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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 11:21:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Vol. 60, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2016 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 engage- ments 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 © 2016 by the Society for Ethnomusicology This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 11:21:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ETM 60_2 text.indd 279 4/5/16 11:40 AM 280 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2016 widespread network of “underground” hip hoppers concerned with local audi- ences, 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 popu- lar 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 engage- ment with musical genre and in dialogue with local and global markets, alter- nately 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 his- tory of musical localization in Africa. Since the early days of the colonial encoun- ter, 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. This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 11:21:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ETM 60_2 text.indd 280 4/5/16 11:40 AM Appert: On Hybridity in African Popular Music 281 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 gener- ally 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 refer- ences 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 prac- tices 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