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JESSE WEAVER SHIPLEY Haverford College Transnational circulation and digital fatigue in Ghana’s Azonto dance craze ABSTRACT oy FM’s Open House Party, hosted by DJ Black, is Accra’s most pop- Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose ular Saturday night radio show, mixing Ghanaian, U.S., Nigerian, popularity is built through its global circulation. I British, and South African pop, hip-hop, and house music. One trace its production and flow across studios, radio evening in September 2011, DJ Black implored his listeners, “It’s stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra been a while since Ghana had a dance of its own. So please, do and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I theJ dance!” He was referring to Azonto, a dance craze spreading across the argue that, as a technologically mediated style, country and among Ghanaians abroad. While the dance’s origins are con- Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a tested, it was inspired by the song “U Go Kill Me,” by star rapper Sarkodie mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the and young producers EL and Krynkman, released less than a year ear- potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and lier. The song’s sparse lyrics celebrate an azonto girl—an obscure vernac- copying for self-recognition. Ghanaian musicians ular term for a disreputable outcast or a sexually promiscuous woman. Its and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of danceable beat and pidgin English hook celebrating the woman’scharms— digital technologies, making this dance a style of “This girl go kill me”—lend it a catchy simplicity. The track played on symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth Ghanaian radio and circulated via user-to-user digital file sharing. Over both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed several months, the dance moves it inspired rapidly spread through clubs community of musical participation that valorizes and school dance competitions and online amateur videos. Other musi- mobility itself. The dance’s sudden ubiquity, cians began making tracks with similar beats and lyrics. In August 2011, a however, creates “digital fatigue,” an uncertainty Wikipedia page appeared—surely a contemporary marker of recognition— among participants about belonging in an era of initially defining Azonto as a “dance which mainly involves moving of all digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of the joints in your body in a rhythmic fashion without taking any or very recognition from the cultural registers that empower little steps.” By Christmas, Azonto had spread to Ghanaians in Europe them in the first place. [digital media, technology, and the United States, mostly through Facebook, YouTube, and Ghanaian circulation, repetition, transnationalism, popular music websites, even reaching the fringes of mainstream British popular culture, music, dance, African urban youth, Ghana, culture. African diasporas] While the dance incorporated numerous styles, its basic steps were sim- plified such that, as a reporter for an online BBC documentary on Azonto’s popularity stated, he “learned to dance Azonto in less than three minutes” (Jakana 2012). U.S. urban fashions are preferred by aficionados—skinny jeans, crisp branded shirts, and perhaps a baseball cap worn at a jaunty an- gle. The dance is controlled and subtle, brash with a bit of humor. Dancers slouch their shoulders and cock their heads to one side, smirking in a defi- ant and flirtatious manner. One leg is stiff and planted while the performer pivots and twists on the ball of the other foot; one hand is pointed straight down, circled around the other hand held at the waist and then pointed to the sky. From this signature move, dancers appropriate and parody an array of dance styles and references to daily life.1 AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST,Vol.40,No.2,pp.362–381,ISSN0094-0496,online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. ! DOI: 10.1111/amet.12027 Transnational circulation and digital fatigue ! American Ethnologist I argue that Azonto’s rapid spread and popularity are transform it, simultaneously expanding its referential lexi- due to its performative fashioning of a cosmopolitan per- con while condensing and simplifying it. Azonto becomes a sona defined by a celebration of mobility, both semiotic and multimodal and multireferential sign built on the inversion geographic. Its transformation of a stigmatized social out- and revaluation of the figure that gives it its name. Trans- cast into an urbane hustler makes it a vehicle of individual forming the image of the outcast into that of the irreverent self-empowerment within a dispersed community of digital urbanite and technologically savvy street hustler, the popu- circulation. Artists and audiences in Ghana and in Ghana- lar dance embodies a new social persona for young Ghana- ian communities abroad are connected through the recog- ians around the world to emulate. In this revaluation, the nition that mobility itself is a sign of national belonging and dance lends itself to a theatricality that is at times sincere personal success. Azonto, in content and form, is the em- and at others parodic. I end by examining anxieties and bodiment of circulation, though the meanings attributed uncertainties about the links between identity, sound, and to its mobility vary. Azonto is identified with Ghanaian in- culture that emerge even as the musical dance’s transfor- digeneity by those abroad and with cosmopolitanism by mations provide a template for aspirational Ghanaians to those at home. In these inverted interpretations, speed and imagine popular style as a vehicle for self-making. ease of repeatability provide new possibilities as well as haz- ards: While financial and geographic mobility defines suc- Digital circulation and the art of repetition cess for many Ghanaians, it also creates anxiety among cer- tain audiences, threatening to delink references to locale This article contributes to theorizing the crucial roles that from their semiotic groundings. That is to say, technological repetition and circulation play in mobile digital media prac- reiteration and circulation can create what one music pro- tices. It does so by showing how, as Azonto is electronically ducer calls “digital fatigue,” unmooring signs of belonging made, circulated, and embodied, various tensions between from the cultural contexts that are supposed to give them prosperity and aspiration, home and abroad, popular and meaning in the first place. As Ghanaian affiliations are rean- traditional are managed and reproduced. Azonto’s rise is imated in embodied technological form, new worries arise but one example of how digital media are reshaping over- about the potential of music and fame to maintain the con- lapping national and global imaginaries and the changing nections they seem to promise. nature of cosmopolitanism (cf. Tsing 2005:3–10). Popular In the following sections, I show how Azonto’s rise culture seems increasingly crucial to the contours of glob- relies on relationships among Ghanaian artists in Accra alized identities. For example, recently, local pop songs and those abroad that are facilitated by digital music pro- have broken through their national boundaries, gaining duction and listening technologies and how participants massive global followings and inspiring innumerable user- manipulate and embody these technologies in dispersed, generated remixes further driving their unexpected online user-generated practices. I first examine how digital mu- circulation; notably, “Ai Se Eu Te Pego,” by Brazil’s Michael sic’s repetitiveness and easy replication facilitate its move- Telo, became a global trending hit in 2011, and South ment. Beat makers craft familiar rhythms that do not Korean singer PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became the biggest require a long attention span, landing easily in their listen- Internet trend to date, receiving over one billion YouTube ers’ ears wherever they are. Rappers write simple, memo- hits by late 2012. For youth around the world, popularity is a rable lyrical hooks designed to circulate by provoking hu- self-fulfilling performative that inspires further circulation morous, sexual controversy. DJs and artists circulate tracks and creative elaboration. There is pleasure and possibility on radio and as digital files, spreading music rapidly among in mobility and difference when cast in easily consumable, widely dispersed audiences. Azonto is a form of symbolic popular formats. For example, the sudden fascination with action emergent in its circulation among Ghanaian mu- Kpop—SouthKoreanpopularmusic—andwithotherinter- sicians and fans in London, New York, and across the national styles among certain American hipsters is driven globe. I demonstrate how popular songs appropriate and by the thrill of difference tempered by the familiar senses of are appropriated by informal musical networks, stimulating pop fandom and fame. But how these global trends articu- user-generated content as aspiring artists and fans shoot late with specific cultures of digital circulation needs further amateur dance videos to accompany their favorite tracks ethnographic attention (Lee and LiPuma 2002). Whereas and rapidly record new songs at informal studios. Azonto’s much scholarship on musical globalization examines how stereotypic beat and banal hook create a sonic landscape blended styles or “world musics” speak to eclectic interna- that facilitates its semiotic work of appropriating and in- tional audiences and considers the role of technology in tensively

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