve similar production styles include Présidents d’Afrique, another solo album by DJ Awadi, as well as his albums recorded with Duggy T as Positive Black Soul; these include Run Cool and Salaam. Daara J’s Boomerang and School of Life albums also follow this general model. 14. As rapper Baye Njagne of 5kiem Underground explained “The word Senegal is deformed. We used to say sunu gaal. Because the French came and asked a fisherman, Where is this? But the guy thought he had asked, what is this? He said, it’s our boat [sunu gaal] . . . and so then they deformed the word to say Senegal. . . . That’s the history. Senegal is sunu gaal. Sunu gaal is ‘our boat’” (Interview, 10 August 2011, Medina, Dakar). 15. Mbalax dominates Senegalese radio and television although hip hop is increasingly well- represented. 16. Rapper Fata is a notable exception and has been critiqued by some rappers for his extensive use of traditional music and even mbalax rhythms. 17. The Casamance is often hailed as a cradle of traditional culture, not only by musicians but also by Dakarois more generally. The song that Simon samples here has been used by numerous hip hop artists, including Positive Black Soul on their Run Cool album, and more recently, Reskape on his Dafa Jot album, where it appears as an interlude in a track based on subtly embedded tama rhythms and punctuated with kora and traditional singing. 18. The Baay Fall are a subsect of the Senegalese Mourides, a Muslim brotherhood founded by Cheikh Abmadou Bamba (Serigne Touba) in the early twentieth century. Devoted to Bamba’s disciple Cheikh Ibra Fall, they eschew the pillars of Islam to devote themselves to hard work; they are easily recognizable by their patchwork clothing, large amulets, beggar’s bowls, and dreadlocks. Baay Fall sing specific chants in night-long séances of prayer and trance.

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Discography 23.3. 2010. “Guem sa Bop.” Sunu Thiono Seen Noflaye. Dakar: Underkamouf Records. Compact disc. 5kiem Underground. 2009. “Jooyu Askan.” Yagg Bawoul Dara. Dakar: Jolof4Life/99 Records. Com- pact disc. Daara J Family. 2010. School of Life. London: Wrasse Records. Compact disc. ———. 2004. Boomerang. London: Wrasse Records. Compact disc. DJ Awadi. 2010. Présidents d’Afrique. Dakar: Studio Sankara. Compact disc. ———. 2008. Sunugaal. East Sussex, UK: Mr. Bongo. Compact disc. Gaston. 2011. “Khikeuma.” Tutti Wakh Job lu Beuri. Dakar: Def Dara Productions. Compact disc. Positive Black Soul. 2001. Run Cool. New York: Wea/Warner. Compact disc. ———. 1996. “Return of da Djelly.” Salaam. London:Mango/Island Records. Compact disc. Reskape. 2008. Dafa Jot. Dakar: Optimist Productions. Compact disc. Simon. 2006. “Borom Xél.” Diggué Boorla. Dakar: Jolof4Life/99 Records. Compact disc.

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